In fact, technology in, and of, itself does not cause particular kinds of change. It is, essentially, an enabling or facilitating agent. It makes possible new structures, new organizational and geographical arrangements of economic activities, new products and new processes, while not making particular, outcomes inevitable.

Every production network has spatiality - the particular geographical configuration and extent of its component elements and the links between them.

It remains to be seen, for example whether China can continue to develop as a market economy while still retaining an authoritarian communist political system.

One of the most striking trends, since at least the 1960's, has been for employment in services to grow far more rapidly than employment in manufacturing. It is this trend that has led to the view that developed economies have become de-industrialized and that they are now effectively service economies.

Geographically, the global economy is now multi-polar , as new centres of production have emerged in parts of what had been, historically, the periphery of the world economy. The world is now more accurately described as a 'mosaic of unevenness in a continual state of flux'.

Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

A striking feature of financial service activities during the past few decades is that the financial transactions essential to the operation of the 'real' economy has become increasingly dwarfed by speculative activity.