Globalization and its Limits

Abstract

World economic developments are increasingly characterized not by their growth dynamics but by their links to the process of ‘globalization’. While the term globalization has often been used to describe wide ranging and often times dramatic changes in the world over the past ten years, it has most commonly been used to describe economic developments. But in this realm too the term has already acquired a wide array of uses. For some, globalization simply refers to the emergence of a new international division of labour alongside greater geographical dispersion of economic activity. The rise in international competitiveness of Western Europe and Japan has already eroded the dominant position of the United States in the world economy and replaced it with regional spheres of economic influence (Ohmae, 1985; Dicken, 1992; Hirst and Thompson, 1992). More recently, the rise of the newly industrialized economies of East Asia and Latin America, along with the emerging economic influence of China harbours a further equalizing of the distribution of world output, trade and financial flows (United Nations, 1995a).

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, New York, NY. This paper draws extensively on research done at UNCTAD. I am grateful to Yilmaz Akyüz, Ha-Joon Chang, Richard Kozul-Wright, Jan Kregel, and Ajit Singh. Michelle Travis provided valuable research assistance. The views do not represent those of UNCTAD, and I alone am responsible for all errors and mis-interpretations.