While individual Americans debate the merits of globalization, Corporate America has already moved overseas, with dramatic financial results.
United Technologies is a case in point. Fully 60 percent of its total sales are from products either made in the US and exported or made and sold offshore.
It exports Pratt & Whitney engines and Sikorsky helicopters, mostly from Connecticut. And its Otis elevator and Carrier air-conditioning subsidiaries have carved out leading positions in emerging markets like China, where the two divisions assemble most of their products.
Aided by declines in the dollar, those foreign sales are bolstering the parent company's bottom line, which grew 18 percent last year. The price of its stock, one of the 30 in the Dow Jones industrials, reached a record high on Friday of US$72.88.
"There's a lot of tension and drum-banging over job losses," says James Geisler, vice president for finance at United Technologies, which is based in Hartford, Connecticut, but has become a global company.
Last year, only 72,500 of the company's 215,000 employees were in the US. The remainder are based abroad.
"The fact is, companies that are growing are better employers and some of those employees are in the United States," Geisler said.
The United Technologies story is part of a broad structural shift in how and where many US companies are making their money.
The trend has been in the making for decades, and by now it carries major economic implications, as well as significant investment opportunities.
The trend accentuates the divide between workers who benefit from globalization and those who don't, sometimes within the same company.
Financial analysts at United Technologies in Hartford overseeing Carrier's sales in India and Pratt engineers designing jet engines in Connecticut for export to Europe certainly benefit; but people who worked in Syracuse, New York, in the company's now-defunct air-conditioning plant do not.
Another divide that seems to be widening is between those Americans whose investments capture international growth opportunities and those whose portfolios don't.
In short, the economic divisions created by globalization are becoming ever sharper.
On the financial side, increasing globalization of US corporate profits may mean, for example, that US stock markets can retain their lofty elevations even if domestic growth continues to prove tepid -- because leading companies are earning so much abroad.
Companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index that break out their international earnings reported at the end of last year that they racked up 45.2 percent of their sales through offshore sales and exports. That is up from 32.2 percent in 2001.
"The long-term trend is for more international," said Alec Young, chief international equity strategist at S&P. Many top multinationals have crossed the 50 percent threshold, as General Electric says it will do this year. Part of the explanation for the rising percentages is that the world is where the growth is.
"In Japan, we're seeing some of the strongest economic growth since World War II," Young said.
"And we're seeing upside growth surprises in Europe," he said.
Emerging markets from India to Brazil also are enjoying big economic gains.
"Real consumerism is breaking out" in those markets, Young said.
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