A Year in Uruguay

Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, recently visited Montevideo and wrote about it in the New York Times today (subscribers only section).

A tiny country of three million people, wedged between Brazil and Argentina, Uruguay has come from nowhere to partner with India’s biggest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services, to create in just four years one of the largest outsourcing operations in Latin America.
Yes, when Tata’s Indian employees in Mumbai are asleep, its 650 Uruguayan engineers and programmers now pick up the work and help run the computers and backroom operations for the likes of American Express, Procter & Gamble and some major U.S. banks — all from Montevideo.
How did this happen? One of the most interesting features of this era of globalization is how any entrepreneur — with the right imagination, Internet bandwidth and a small amount of capital — can assemble a global company by matching workers and customers from anywhere to do anything for anyone. Maybe the most important rule in today’s increasingly flat world is this: Whatever can be done, will be done — because so many people now have access to the tools of innovation and connectivity.

Labels: economics, Uruguay