Gobal Economy

Global economy is affecting work in the Unites States and worldwide. In a sense, the U.S. economy has always been international because world trade has always linked United States to other countries. The globalization of the economy affects much more than trade however. The concept of global economy acknowledges that all dimensions of the economy now cross national borders, including investment, production, management, markets, labor, information, and technology. Economic events in one nation now can have major reverberations throughout the world, so when the economy in Brazil, Japan, China, or Russia is unstable, the effects are felt worldwide. This all leads to global stratification, in which I will be discussing in this paper. Global stratification is a very important topic in society that raises several negative questions that vary from morality to economic problems and economic power over the world.

Global stratification is a system of inequality of the distribution of resources and opportunities between countries. A particular country’s position is determined by its relationship to other countries in the world and its position in the world market and power over it. The distribution of wealth, and thus power, among nations is extremely unequal. We still have a tendency to call those with the least in terms of economic resources and power the “Third World,” a term first applied to them when they were not formally aligned with either of the two great industrialized blocs of nations. The First World, i.e., the western industrial democracies including US, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe, and the Second World, i.e., the communist industrial nations including the former Soviet Union and the nations of Eastern Europe. The nations of this so-called "Third World" are primarily agrarian countries with relatively little industrialization. Most of the people in them are poor--extremely so by our standards, generally with per capita incomes of less than $1000 per...