capital and information

INTRODUCTION:

After the age of the Industrial Revolution, where the application of energy was focused on the production of goods, and after the age of electricity and chemistry, the world entered an era of excessive technology combined with a large circulation of goods and services. This is the era of computers and telecommunications, capital and monetary flows. This new era, whose peak is commonly referred to as globalization, has its key words: information and capital. Thus, information has become a driver of growth and a source of highly skilled jobs. While the Industrial Revolution had tied people to factories, which were themselves linked to natural resources like iron and coal, leading to the creation of large industrial centers such as the Midlands in England, the Midwest in the U.S., and the Ruhr region in Germany.

In the information age, production no longer depends on the location of natural resources and transportation means. Markets are no longer places like crossroads and ports; they have become connection networks. Now, the information society has become a network society. Capital, an essential link in the modern economy, will determine the degree of economic growth and, consequently, overall development.

In this context, it is worth asking how this information revolution presents itself and how, combined with capital, they constitute the pillars of the global economy.

Thanks to its great capacity to process data and its ability to disseminate knowledge, information has experienced a meteoric rise at the beginning of the 3rd millennium, generating economic development. It is also considered, along with capital, as a pillar of the global economy, as the latter is synonymous with savings, investment, and interest rates, all crucial to any economic takeoff.

This will briefly cover the information revolution at the start of the 3rd millennium, the impact of capital on the global economy, and, finally, information as a fundamental lever of the economy.

Cables and satellites, wireless communications, the Internet network—over the past two decades, innovations have never followed one another at such a rapid pace. Indeed, man has always felt the need to communicate over distances. Today, he has many means to do so almost instantaneously. Thanks to the advent of the telephone, fax, and the Internet, communication has progressed significantly. Around 1790, a stagecoach could carry a message from Paris to Strasbourg in 4 days; nine years later, the same message would take less than 2 hours.

This true revolution is due to the invention of the optical telegraph by Claude Chappe, marking the birth of telecommunications and constituting one of the ancestors of the Internet. Thanks to the Internet, the world of information is undergoing a significant transformation. That is why we will focus only on this aspect, which undoubtedly constitutes a fundamental pillar of information.

Let's first trace its history. ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, was originally a military network in the United States. The idea of a network connecting certain American military research laboratories dates back to 1957, during the height of the Cold War. At that time, the Soviets had achieved a great success in the space race by launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The Americans felt threatened in terms of their security, especially since satellites were primarily used for military espionage.

Thus, to restore American supremacy in scientific and technical fields with military applications, the U.S. Department of Defense founded a research agency, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). This agency was particularly tasked with creating an experimental network designed to enable the transfer of files between large computers, thus developing ARPANET, a network capable of expanding flexibly, independent of the computers used, and much less vulnerable to nuclear attacks than a traditional centralized system.

In 1974, they developed the TCP/IP protocol (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol). This protocol adapts to different data transfer rates and allows a simple microcomputer to communicate with a supercomputer through the interconnection of heterogeneous networks. In 1979, the network became available for use by civilian researchers and was mainly administered and funded by the NSF (National Science Foundation), the American equivalent of France’s CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research).

Thus, the name "Internet" appeared for the first time in 1982, and by 1988, the Internet became a global network primarily dedicated to civilian research. France was one of the first European countries to connect to the NSF network. This network of networks offered unprecedented possibilities for real-time communication. Initially, it was mainly used by scientific researchers, and its operation was not very user-friendly.

To address this problem, one of the most notable successes was the concept of the World Wide Web (WWW), the "web" of the Internet, invented in 1991 by Swiss scientist Tim Berners-Lee. With the Internet, distances have shortened thanks to the vast circulation of information on a global scale. The Internet is considered one of the essential components of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies).

Today, economic growth, the foundation of development, is conditioned by production capacities, which themselves depend closely on the amount of capital available. Capital, whose driving forces are savings, interest rates, and investment, has become the cornerstone of any economic takeoff.

Savings refer to the monetary resources collected from third parties or from national or multinational companies, for the benefit of banking institutions or the state. This accumulated and frozen money will be used to fund large-scale investments and, consequently, to support loans at interest rates. This is a closed cycle, which may seem simple but is, in reality, much more complex, as it requires mastery of the most advanced technical mechanisms.

