Papers



Impacts of Globalisation

One of the most important impacts of globalisation involves the disruption of social relations that arises from displacement and destruction of older patterns of production, exchange, consumption, and lifestyle. Although this process is reified as one of the costs of economic progress and the raising of factor productivity, it may also play a role in phenomena such as terrorism.

The individual freedom associated with global consumer capitalism helps to erode the social discipline and peer pressures associated with older patterns of behavior and practices, and globalisation makes available technologies and methods that facilitate capital and individual mobility as well as the dual use of everyday technology and communications. Because social disruption also involves major shifts in status, hierarchies, and relative well-being, it may foster the formation of both activist social movements and networked terrorist groups and associations. This hypothesis, however,

In effect, negative environmental externalities are being exported around the world. Furthermore, the transformation of landscapes arising from the relocation of production; the exploitation of forests, minerals, and water resources; and the rise in international tourism, among other processes, are diminishing global biodiversity. Again, these impacts often affect people very different and distant from those who consume goods and services.

Finally, what are the impacts of globalisation on people's well-being and social welfare? This is a point of some dispute: Has globalisation improved the lot of the world's poorest? On the one hand, the very high rates of economic growth in China and India have raised the incomes of hundreds of millions above the World Bank's official poverty line of $1 to $2/day, and some data suggest that mean incomes have risen in many countries (with the notable exception of those in Africa).

World War II and America

World War II was one of the most widely supported wars in ...