Globalization

Risks of globalization

Competition among business sitesincreases, leading, for example, to the transfer of jobs to regions with lower wages.

• Local economies depend more and more on the world market, with less and less room for national and state control of the economy.

• Mighty international concerns (global players) increasingly emancipate themselves from the political control and the social responsibilities of the countries in which they are active.

• Uncontrolled money flow on the capital market gives rise to monetary turbulences and economic crises.

• Industrialization of the developing and threshold nations (in particular, China and India) create enormous environmental problems.

• Organized crime becomes internationalized (trafficking in human beings, in drugs etc).

Unequal Growth: American pundits laud the success of the current liberal economic order. These pundits are quick to point out that, in large part to increasing globalization, one quarter of humanity is now enjoying economic growth at rates by which their

living standards will quadruple within a generation.Global average life expectancy and literacy rates are up, and infant mortality rates are down. Though only one percent of the world’s population is using the Internet, other forms of global

telecommunications have given people everywhere access to new ideas and are coalescing, for the first time in human history, a global consensus on what type of life is desirable—a life based on freedom, democratic values, and consumerism. It is this world that is “directly or indirectly shaping the domestic politics, economic policies, and foreign relations of virtually every country

As a result, in 1996, the incomes of more than seventy countries were lower than they were in 1980, and in forty-three countries, they were lower than in 1970. 8 Additionally, there

are still some three billion people living in poverty. Half that number are struggling

to subsist on less than $1 a...