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Globalization and Nation-States in Africa and Asia
Abstract
This chapter provides background information on the themes and case studies in this volume. The first part of the chapter introduces several indicators to grasp the globalization and economic situations of the six countries featured in this volume. It is to gain an overall picture of globalization and the economic situations of the six case countries. The second section of this chapter focuses on the nation-state and nation/state-building that the six case countries, more or less, have experienced vis-à-vis globalization. The section attempts to identify characteristics and conditions that the states in Africa and Asia had to face for their state- and nation-building in the globalized world. The chapter provides a broader picture of the theme of this book in relation to the six cases introduced in this volume.KeywordsGlobalization indexGrowthInequalityPolitical economyState-building
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The aim of this paper is to explore the connection between stateness (and its constituent attributes) and democracy by conceiving the effective state as an independent variable and a prerequisite for the success of a well-functioning democracy. Such a conditioning relationship between the state and the regime has often been subject to being neglected among many scholars of democratization 1 , who have not considered the state as an important explanatory or at least obstructive variable for the success of democratization. This paper argues that the existence of an effective and legitimate state is essential to build a well-functioning democracy. Herein, the variable of stateness is analysed in terms of four attributes: that of monopoly on the legitimate use of force; citizenship agreement; infrastructure capacity of the state; and law enforcement capacity.
We introduce the revised version of the KOF Globalisation Index, a composite index measuring globalization for every country in the world along the economic, social and political dimension. The original index was introduced by Dreher (Applied Economics, 38(10):1091–1110, 2006) and updated in Dreher et al. (2008). This second revision of the index distinguishes between de facto and de jure measures along the different dimensions of globalization. We also disentangle trade and financial globalization within the economic dimension of globalization and use time-varying weighting of the variables. The new index is based on 43 instead of 23 variables in the previous version. Following Dreher (Applied Economics, 38(10):1091–1110, 2006), we use the new index to examine the effect of globalization on economic growth. The results suggest that de facto and de jure globalization influence economic growth differently. Future research should use the new KOF Globalisation Index to re-examine other important consequences of globalization and why globalization was proceeding rapidly in some countries, such as South Korea, but less so in others. The KOF Globalisation Index can be downloaded from http://www.kof.ethz.ch/globalisation/.
The international industrial ecology (IE) research community and United Nations (UN) Environment have, for the first time, agreed on an authoritative and comprehensive data set for global material extraction and trade covering 40 years of global economic activity and natural resource use. This new data set is becoming the standard information source for decision making at the UN in the context of the post-2015 development agenda, which acknowledges the strong links between sustainable natural resource management, economic prosperity, and human well-being. Only if economic growth and human development can become substantially decoupled from accelerating material use, waste, and emissions can the tensions inherent in the Sustainable Development Goals be resolved and inclusive human development be achieved. In this paper, we summarize the key findings of the assessment study to make the IE research community aware of this new global research resource. The global results show a massive increase in materials extraction from 22 billion tonnes (Bt) in 1970 to 70 Bt in 2010, and an acceleration in material extraction since 2000. This acceleration has occurred at a time when global population growth has slowed and global economic growth has stalled. The global surge in material extraction has been driven by growing wealth and consumption and accelerating trade. A material footprint perspective shows that demand for materials has grown even in the wealthiest parts of the world. Low-income countries have benefited least from growing global resource availability and have continued to deliver primary materials to high-income countries while experiencing few improvements in their domestic material living standards. Material efficiency, the amount of primary materials required per unit of economic activity, has declined since around 2000 because of a shift of global production from very material-efficient economies to less-efficient ones. This global trend of recoupling economic activity with material use, driven by industrialization and urbanization in the global South, most notably Asia, has negative impacts on a suite of environmental and social issues, including natural resource depletion, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and uneven economic development. This research is a good example of the IE research community providing information for evidence-based policy making on the global stage and testament to the growing importance of IE research in achieving global sustainable development.
The objective of this article is to explore the effects of crises and openness on a large sample of African countries. Focusing
on sudden stops, currency, twin and sovereign debt crises, the article shows that crises are associated with growth collapses
in Africa. In contrast, openness is found to be beneficial to growth. More specifically, consistent with standard Mundell–Fleming
type models, greater openness to trade and financial flows is found to mitigate the adverse effects of crises. These findings
are robust to various measures of both openness and crises as well as to endogeneity concerns.
