Globalisation Fails to Help the Poorest

China and India have benefited but reforms改革 must be made to lift升起 those in poverty, says Joseph Stiglitz

Globalisation has been a double-edged sword双面剑. To those able and willing to seize抓住 the opportuni-ties and manage globalisation on their own terms, it has provided the basis of unprecedented空前的 growth.

China and India, with a total of 2.4 billion people, have for more than a quarter of a century been growing at unprecedented rates, with hundreds of millions of people moving out of poverty.

They have taken advantage of globalisation of knowledge and globalisation of markets.

China and India had the education, the technology and the resources to take advantage of the new technol-ogy, to close the gap between them and the advanced industrial countries.

But elsewhere在别处, matters have not worked out so well. There is growing disparity不同的 between the richest and the poorest countries, as well as growing inequalities不平衡的 within most countries around the world, and globalisation, as it is managed, has played an important role in both of these disturbing打扰 trends.

The number of people in poverty in Africa has doubled in the past two decades and globalisation has contributed to these problems. Africa was left by its colonial殖民地的 legacy遗产 with neither the resources nor the education, for instance, to take advantage of the new technologies that make such a difference in India and China.

But making matters worse is the fact that the last trade agreement交易协议, the Uruguay Round乌拉圭回合谈判, signed in Marrakesh in the spring of 1994, was so unfair that the poorest countries of the world, includ-ing sub- Saharan Africa as a region地区, were actually made poorer. The North insisted坚持 that the South remove its trade barriers, open up its markets to the goods produced in the North and eliminate消除 its sub-sidies补贴, but the North did not fully reciprocate.互换

Of particular特别的 concern is agriculture. Seventy per cent of the people in the developing world depend directly, or...