Truly global markets now produce and consume about 20 percent of world output—about $6 trillion of the planet's $28 trillion gross domestic product.1 Within 30 years, as that GDP expands to $91 trillion (assuming an overall real growth rate of 4 percent), global markets could multiply 12-fold, reaching about $73 trillion, more than 80 percent of world output (Exhibit 1).
Economic integration, the force driving this expansion, will promote the formation of global markets in accounting, chemicals, food, health care, the mass media, pulp and paper, telecommunications, and many other industries. Indeed, more integration will take place in the next 30 years than occurred in the previous 10,000 or more.
Companies operating in these future global markets will have profit opportunities worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The annual pretax earnings of, for example, the global personal financial services (PFS) industry, now standing at some $300 billion, will double within a decade.2 At the same time, the world's PFS markets, until recently segmented by regulation and technological limitations, so that no single participant captures more than 3 percent, or $9 billion, of the global profit pool—will...