Analyses why conflict occurs and provides evidence that horizontal inequalities are n important cause of conflict in multiethnic societies, with both econometric and country case evidence. It discusses policy implications of the findings.
Globalisation is a complex process which leads to an increasing connectedness and inter-relatedness in the political, economic, social and cultural, technological and environmental domain on many different scales. While this is a truly global phenomena, it also has different impacts and manifestations in different geographic localities. As a result, different nations exhibit different levels of globalisation or connectedness. Further, perspectives on globalisation are manifold and change over time, therefore it is crucial to continuously reflect upon and revise existing methodologies. Composite Indices are a powerful tool to capture and measure complex concepts that allow for monitoring complex systems over time and yield relative rankings and comparisons. This paper presents a revised and updated Maastricht Globalisation Index for 117 countries and three points in time, 2000, 2008 and 2012, including a new calculation methodology and data. Results show that globalisation still continues but has slowed down, due to the recent economic crisis.
Over the past two decades, donors increasingly linked foreign aid to democracy objectives in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet systematic research on this topic typically focuses on how aid influences democratic transitions. This study investigates whether and how foreign aid affects the process of democratic consolidation in sub-Saharan Africa by examining two potential mechanisms: (1) the use of aid as leverage to buy political reform, and (2) investment in the opposition. We test these mechanisms using five dependent variables that capture different aspects of democratic consolidation. Using survival analysis for the period from 1991 to 2008, we find that democracy and governance aid has a consistently positive effect on democratic consolidation. Economic aid, on the other hand, has no effect on democratic consolidation.
Liberals argue that globalization, or growing interdependence among states, will transform societies towards more liberal values reflected in better respect for human rights. Skeptics of globalization, among them Marxists, critical theorists, and a large portion of the NGO community, see globalization facilitating the exploitation of the weak by the strong, exclusion of the poor from economic gain and political rights, increased inequality and economic insecurity, all of which results in social disarray—in other words, globalization is a ‘race to the bottom.’ Thus, resistance to globalization by ordinary people, they argue, will be met with greater state repression. Previous studies have examined the issue with single indicators, such as trade openness and the level of FDI. We make use of a unique measure of globalization, which gauges globalization along economic, political, and social dimensions, to assess the propositions. Our findings reveal a strong positive association between overall globalization and its disaggregated components on government respect for physical integrity rights between 1981 and 2005 for a large sample of countries, controlling for a host of relevant factors, including the possibility of endogeneity. The results are robust to sample size, alternative data and methods, and when assessing developing countries only. Contrary to the skeptics, our results show that increased exposure to globalization lowers state violations of basic human rights.
Researchers have available to them numerous indicators of financial openness and integration, many of which have yielded substantially differing results in past research, for example, on the relationship of financial openness or integration with economic growth. This article reviews the main indicators and finds that de jure vs. de facto indicators yield systematically different growth results. Among de jure indicators, sample differences account for much of the variation in growth results, with a weaker impact found in more recent data and among advanced economies. It also finds that many indicators capture different and useful facets of financial openness, such as intensive vs. extensive measures, and de facto vs. de jure. A small minority of indices suffer weaknesses that make them not useful for rigorous economic analysis, most notably the Investment Freedom Index by the Heritage Foundation.
The relationship between globalization and economic growth, especially in the poorer developing countries, is controversial. Previous studies have used single globalization indicators such as the ratio of exports plus imports to GDP. This paper uses a comprehensive measure of a globalization of Dreher (2006), which is based on measures of globalization of the economic, social and political sectors. Panel data estimates with data of 21 low income African countries show a small but significant positive permanent growth effects. The sensitivity of this growth effect is examined with the extreme bounds analysis (EBA). Contrary to the findings by Levine and Renelt (1992) that cross-country growth relationships are fragile, the effects of globalization and some other determinants of the long run growth rate are found to be robust by EBA.
This paper evaluates the effects of globalization on human development, gender development and human poverty in the developing countries and compares the effects across world regions as well as the income groups of countries. Applying the GLS random effect model to the annual panel data of 124 developing countries covering 9 years from 1997, the study shows that globalization, measured by the KOF Index of globalization, not only promotes human and gender development but also reduces human poverty significantly. Not surprisingly, all three aspects of globalization (economic, social and political) contribute to the overall effect of globalization. In general, poverty reducing effect of globalization is found more in the poorer countries and the poorer region. To complement these findings, the paper calls for a study of some country cases. Such studies, the paper concludes, will facilitate the development of policy recommendations tailored towards countries in their cultural context, with a positive (or at least neutral) impact on the reduction of human development gaps within them.
