GLOBALIZATION IMPACT OVER SOCIAL WELLBEING

Globalization Impact over Social Wellbeing

Globalization Impact over Social Wellbeing

Introduction

Globalization's impact on economic efficiency and development outcomes conventionally had drawn most research vigilance (Nyahoho, 2001). A recent article published in Social Indicators Research by Sirgy et al. (2004) forcefully proposes that globalization's promise impact on value of life (QOL) should receive similar research efforts.

Globalization, characterised as ''the diffusion of goods, services, capital, technology, and persons (workers) across nationwide borders'' by Sirgy et al. (2004, p. 253), is considered to be a multifaceted diffusion process that produces significant influences in human well-being. This article (Sirgy et al., 2004) proposes 24 theses to demonstrate international linkages and a country's general socio-economic progress, concluding that globalization is a double-bladed phenomenon; that is, both positive and adverse effects developed by this pervasive international transformation need careful specification of various mechanisms in research design. (International Monetary Fund, 2002, 12)

The work of Sirgy et al. (2004) open up a 'brave new world' of QOL research. Whereas Sirgy et al. (2004) had evolved a new set of theoretical propositions to account for variety amidst countries in progress of human well-being, their picture of globalization and human QOL, all-embracing as a impressive project should be, requires farther theoretical elaboration and reformulation. In supplement, their effort is mainly speculative at this stage, and immediately needs empirical investigation. This study contributes in proposing a theoretical form and supplying empirical evidence by testing the hypothesized relationship between globalization and human well-being. (Nyahoho, 2001, 543)

Human Well-Being and Globalization as Double-Bladed Phenomena

Globalization manifests itself as a basic change of human institutions in the contemporary era. While the publications agrees that the fast and intensive flows and connections of goods, services, cash, persons and culture after nationwide borders really characterise the basic characteristics of the current world society, its human consequences stay unsettled. Two theories prevail in argument over how globalization affects human well-being. The neoliberal school contends that globalization is an omnipresent power of 'creative destruction' in that international trade, crossborder investment and technological discovery enhance productive efficiency and develop exceptional prosperity despite vintage jobs are replaced and the wages for unskilled workers necessarily fall. Globalization manages these promise threats by signaling to the last cited assembly about the pay-offs from acquiring added skills. Benefits can spread over the masses 'if the work market is responsive to changes in supply and demand'. (Anderson, 1996, 170) Relevant empirical studies additionally documented that globalization had functioned to spread industrialization into evolving countries (DCs) and thus reduced international income inequality. Economic integration approximated by foreign trade was discovered to be closely associated to institutional construction of a society, which constituted a decisive factor of economic growth.

The second approach sees globalization as a new hegemonic project that transnational capitals functioned in ways that promised couple of betterments for most countries. According to Petras and Veltmeyer (2001), globalization demonstrates a creation of a new world alignment architectured by international powers (the industrial countries, worldwide financial institutes, etc.) to facilitate capitalist accumulation in an natural environment of ...