Globalization Abstracts

Explaining Welfare State Survival: The Role of Economic Freedom and Globalization ANDREAS BERGH, Ratio Institute; Lund University - Department of Economics
Abstract: Using the economic freedom index and the newly developed KOF-index of globalization, it is shown that the Scandinavian welfare states have experienced faster, bigger and more consistent increases in these areas, compared to the smaller Central-European and the Anglo-Saxon welfare states. The market economy and globalization hence do not pose threats to these welfare states, but are instead neglected factors in explaining their survival and good economic performance.

Globalization of Law
Annual Review of Sociology
Vol. 32: 447-470 (Volume publication date August 2006)
Terence C. Halliday, American Bar Foundation
Pavel Osinsky, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
Globalization of law may be defined as the worldwide progression of transnational legal structures and discourses along the dimensions of extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact. We propose that a theory of the global penetration of law will require at least four elements—actors, mechanisms, power, and structures and arenas. A comparison of four approaches to globalization and law—world polity, world systems, postcolonial globalism, and law and economic development—indicates considerable variation in perceived outcomes and gaps in explanation, but with possible complementarities in both outcomes and explanatory factors. Research demonstrates that globalization is variably contested in several domains of research on law: (a) the construction and regulation of global markets, (b) crimes against humanity and genocide, (c) the diffusion of political liberalism and constitutionalism, and (d) the institutionalization of women's rights.

Sovereignty, globalization and transnational social movements
Raimo Väyrynen
Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame
Abstract: Economic globalization is associated with the liberalization of the world economy, decreases in transaction costs, the development of communication technologies, and the emergence of transnational social and cultural spaces. The anti-globalization movement, although it is unable to halt the process of economic integration, has been able to redefine the terms of the globalization debate and influence responses by national governments and international financial institutions. - irap.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/1/2/227

Globalization and the governance of space: a critique of Krasner on sovereignty
Steve Smith, University of wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion SY 23 2AA, Wales UK. Email: sts@aber.ac.uk
Abstract: This paper examines the literature on the relationship between globalization and sovereignty, focusing on the arguments of Stephen Krasner as to the limited changes to this relationship represented by globalization. Contra Krasner, this paper argues that globalization represents a fundamental challenge to the way in which space is governed. The paper outlines three conceptual lenses through which to look at the governance of space: Foucault on social practices; critical politics and Henri Lefebvre; and R.B.J. Walker on sovereignty. It then discusses Krasner's recent book on sovereignty, and offers a series of criticisms of his argument, particularly in its treatment of the impact of globalization. This leads to a discussion of the three main interpretations of globalization: sceptical, hyperglobalist and transformationalist.

From Modernization to Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities
Dawn H. Currie, Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia
Sunera Thobani, Center for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations
During the past decade, notions of globalization have displaced familiar discourses of modernization. On the political right, globalization is seen to signal the demise of socialist economies, and proponents of market liberalization proclaim new opportunities to further global wealth and prosperity. On the left, critics point to the ways in which the current economic restructuring is accompanied by an increasing gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots'. However disparate these two positions seem, both neglect the gendered impact of globalization. The purpose of this article is to review feminist critiques ofglobalization. Central to this review is recognition of the diversity of women's (and men's) situations, both within and across cultures. This recognition reminds us that 'gender'cannot simply be added to existing paradigms ofglobalization.

Broadening The Debate, The Pros and Cons of Globalization
Joyce S. Osland, San Jose State University
Globalization has become an increasingly controversial topic, and the growing number of protests around the world has focused more attention on the basic assumptions of globalization and its effects. The purpose of this literature review is to broaden the boundaries of the debate on globalization and increase our understanding of its influence beyond the economic sphere. The winners and losers resulting from globalization are identified along with empirical evidence of its impact on key areas: equality, labor, government, culture and community, and the environment.

Globalization and Social Policy: From Global Neoliberal Hegemony to Global Political Pluralism
Nicola Yeates, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland
Many accounts of globalization and social policy accept the 'strong' globalization thesis in emphasizing the naturalistic, inevitable nature of globalization, the external constraints imposed on governments by international markets and international governmental organizations and the limitations placed on international and domestic politics and social policies. This article argues that a less 'defeatist' and more fruitful way of analysing the relationship between globalization and social policy is to consider, first, how globalization has thrown up structures for contestation, resistance and opposition and, second, how states and other interests act domestically and outwardly through their own 'multi-tiered', 'multi-sphered' strategies to determine the pace, course, timing and effects of globalization.

Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality since 1980
David Dollar
One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This article documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. The first trend is that growth rates in poor economies have accelerated and are higher than growth rates in rich countries for the first time in modern history. Developing countries’ per capita incomes grew more than 3.5 percent a year in the 1990s. Second, the number of extremely poor people in the world has declined significantly—by 375 million people since 1981—for the time in history. The share of people in developing economies living on less than $1 a day has been cut in half since 1981, though the decline in the share living on less than $2 per day was much less dramatic. Third, global inequality has declined modestly, reversing a 200-year trend toward higher inequality. Fourth, within-country inequality in general is not growing, though it has risen in several populous countries (China, India, the United States). Fifth, wage inequality is rising worldwide.

Globalization and Inequality, Past and Present
Jeffrey G. Williamson
The late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries shared more than globalization and economic convergence. The trend toward globalization in both centuries was accompanied by changes in the distribution of income as inequality rose in rich countries and fell in poor ones. Between one-third and one-half of the rise in inequality since the 1970s in the United States and other member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been attributed to global economic forces, about the same as a century earlier. It appears that the inequality produced by global economic forces before World War I was responsible in part for the retreat from globalization after the war.

Welfare lobby groups responding to globalization
A case study of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS)
Philip Mendes, Department of Social Work, Faculty of Medicine, Monash University, PO Box 197, East Caulfield, Victoria, Australia 3145, Philip.Mendes@med.monash.edu.au
Theories of globalization suggest that national lobby groups continue to exert influence on social policy agendas and outcomes. This article explores the response of an Australian welfare lobby group to the challenges posed by globalization. - isw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/6/693

Globalization and Nationalism
John A. Hall
Many voices now proclaim that we live in a global age. Doubts are cast on this view in this paper, particularly insofar as it suggests that the nation-state has lost its functional salience for modernity. A first argument suggests, by means of varied figures and analytic consideration, that the world economy is far from globalized. A second argument adds to this an insistence of national diversity within capitalism.

The End of Geography? Globalization, Communications, and Culture in the International System
J. MICHAEL GREIG, Department of Political Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Globalization and the expansion of communications carry important consequences for culture in the international system. The effect of the expansion of communications on cultural change is examined using simulations based on Robert Axelrod's adaptive culture model. Findings show that the expansion of communications increases the rate at which cultures change and the level of cultural homogeneity in the system, but limited expansion of communications promotes the development of cultural diasporas.

GLOBALIZATION AND DEMOCRACY
Kathleen C. Schwartzman, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721; e-mail: KCS@U.Arizona.edu
By 1996, 66% of the countries of the world were using elections to choose their top leaders. This wave of democratization was accompanied by a paradigm shift that took the large number of historically clustered democratizations and called it a "wave." The scholarship has moved beyond overly episodic, event-oriented accounts of democratization to comparative work that investigates the impact of global processes on the political regimes of nations.

Economic Globalization and Transnational Terrorism
A Pooled Time-Series Analysis
Quan Li, Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University
Drew Schaub, Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University
The effect of economic globalization on the number of transnational terrorist incidents within countries is analyzed statistically, using a sample of 112 countries from 1975 to 1997. Results show that trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and portfolio investment have no direct positive effect on transnational terrorist incidents within countries and that economic developments of a country and its top trading partners reduce the number of terrorist incidents inside the country.

GLOBALIZATION AND THE EMPOWERMENT OF TALENT
Dalia Marin and Thierry Verdier - www2.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/institute/wpol/ schumpeter/seminar/abstract/DaliaMarin.html
Abstract: Globalization has been indentified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of talent as the new stakeholder in the firm. This paper examines the role of trade integration for the changing nature of the corporation. International trade leads to a 'war for talent' which makes it more likely that an organizational equilibrium emerges in the integrated world economy in which control is delegated to lower levels of the firms' hierarchy empowering human capital.

Globalization of the Economy
Jeffrey Frankel - August 2000 - ksghome.harvard.edu
Abstract: Globalization of trade and finance has gone a long way over the last half-century. But it is less impressive than most non-economists think, judged either by the standard of 100 years ago or by the hypothetical standard of perfect international integration. The paper documents the extent of globalization, and some reasons for the barriers that remains. The conclusion is that globalization is not the primary obstacle to efforts to address such concerns.

