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Remarks by the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to the Government Leaders Forum Europe, at the Scottish Parliament.

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M2 PRESSWIRE-31 January 2007-UK Government: Remarks by the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to the Government Leaders Forum Europe, at the Scottish Parliament(C)1994-2007 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

RDATE:31012007

My theme today is how we, the advanced industrial world, make globalisation and it's technological advances - many of them the innovations of Bill Gates - work for not just some of the people, but all of the people. For what Bill Gates is achieving in building a partnership between rich and poor countries that addresses the health and educational needs of the poor, is now at the very core of what the Prime Minister of India has called an 'inclusive globalisation'.

Two centuries and more ago, the very idea of globalisation - of a wholly global interconnected economy - was anticipated by Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist, who was born in my home town of Kirkcaldy.

Brought up by the waterfront, looking out from his window over the North Sea, witnessing a hundred and more ships coming in and out of Kirkcaldy to trade, he could see with his own eyes how trade was the engine of wealth creation, that an increasingly specialised division of labour would drive nations to seek their comparative advantage through innovation and trade, and his book 'The Wealth of Nations' explained the foundations of the world's first industrial revolution starting here in Britain.

And now today, driven by the same dynamic of technology and trade that Adam Smith observed, but this time with global and not just national or continental flows of capital and labour as well as of goods and services, we are at the birth of the creation of a new world order, as dramatically different for the 21st century as the growth of the industrial revolution was for the 19th century.

* It took just 40 years for the first 50 million people to own a radio;

* Just 16 years for the first 50 million people to own a PC;

* But just 5 years for the first 50 million to be on the Internet.

Today one hundred million people are using online communities such as MySpace or YouTube. On the Internet, one million new postings are made every day, and one new blog is created every second - a world so interdependent and connected that we talk now, not just as Adam Smith did, of the wealth of nations, but of the wealth of networks.

And with technological change - the falling costs of technology and telecommunications - has come also a...

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