Under a buyback barter, one party's purchase of capital equipment (plant, process) is paid for through the output made feasible by the capital equipment. Examples:
Russia is buying phosphates from Occidental Petroleum. In a $20 billion deal, Oxy helped the Soviets build ammonia plants and is buying part of the output.
China awarded a $500 million contract to Italy's Tecnotrade to expand coal mines and modernize a railroad. Tecnotrade agreed to buy coal for sale abroad.
SOURCE: Adapted from S. Jain, International Marketing, pp. 630-633.
Evidence of the phenomenon of converging commonality (which Levitt attributes to widespread accessibility of communication, transportation, and travel) is widespread. Futurists, of course, had long been warning everybody about "global shrinkage." For example, a report on Science and Future of Mankind, a study done at the Stanford Research Institute in 1960, twenty years before Levitt's article, concluded as follows:
In a few generations, man's world has shrunk from a vast expanse, whose area was still incompltely known and whose peoples were relatively distant from one another, to a continuous neighborhood. No man is more than a few hours journey from all other men, and communications between men may be almost instantaneous. Man-made satellites circle this neighborhood many times in one day, and the repercussions of major events affecting any part of the human family are swiftly felt throughout the whole world. 1
What was true twenty and thirty years ago is even more evident today. Ours is a global neighborhood, and the challenge confronting the international marketing manager is to determine how best to use the resources of the firm and the tools of the marketing profession to reach the inhabitants of this global neighborhood.
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