Globalisation

Globalisation is more than the flow of money and commodities around the world. It also involves the growing interdependence of the world’s people through ‘shrinking space, shrinking time and disappearing borders’. This offers great opportunities for enriching people’s lives and creating a global community based on shared values. However, when markets are allowed to dominate the process, the benefits and opportunities may not be shared equitably.

As a result globalisation has led to a polarisation between the people and countries who benefit from the system and those that are merely passive recipients of its effects.

The fifth of the world’s people living in the highest income countries has 86% of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 82% of world export markets, 68% of foreign direct investment, and 74% of telephone lines. The bottom fifth, in the poorest countries, has about 1% of each category. Of the foreign direct investment in developing countries and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, more than 80% went to just 20 countries, mainly to China.

Such disparities are glaring enough. However, the inequitable effects of globalisation driven by markets and profit are far wider and deeper, touching on many aspects of human life, including:

Caring for each other, ‘the invisible heart of human development’, is threatened because today’s competitive global market is putting pressures on the time, resources and incentives for caring labour, without which, individuals do not flourish and social cohesion can break down.
Breakthroughs in technology, such as the Internet, can open a fast track to knowledge-based growth in rich and poor countries alike, but at present benefit the relatively well-off and educated: 88% of users live in industrialised countries, which collectively represent just 17% of the world’s population. The literally well connected have an overpowering advantage over the unconnected poor, whose voices and concerns are being left out of the global conversation.
Money also talks louder than need in defining the biotechnology research agenda – cosmetic drugs and slow-ripening tomatoes seem to come higher on the list than a vaccine against malaria or drought-resistant crops for marginal land.
The ‘breakneck’ speed of globalisation is also making people’s lives less secure, as the spread of global threats to well-being outpaces action to tackle them.
Job insecurity is also increasing in both industrialised and developing countries, in the wake of economic and corporate restructuring and the dismantling of social protection measures.
Culturally, many people feel threatened by the predominantly one-way flow. The single largest export industry for the United States is not aircraft or cars, but entertainment.
Criminals are also major beneficiaries of globalisation, with the six major international syndicates believed to gross $1.5 trillion a year. And the illicit trade in narcotics, weapons, labour, goods and money contributes to crime and violence that threaten neighbourhoods around the world.

Source: Adapted from United Nations Development Programme, Press Release, New York, 12 July 1999.