Globalization (or globalisation) refers to the process or processes of international integration. Human Interaction over long distances, such as the overland Silk Road that connected Asia, Africa and Europe, existed thousands of years ago. In the 15th century, Europeans made important advances in exploring the World Ocean and locating the "New World" of the Americas. Global movement of people, goods, and ideas expanded significantly in the early 19th century with development of new forms of transportation (such as steamship and railroads) and telecommunications that seem to "compress" time and space. In the 20th century, road vehicles and airlines made transportation much faster. Electronic communications, most notably mobile phones and the Internet, connect billions of people in new ways.

The term derives from the root word "globe", with the meaning of "sphere," which came to English from the Latin globus: "round mass, sphere, ball," carrying the sense of "planet earth," or a three-dimensional map of it, from around 1550. One of the earliest known usages of the term as the noun "globalization" was in 1930, in a publication entitled Towards New Education, to denote a holistic view of human experience in education. A related term, 'corporate giants', was coined by Charles Taze Russell in 1897 to describe the largely national trusts and other large enterprises of the time. By the 1960s, both terms began to be used synonymously by economists and other social scientists. It then reached the mainstream press in the later half of the 1980s. Since its inception, the concept of globalization has inspired competing definitions and interpretations, with antecedents dating back to the great movements of trade and empire across Asia and the Indian Ocean from the 15th century onwards.

Johan Norberg (born 27 August 1973) is a Swedish author and historian, devoted to promoting economic globalization and liberal positions. He is arguably most known as the author of In Defense of Global Capitalism. Since March 15, 2007 he has been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Johan Norberg was born in Stockholm, the son of former Swedish National Archivist Erik Norberg and his wife Birgitta. He grew up in the suburb of Hässelby in northern Stockholm. In his youth, Norberg was active as a left-anarchist but later abandoned those views and became a classical liberal. According to the biography given at his personal website, Norberg was disillusioned with the anarchist view of liberty when he discovered the collectivist themes in the major anarchist works, and was unable to sympathize with the pre-industrial society which its anarcho-primitivism promoted. This realization made him embrace classical liberalism, which he felt "took freedom seriously". He studied at Stockholm University from 1992 to 1999 and earned a M.A. with a major in the history of ideas. His other subjects included philosophy, literature and political science. During his time at Stockholm University he was active in the libertarian network Frihetsfronten ("the Liberty Front") and was the editor of its journal Nyliberalen ("The Neoliberal"/"The Libertarian") from 1993 to 1997.

Paul Robin Krugman ( /ˈkruːɡmən/; born February 28, 1953) is an American economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (informally the Nobel Prize in Economics) for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. According to the Nobel Prize Committee, the prize was given for Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic concentration of wealth, by examining the impact of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.

Krugman is known in academia for his work on international economics (including trade theory, economic geography, and international finance),liquidity traps and currency crises. He is the 17th most widely cited economist in the world today and is ranked among the most influential academic thinkers in the US.