The Affects Of Globalization On The Economy And The Individual Worker

As economic globalization spreads wide its many-fingered hand a shadow falls on the environment and its resources. Nations who would not have been able to prosper independently use the resources of other nations to grow and develop. With this flow of goods, development is occurring at rapid rates.

When the First Nations were left to their own devices, the environment was never put at risk. It was globalization that brought the explorers to the land; it was globalization that nearly wiped out the buffalo. In Alberta, the Gross Domestic Product grew 43% between 2002 and 2005. The oil and gas industry, which makes up most of the economy, has been an environmental nightmare because of the high demand for oil. The pollution from the tar sands has not been reduced enough to make a difference or achieve the standards set by The Kyoto Protocol.

Resources are being used up; our natural gas and oil is predicted to run out by 2050. In the last century the world has brought more species to extinction than in the last two-thousand years. The population is increasing at a rate of over eighty-million people a year and land continues to be cleared to accommodate growing cities. Globalization has created the right for all people to prosper, yet our global economic practices are taking a serious toll on the earth. Our current actions could heavily impact the lives of future generations. Sustainable prosperity is being negatively affected by globalization through the abuse of the earth and unnecessary expenditure of our resources.

'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer' is a phrase that can be applied within countries and more significantly between countries to describe the inequalities between the two strata's of society and the more developed and least developed countries. The phrase can be taken to compare the relative differences in wealth, as they both may be increasing but perhaps the richer are getting richer at a faster rate, thus increasing the gap, or it can be absolute where the rich are indeed getting richer and the poor are loosing wealth and getting poorer, increasing the gap at a faster rate.

Through the percentage living in poverty may not be as large as lead to believe, the gap between the rich and the poor has increased, the ratio of the richest 20% and poorest 20% has enlarged from 60:1 to 90:1 over the last 30 years.

The phrase can be examined using measurable factors; statistics show that 1.2 billion people are living in absolute poverty, which in itself is an increase. However the total population has increased therefore it is acceptable to expect that the numbers living in poverty are to increase. A different way of looking at it is to say 25% of the total population are living in poverty, which is not as large as would be expected.

Rostow, an economist believed every country had the ability and potential to break the cycle of poverty, thus ...