"Another world is possible". This sentence, popularized for the first time during the demonstrations in the Doha Round, aims at denouncing the rising inequalities within countries, and considers the kind of globalization currently implemented being responsible for the prevailing situation. According to the IMF, globalization refers to the "increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial flows". The progress of technology and communication in the 1970s made the world smaller and the borders easier to cross. Indeed, it seems quite paradoxical: although globalization is accused of raising inequalities, more and more countries try to be involved in it. So can globalization be considered as a positive force that uniformly bolsters the economic prospects of countries and societies around the globe? In this essay, we will see that although, the rise of globalization has been parallel to the rise of inequalities within countries, these inequalities do not come from globalization in itself but from the lack of integration of countries in globalization.
[...] Indeed, some countries have made major economic progress, such as the new industrialized Asian countries, which are now in a phase of major catch-up with the Western countries. But on the other hand, some continents lag behind such as Africa. And even in this continent, the trend is not the same for every single country. We need to underline that it is true that even the poorest quarter of the world population saw its income increase during the 20th century, but it has increase less than three-fold during the century, while the richest quarter experienced a six-fold increase.[3] So, a global increase in the world welfare does not mean by far a reduction of inequalities between countries. [...]
[...] For instance, there is an interesting correlation between the economic growth of a country and the growth of its external trade[9] Moreover, Dollar and Kray had identifies a group of 24 countries whose openness to globalization happened in the 1980's and it is really interesting to see that their average per capita GDP has risen from 1488 US dollars in 1980 to 2485 US dollars in 1998, catching up with another group of 40 countries, which were doing better at the beginning of the 1980's (1947 US dollars per capita GDP in 1980) and which failed to enter globalization: their average per capita GDP is now of 2133 US dollars, far behind the one of the 24 newly globalized countries.[10]So, it is worth noticing that globalization offers opportunities of development even to relatively poor countries, which are able to seize the opportunity to open to the world. [...]
[...] But other causes of these bad results might be found for instance in intellectual properties agreements which prevent developing countries to have access to some technologies or to medicaments, or to agricultural subventions such as the Common Agricultural Policy implemented by the European Union which jeopardized the agricultural competitiveness of developing countries and these causes can only be considered as particular conditions of this globalization and might be changed.[8] As far as agricultural subventions are concerned, we may even talk about protectionism and consider that it does not go with the concept of globalization and that it is even a lack of globalization. [...]
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