Full text can be available at: http://www.socionauki.ru/journal/files/jogs/2011_1/globalization_and_human_aspect_of_development_in_developing_countries.pdf
This paper examines the empirical relationship between economic growth and income inequality both at aggregate and regional level using more comparable data set for 69 developing countries over the period 1965-2003. The study identifies credit market imperfection in low-income developing countries as the likely reason for a strong negative relationship between income inequality and economic growth. While in short run the relationship between growth and income inequality might be positive but over time more income inequalities reduces economic growth. Moreover, this paper finds evidence that more physical and human capital investment, openness to trade and higher government spending have statistically significant impact on enhancing economic growth and reducing inequality.
Several recent studies have found a negative relation between government size and economic growth in rich countries. Since countries with big government have experienced above average improvements in both the Economic freedom index and the KOF globalization index, we argue that existing studies suffer from an omitted variable problem. Using Bayesian Averaging over Classical Estimates (BACE) in a panel of OECD countries, we show that the negative effect from government size is very robust and may have been underestimated in previous studies. The dataset is an updated and extended version of the data used by Fölster and Henrekson (2001), covering the period 1970-1995. We find clear evidence that globalization has a positive effect on growth, but find no effect of economic freedom. Finally, we find that the negative effect of government size decreases substantially in size but remains significant when we add the period 1996-2005 to the sample. Our results support the idea that countries with big government can use institutional quality such as economic freedom and globalization to mitigate negative growth effects of taxes and public expenditure.
Cambridge Core - South-East Asian Government, Politics and Policy - Stateness and Democracy in East Asia - edited by Aurel Croissant
This chapter discusses contending theoretical approaches to political economy relevant to the study of Southeast Asia and outlines the approach taken in the rest of this book. After introducing the basic notion of “political economy”, we outline three contending approaches used to understand it: Weberianism, historical institutionalism, and the Murdoch School.
This volume examines and evaluates the impact of international statebuilding interventions on the political economy of post-conflict countries over the past 20 years. While statebuilding today is typically discussed in the context of “peacebuilding” and “stabilization” operations, the current phase of interest in external interventions to (re)build and strengthen governmental institutions can be traced back to the “good governance” policies of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in the early 1990s. These sought political changes and improvements in the quality of governance in countries that were subject to, or were seeking support under, IFI-designed structural adjustment programmes. The focus of this book is specifically on state-building efforts in conflict-affected countries: countries that are emerging, or have recently emerged, from periods of war and violent conflict. The interventions covered in the present volume fall into three broad and overlapping categories: International administrations and transformative occupations (East Timor, Iraq, and Kosovo); Complex peace operations (Afghanistan, Burundi, Haiti, and Sudan); Governance and state-building programmes conducted in the context of economic assistance (Georgia and Macedonia).This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, humanitarian intervention, post-conflict reconstruction, political economy, international organisations and IR/Security Studies in general. © 2013 selection and editorial material, Mats Berdal and Dominik Zaum; individual chapters, the contributors.
This book reports why orthodox structural adjustment measures do not have the expected results in Africa. Orthodox measures may be necessary but are frequently not sufficient because of structural factors, some peculiar to individual countries, some found more widely. Six chapters report on extensive fieldwork in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe; three chapters compare countries in Africa (recovery from disaster, labour markets, new financial markets) and one makes comparisons with Asia and Latin America of employment policies.
This chapter addresses the interplay between socioeconomic and identity-related factors in civil conflict, guided by the concept of horizontal inequalities (HIs). In a series of case studies, Stewart (2002) found that various dimensions of HIs provoked some kind of conflict, ranging from a high level of criminality in Brazil to civil war in Uganda and Sri Lanka. In order to test whether these findings can be generalized beyond the particular case studies, there is a need for large-N investigations. Drawing on national survey data, Østby (2008) provided quantitative evidence that Stewart’s findings hold when socioeconomic inequalities between ethnic groups are tested systematically across 36 developing countries. Moreover, I found similar effects for horizontal inequalities at the regional level with a larger sample (Østby, 2005).
