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Thomas J. Falk, chairman and CEO of Irving-based Kimberly-Clark, joined by two of the company’s global executives— Stephen Shao, who runs the China operations, and Gustavo Calvo Paz, the top manager in Russia and Eastern Europe: The Irving-based paper and consumer products producer operates more than 100 manufacturing facilities in 45 countries. Recruiting talented people remains one of the key challenges for global businesses—especially in fast-growing markets like China and Russia, Falk said.

Shao, a Chinese-born MIT graduate, said that offering opportunities was the best way to recruit China’s young, ambitious college graduates. Calvo Paz, a native of Argentina, said Russians said it the trick was finding entrepreneurial gems among a population used to being told what to do.

“The consumer is at the center of everything we do,” Falk said. In Russia, mothers tend to be young and fashionable, snapping up blue jean-themed Huggies diapers, Calvo Paz said. In China, mothers are older and willing to spend to buy the best for their one child, Shao said

Richard Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Recent decades have been marked by rapid integration of the world economy, but some analysts see a sharp trade contraction in 2008 and 2009 as a signal of globalization’s reversal. Fisher refuted this deglobalization thesis.

According to Fisher, there’s no evidence of reversal in globalization’s signature feature—the whittling away of gaps between home-market and world prices. He concluded that trade’s decline came not from deglobalization but from plunging consumer demand, exacerbated by the drying up of trade credit in the wake of financial market turmoil.

Robert A. Lawson, co-author of the Economic Freedom of the World report:

The Auburn University professor reviewed the latest results from the Fraser Institute’s annual report that tracks economic freedom in 141 countries around the world. The United States ranked sixth in the world in economic freedom, trailing Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland and Chile.

Lawson said U.S. economic freedom rose for two decades but ebbed since 2000.

Two factors are at work—growing government spending and weakening protection for property rights. He expects the country’s scores to slip further when data for the past two years become available.