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After W.W.II and on past even the Cold War era, many countries have developed and changed their economies on various occasions. Japan, for example, switched over to become a more opportunistic economy after the U.S. military began to occupy the country by giving legal equality to women, starting an open-education system, and training the workforce to be more efficient and skilled as time went on. They learned from how the U.S. government and economy operated and started to adapt their own economy to be similar. Another country that had an economic change was the small African colony of Ghana, which had been under the control of Great Britain until 1957. Kwame Nkruma, the Prime Minister of Ghana at the time, states that Ghana was always depending on Great Britain for everything from importing and exporting goods to even military protection from other countries in times of war. When they finally broke free of Great Britain’s rule, they faced many obstacles, ranging from money to stabilize their economy to not having an educated workforce, which had also been given to them by Great Britain. They were finally able to even things out, and are even now an independent nation. All of these countries changing how their economy works is part of a process known as Globalization, which is when countries will develop and adapt another nation’s ideas into their own, such as how Japan changed to be a little bit more like the United States. It wasn’t just Japan that was affected by Globalization, though. After the Soviet Union collapsed, many nations that had once had an economy similar to the Soviet Union’s decided to change and start to look to the U.S. for an example. Many nations in Europe formed a union with each other that came to be known as the European Union. While many countries did look to the U.S. for a complete economic change, some still decide to stay in the same mindset as the Soviet Union. For example; China’s leader, Mao Zedong wanted to revolutionize China by initiating a plan that he called the “Great Leap Forward,” which lasted from 1958 to 1960. Under this plan, many villages in China united their resources together, and many steel mills were built across the country and were able to produce even more resources for China. This plan increased productivity for and industrialization for China greatly, which other countries would come to follow themselves and spark globalization to occur at an even faster pace.

//**- Josh Sutherland, Era 4**//