The persistence and brutality of contemporary civil wars have left many analysts puzzled. Traditional interpretations describe civil wars as simple confrontations between two sides, as explosions of mindless violence, or as disrupting apparently benevolent development processes within countries. These approaches do not fully take into account the rational economic calculations that drive many civil conflicts in the late twentieth century. This paper argues that, to understand violence in civil wars, we need to understand the economic dimensions underpinning it.
Economic activities arising from war fall into seven categories: pillage; extorting protection money; controlling or monopolising trade; exploiting labour; gaining access to land, water and mineral resources; stealing aid supplies; and advantages for the military. If these short-term benefits suggest that there is more to civil wars than simply winning, so too does the prevalence and persistence of behaviour that is, in military terms, counter-productive. This can take two forms: cooperating with the ‘enemy’; and mounting attacks that increase, rather than reduce, political and military opposition.
This paper describes two forms of economic violence: ‘top-down’, which is incited by political leaders and entrepreneurs; and ‘bottom-up’, where violence is actively embraced by ‘ordinary’ people, either civilians or low-ranking soldiers.
Seven conditions can encourage top-down economic violence: a weak state; rebel movements that lack strong external finance or support; an undemocratic or ‘exclusive’ regime under threat; economic crisis; ethnic divisions that cut across class lines; the existence of valuable commodities; and prolonged conflict.
Three conditions are particularly conducive to bottom-up violence: deep social and economic exclusion; the absence of a strong revolutionary organisation; and impunity for violent acts.
To achieve more lasting solutions to civil conflicts, it needs to be acknowledged that violence can present economic opportunities. This paper concludes that outside intervention must take into account the political and economic interests of the violent. Intervention must provide realistic economic alternatives to violence, and must handle democratic transitions and the introduction of free markets with sensitivity. This is likely to mean strengthening and improving the institutions of the state, such as schools, social-security systems and establishing a more accountable police force and Army.
Exploring the challenge of rehabilitating countries after civil wars, this study finds that attempting to transform war-shattered states into liberal democracies with market economies can backfire badly. Roland Paris contends that the rapid introduction of democracy and capitalism in the absence of effective institutions can increase rather than decrease the danger of renewed fighting. A more effective approach to post-conflict peacebuilding would be to introduce political and economic reform in a gradual and controlled manner.
This paper takes advantage of a recently-compiled cross-country dataset that distinguishes market inequality from net inequality and allows us to calculate redistributive transfers for a large number of country-year observations. Our main findings are: 1. More unequal societies tend to redistribute more. 2. Lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth, for a given level of redistribution. 3. R edistribution appears generally benign in terms of its impact on growth; only in extreme cases is there some evidence that it may have direct negative effects on growth. Thus the combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution -including the growth effects of the resulting lower inequality- are on average pro-growth. While we should be cognizant of the inherent limitations of the data set and of cross-country regression analysis more generally, we should be careful not to assume that there is a big tradeoff between redistribution and growth. The best available macroeconomic data do not support that conclusion.
From the mercantile monopolies of seventeenth-century empires to the modern-day authority of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, the nations of the world have struggled to effectively harness globalization's promise. The economic narratives that underpinned these eras-the gold standard, the Bretton Woods regime, the "Washington Consensus"-brought great success and great failure. In this eloquent challenge to the reigning wisdom on globalization, Dani Rodrik offers a new narrative, one that embraces an ineluctable tension: we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and economic globalization. When the social arrangements of democracies inevitably clash with the international demands of globalization, national priorities should take precedence. Combining history with insight, humor with good-natured critique, Rodrik's case for a customizable globalization supported by a light frame of international rules shows the way to a balanced prosperity as we confront today's global challenges in trade, finance, and labor markets.
Maldistribution of land in agrarian societies is commonly thought to be an important precondition of mass political violence and revolution. Others argue that because of the difficulty of mobilizing rural populations for political protest, land maldistribution is irrelevant except as part of an inegalitarian distribution of income nationwide. These rival inequality hypotheses have significant implications with respect to the kinds of reforms likely to reduce the potential for insurgency in a society. They are tested using the most comprehensive cross-national compilation of data currently available on land inequality, landlessness, and income inequality. Support is found for the argument that attributes the greater causal import to income inequality. Moreover, the effect of income inequality on political violence is found to hold in the context of a causal model that takes into account the repressiveness of the regime, governmental acts of coercion, intensity of separatism, and level of economic development.
