ARE GLOBALISATION'S BENEFITS GREATER THAN ITS COSTS?

Are globalisation's benefits greater than its costs?

Are globalisations benefits greater than its costs?

Globalization is better understood, therefore, as simultaneously an idealist set of beliefs; a behavioural set of principles, rules, and activities; and a material set of outcomes and infrastructures. Globalization is a form of idealism through reification of a complex process that, it is said, will make the world richer and happier, and it is rationalized and naturalized in the name of efficiency, competition, and profit, as an inevitable concomitant of the historical triumph of liberalism. Globalization is a form of behavioralism in its reorganization of existing institutions, resulting changes in the practices of real live people, and creation of new conditions of normality that are of benefit to some and not others. Finally, globalization is a form of materialism in the sense that flows of capital, technology, goods, and, to a lesser degree, labour move rapidly, putting in place new infrastructures and landscapes of production, exchange, and consumption. (Haugerud, Edelman, 2005)

Although people still identify with their local communities and national governments, many increasingly see themselves as part of a global society. However, globalisation does not affect all regions in the same way. Individuals and corporations in industrialized countries tend to benefit more than those in developing countries do. (Kraidy, 2002)

Goods and services now move more freely among countries than ever before. Ongoing declines in the cost of long-distance communication and transportation and in national restrictions on international trade and investment have allowed world economies around the world to become increasingly integrated, thereby enhancing productivity growth and expanding consumer choices. In parts of the developing world and especially in East Asia, globalisation has been accompanied by an increase in living standard hardly imagined just a generation ago. At the same time, globalisation has also become the focus of widespread controversy. In particular, concerns about adverse consequences for income distribution have fuelled policy initiatives that threaten to turn back the clock. (Swyngedouw, 2004)

An especially troubling development was the emergence of a popular backlash to globalisation in the United States, even when the country was enjoying record growth and the lowest unemployment rate in decades. An article in The Economist (“Globalisation and the Rise of Inequality,” January 18, 2007), written while the U.S. economy was expanding, highlights “a poisonous mix of inequality and sluggish wages” as the force underlying a globalisation backlash in the United States as well as Japan and the European Union. Once America's long period of expansion reached an abrupt end, market-opening trade accords such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became lightning rods for public concern about stagnating real incomes, job losses, and increased economic insecurity.

Globalization is a term that in many instances, come to replace the older and no less complex notion of “development.” In fact, Edelman and Haugerud (2005) have argued that globalization has replaced the term development as the new action word of contemporary international governance discourse. Not simply a term that describes an inevitable process ...