Matters of Scale - The Global Economy
Price of a jar of Avon "skin-renewal" product being advertised on Brazilian TV and then sold door-to-door in the Amazon Basin by an army of 80,000 Avon saleswomen | 40 |
Average household income per day of the women in the region, who are persuaded to forego buying clothes or shoes in order to purchase the Avon product | 3 |
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Average hourly wage of workers at 2,200 factories of General Electric, Ford, General Motors, GTE Sylvania, RCA, Westinghouse, and other U.S. companies with plants in the free-trade zone of Mexico along the U.S. border | 1.64 |
Average hourly wage of manufacturing workers in the "home" country of these companies | 16.17 |
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Amount AT&T is investing in a joint venture with Mexican banks to develop a digital telephone network in Mexico | $1 billion |
Net worth of Carlos Slim, chairman of the Mexican telephone company (Telmex) | $6 billion |
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Worldwide profits of the Walt Disney Company in 1993 | $300 million |
Amount taken home by Disney chairman Michael Eisner | $203 million |
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Number of the 100 largest economic units in the world that are nations (as measured by GNP) | 49 |
Number that are corporations (as measured by sales) | 51 |
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Number of elephants in Burundi in 1986 | 1 |
Number of elephant tusks, all certified as originating in Burundi, exported that year | 23000 |
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Sources: Avon item: TV Nation, NBC television, August 2, 1994; Mexican factories: David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 1995; AT&T: World Trade, March 1997; Disney: New York Times, April 16, 1994; economic units: Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, quoted in World Watch, March/April 1997; elephant: "The Price of Habitat" in this issue.