This paper describes seven salient features of trade integration in the 21st century: trade integration has been more rapid than ever (hyperglobalization); it is dematerialized, with the growing importance of services trade; it is democratic, because openness has been embraced widely; it is criss-crossing because similar goods and investment flows now go from South to North as well as the reverse; it has witnessed the emergence of a mega-trader (China), the first since Imperial Britain; it has involved the proliferation of regional and preferential trade agreements and is on the cusp of mega-regionalism as the world's largest traders pursue such agreements with each other; and it is impeded by the continued existence of high barriers to trade in services. Going forward, the trading system will have to tackle three fundamental challenges: in developed countries, the domestic support for globalization needs to be sustained in the face of economic weakness and the reduced ability to maintain social insurance mechanisms. Second, China has become the world's largest trader and a major beneficiary of the current rules of the game. It will be called upon to shoulder more of the responsibilities of maintaining an open system. The third challenge will be to prevent the rise of mega-regionalism from leading to discrimination and becoming a source of trade conflicts. We suggest a way forward -- including new areas of cooperation such as taxes -- to maintain the open multilateral trading system and ensure that it benefits all countries.
This volume examines and evaluates the impact of international statebuilding interventions on the political economy of conflict-affected countries over the past 20 years. It focuses on countries that are emerging, or have recently emerged, from periods of war and protracted conflict. The interventions covered fall into three broad categories:
•international administrations and transformative occupations (East Timor, Iraq, and Kosovo);
•complex peace operations (Afghanistan, Burundi, Haiti, and Sudan);
•governance and statebuilding programmes conducted in the context of economic assistance (Georgia and Macedonia).
Globalisation is blamed for many socioeconomic shortcomings. I discuss the consequences of globalisation by surveying the empirical globalisation literature. My focus is on the KOF indices of globalisation (Dreher 2006a, Applied Economics 38, 1, 1091; Dreher et al. 2008, Measuring Globalization – Gauging its Consequences. Berlin: Springer) that have been used in more than 100 studies. Early studies using the KOF index reported correlations between globalisation and several outcome variables. Studies published more recently identify causal effects. The evidence shows that globalisation has spurred economic growth, promoted gender equality and improved human rights. Moreover, globalisation did not erode welfare state activities, did not have any significant effect on labour market interaction and hardly influenced market deregulation. It increased, however, within-country income inequality. The consequences of globalisation thus turn out to be overall much more favourable than often conjectured in the public discourse.
There are difficult global challenges that need to be addressed. In response, many have argued for the increased constitutionalization of international law. An argument is often also made that the international order is already constitutionalized in some meaningful sense and that there are founding conditions within the international order that represent something like a global constitution. Nevertheless, when surveying the literature on constitutionalization one is often struck by a general ambiguity about what the term means and with how constitutionalization is meant to operate between theory and institutional practice. In particular, there seems to be an overall ambiguity regarding what is being constituted by the processes of constitutionalization, about how these processes operate, and with whether this legal order is in fact creating the type of progressive cosmopolitanism that is often assumed. To address these ambiguities, this article will seek to better understand what appeals to constitutionalization generally mean and to expose key conceptual problems. The goal in doing so is to highlight areas that need greater conceptual attention and to recommend potential solutions, so that more cosmopolitan minded scholars can feel more confident in prescribing constitutionalization as part of their normative catalogue.
This paper, devoted to the study of globalisation, analyses two distinct but closely related issues: First, it aims at evaluating disparities in the degree of globalisation observed in a sample of 101 countries over the period 1970–2005. Second, the paper tries to shed some light to the much debated issue of whether globalisation affects economic growth and, in so doing, whether convergence in globalisation brings about convergence in per capita income. The results obtained are both encouraging: on the one side, as it is shown that there has been a clear process of globalisation convergence; on the other, the paper concludes that globalisation has been one of the main drivers of economic growth, thus fostering convergence in per capita income.
