Globalization and Sustainable Development

Abstract

Globalization is a new buzz word, a cliche, a new term to frighten the children. Its champions say that it has altered all economic relations, marginalized the nation state, given unregulated and highly mobile capital the upper hand over labor and over governments, and that it is ushering in a borderless world. Its detractors say that it is globaloney or globaldegook to say these things. Globalization is not new: it is merely a throwback to the nineteenth century or, indeed, merely another chapter in the saga of the world systems built up by capitalism since the fifteenth century. Economists point out that, despite all the hype about globalization, interest rates diverge even between OECD markets, and that domestic savings still correlate highly with domestic investment which they should not if there was a global market and that national policies still have a significant role to play. Political economists on the Left especially discount globalization by saying that it is merely internationalization, that there is no truly global firm but only multinationals, based in a few advanced countries, parading falsely as global.

The process of globalization is more robust than people think and that markets remain powerful instruments even in the face of the environmental problem. In the context of sustainable development, however, globalization for the firsttime in 200 years, challenges the hegemony of the Northvisavis the South. Only a structural adjustment in the North, as drastic as the South has experienced during the last twenty-five years, will save the North.