This model implies a wide circulation of capital and a significant monetary flow across the world. This transnationality of capital highlights its importance today. It goes without saying that circulating capital includes money, reserves of foodstuffs, and materials used during the manufacturing process, as well as goods. However, to be more precise, the wealth of a nation does not come solely from the increase in its available capital but from the optimal use of this capital in operations aimed at boosting productive activity.

Thus, a nation's economic power is measured by its capital. His Majesty King Hassan II gave a speech on the occasion of the Marrakech Agreements, which were the basis for the creation of the WTO and ended the Uruguay Rounds. In this speech, he emphasized the importance of capital in the modern economy and predicted, "In the coming years, we will witness a commercial, economic, and monetary war in which capital will be the ultimate weapon. This reality will shake up existing concepts and require the belligerents to change their views and strategies."

The new dividing line will therefore be capital, given that there will be countries that possess capital and those that do not. Once again, there will be dominators and the dominated. Thus, capital plays a fundamental role in economic and commercial activity. As an essential instrument of transactions and a necessary tool for liberal activities, it proves to be a driving force for economic growth.

The global economy, therefore, assumes not only the capital that generates the best production but also the efficiency of information networks and the mastery of telecommunications means.

Information, at the heart of ICT, holds a very important role in economic takeoff and mastering competitiveness, beyond modernizing investment flows and job creation.

Indeed, the emergence of ICT has significantly contributed to the dynamism of the global economy in recent years. According to a study conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, it was found that the contribution of the new economy accounted for 0.7% of the 2.6% annual growth recorded between 1987 and 1998, an extraordinarily significant share.

In the United States, this phenomenon is even more evident, as it is estimated that ICT was responsible for three-quarters of the acceleration in labor productivity observed during the second half of the 1990s.

In fact, the manufacturing and sale of computers, IT equipment, electronics, and telecommunications are at the origin of this incredible movement. The telecommunications industry is a full-fledged sector, whose size continues to grow and, in terms of capitalization, occupies the third place in the world behind healthcare and banking activities. Telecommunications also play a crucial role in other industries, such as information systems that allow access to, processing, and dissemination of data in electronic form, which have become as important a resource as land and labor.

In 1995, sales in the telecommunications sector amounted to 788 billion dollars, with about three-quarters relating to services and a quarter to equipment. The growth that began in 1992 accelerated in 1995, as evidenced by a 7% increase in real terms in service sales. Maroc Telecom generated a revenue of 11.6 billion dirhams in 2000, with a net profit of 1.6 billion dirhams. Mobile subscribers reached 2.250 million clients, and the potential remains significant, with the global ICT market achieving a figure of 2,000 billion dollars in 1999, and it is expected to reach more than 3,000 billion dollars by 2004.

These sectors, producers of ICT, have multiplied innovations in recent years, which have facilitated the spread of new equipment, such as computers, among companies, while also reducing their cost. This trend has logically led to significant employment needs, thereby reducing unemployment and creating wealth conducive to consumption.

Technology is also disrupting the production process: buying, selling, producing, and distributing—each function is impacted. At any moment, a new competitor can disrupt the value chain by positioning itself as a new intermediary. The customer becomes king.

We move from mass marketing to personalized marketing. The competition becomes colossal, both global and local. Every company can address the world but adapt locally to each market. Building relationships with partners and clients requires active communication in newsgroups.

Thanks to email and new professional practices on the internet, agreements, partnerships, and contracts can be concluded around the world in just one night.

Thanks to virtual galleries, it is now possible to sell all kinds of products via the Internet, which has led to an increase in foreign currency earnings and the promotion of the desired type of commerce. This has helped reduce travel costs for commercial operators and eliminate bottlenecks in commercial procedures, while simplifying money transfers.

The advent of the information technology revolution and the unprecedented means it provides to process, store, refine, and disseminate data, information, and knowledge in various ways and across borders has radically transformed the components of every economy around the world.

CONCLUSION:

The dramatic rise of information at the beginning of the 3rd millennium is a landmark event of all time. Having become a key criterion for development, it is now considered, alongside capital, as one of the driving forces of modern economic growth. This is because capital is a factor of wealth, generated through monetary flows from savings, interest rates, and investments.

This movement appears to be irreversible. Will we witness a new form of colonization based on these new data?