This article analyzes the power and legitimacy of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), explaining why local actors chose to comply and cooperate with the operation in its crucial first year. It argues that, to be effective, peace operations require the compliance of local populations, and finds that RAMSI's ability to shape the attitudes, incentives and interests of local actors was determined by the relationship between its three currencies of power: coercion, inducement and legitimacy. Focused on the exercise of power by RAMSI, this article enables much-needed analysis of the local dimensions of peace operations and affords serious consideration to processes of local legitimation. Within the local realm, the case of Solomon Islands provides three important insights on the power and legitimacy of peace operations. First, the design and implementation of RAMSI's communications strategies were central to its ability to exercise coercive and inducive power and, crucially, to legitimize its power relationship with local populations. Second, the manner in which RAMSI exercised authority affected local perceptions about its legitimacy, independent of the operation's outcomes. Third, the quality of treatment people received from RAMSI was influential in their decisions to comply and cooperate with the operation. This suggests that carefully examining the way that peace operations and local people interact can help to identify the determinants of an operation's effectiveness.
Summary This paper analyzes the relationship between three dimensions (economic, social, and political) of globalization and life expectancy using a panel of 92 countries covering the 1970-2005 period. Using different estimation techniques and sample groupings, we find that economic globalization has a robust positive effect on life expectancy, even when controlling for income, nutritional intake, literacy, number of physicians, and several other factors. The result also holds when the sample is restricted to low-income countries only. In contrast, political and social globalization have no such robust effects.
We study the relationship between politics and economic growth in a simple model of endogenous growth with distributive conflict
among agents endowed with varying capital/labor shares. We establish several results regarding the factor ownership of the
median individual and the level of taxation, redistribution, and growth. Policies that maximize growth are optimal only for
a government that cares solely about pure “capitalists.” The greater the inequality of wealth and income, the higher the rate
of taxation, and the lower growth. We present empirical results that show that inequality in land and income ownership is
negatively correlated with subsequent economic growth.
The study develops an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions: economic integration, social integration, and political integration. Using panel data for 123 countries in 1970-2000 it is analysed empirically whether the overall index of globalization as well as sub-indexes constructed to measure the single dimensions affect economic growth. As the results show, globalization indeed promotes growth. The dimensions most robustly related with growth refer to actual economic flows and restrictions in developed countries. Although less robustly, information flows also promote growth whereas political integration has no effect.
This paper discusses conceptual and operational issues involved in measuring globalization. We propose a modified index for measuring globalization. The suggested index is based upon the A.T. Kearney|Foreign Policy Globalization Index, but is improved both conceptually and operationally. We used data for 117 countries from a variety of resources to test the robustness of the suggested index. Furthermore, the results are compared with two recent globalization indices (the A.T. Kearney|Foreign Policy Globalization Index and the World Markets Research Centre G7-Index). The new index is used to delineate the various countries according to their level of globalization. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
These days it seems that almost everyone in the development community is talking about"pro-poor growth."What exactly is it, and how can we measure it? Is ordinary economic growth always"pro-poor growth"or is that some special kind of growth? And if it is something special, what makes it happen? The author first reviews alternative approaches to defining and measuring"pro-poor growth."He then analyzes evidence on whether growth is pro-poor, what factors make it more pro-poor (including the role played by both initial inequality and changing inequality), and whether the factors that make the distribution of the gains from growth pro-poor come at a cost to growth. The author identifies some priorities for future research.
Human rights and liberal trade rules (including WTO rules) are based on the same values: individual freedom and responsibility (e.g. to adjust to competition); non-discrimination; rule of law; access to courts and adjudication to disputes; promotion of social welfare through peaceful cooperation among free citizens; parliamentary approval of national and international rules. The non-economic values of WTO law are no less important for the human rights and welfare of citizens than the economic welfare effects of liberal trade. Like the EC, the WTO can and should become an advocate not only of economic freedom, but of human freedom more generally. This article argues in favour of constitutional reforms of WTO law so as to take civil society and human rights more seriously. Copyright 2000 by Oxford University Press.
There has been no shortage of theories which purport to explain why globalisation may have, adverse, insignificant or even beneficial effects on income and earnings inequality. Surprisingly, the empirical realities remain an almost complete mystery. In this paper we use data on industrial wage inequality, household income inequality as well as measures of the economic, social and political dimensions of globalisation to examine this controversial issue. We find that the economic dimension of globalisation, and – less robustly – political integration, have exacerbated wage inequality in developed countries. In contrast, the impact of globalisation on both income and earnings inequality in less-developed countries has been negligible.
The experience of Southeast Asia. IMF and Bank Negara Malaysia
- A U Aziz
- AU Aziz