Corporate Codes of Conduct and the Success of Globalization
Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 16.1 (Spring 2002) - cceia.org/resources/journal/16_1/articles/280.html
S. Prakash Sethi
Abstract: This article focuses on the expanding role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in developing countries, within the context of globalization and free trade. It demonstrates that the current state of globalization does not conform to the conventional notion of free trade. Therefore, given the prevailing circumstances, MNCs have an unfair advantage in expropriating a greater share of gains from efficiency and productivity from international trade than would be possible if labor had greater mobility or more equitable bargaining power.
A failure to undertake meaningful reforms will retard or even reverse the process of globalization, thus depriving all concerned of globalization’s attendant benefits. Even more ominously, such a failure would seriously undermine democratic values and erode the very foundations of political and economic freedom in large parts of the world that sustain private enterprise, property rights, respect for individual freedom, and protection of human rights.

Globalization and the distribution of income: The economic arguments
Ronald W. Jones - Department of Economics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627
One of the issues currently being debated in the ongoing discussion of the pros and cons of today's globalization concerns the effects of greater world trade as well as of the changes in technology on a country's internal distribution of income, especially on skilled versus unskilled wage rates. In this article, I attempt to spell out some of the arguments concerning internal income distribution that have been put forth both by labor economists and international trade theorists. The impact of globalization on the wage premium between the skilled and unskilled may not be as obvious as is first imagined.

Web-science communication in the age of globalization
Han Woo Park - YeungNam University, South Korea
Mike Thelwall - University of Wolverhampton, UK
The web is important for academic communication and publishing on an international scale, but it is difficult to assess the extent to which globalization actually has occurred. This article examines the connectivity structure of links between university websites in 25 Asian and European countries as a case study of an inter-regional and intra-regional web phenomenon. Universities’ websites in Asia are more heavily connected to European universities than linked to each other. The overall findings were indicative of globalization rather than regionalism, but a better characterization might be globalization with regional imbalances and individual high performing countries. - nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/4/629

Copyright and globalization in the age of computer networks
Richard Stallman
Abstract: Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit well with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only Draconian punishments can enforce it. Today the global corporations that profit from copyright are attempting to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology so that they can retain control. But if we seriously hope to serve the purpose for which copyright was established in the US--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--what needs to be done is either to reduce copyright powers or effectively eliminate them, depending on the kind of work.

Does Globalization of the Scientific/Engineering Workforce Threaten U.S. Economic Leadership?
Richard B. Freeman
Abstract: This paper develops four propositions that show that changes in the global job market for science and engineering (S&E) workers are eroding US dominance in S&E, which diminishes comparative advantage in high tech production and creates problems for American industry and workers: (1) The U.S. share of the world's science and engineering graduates is declining rapidly as European and Asian universities, particularly from China, have increased S&E degrees while US degree production has stagnated. 2) The job market has worsened for young workers in S&E fields relative to many other high-level occupations, which discourages US students from going on in S&E, but which still has sufficient rewards to attract large immigrant flows, particularly from developing countries. 3) Populous low income countries such as China and India can compete with the US in high tech by having many S&E specialists although those workers are a small proportion of their work forces. This threatens to undo the "North-South" pattern of trade in which advanced countries dominate high tech while developing countries specialize in less skilled manufacturing. 4) Diminished comparative advantage in high-tech will create a long period of adjustment for US workers, of which the off-shoring of IT jobs to India, growth of high-tech production in China, and multinational R&D facilities in developing countries, are harbingers.

Globalization and Social Work: International and Local Implications
Karen Lyons
Globalization can seem a remote process, related only to the economic and commercial world. However, it impacts (differentially) on the work opportunities and living conditions of populations around the world and has also influenced thinking about welfare policies, including through state provision. It thus has implications for the practice and education of social and community workers in both affluent and poverty stricken states. In addition to social professionals who seek opportunities to work internationally, globalization is also affecting the practices of those who would previously have seen their work as essentially rooted in local conditions and community needs.

The Internationalization of Money and Finance and the Globalization of Financial Markets
JAMES R. LOTHIAN, Fordham University - College of Business Administration; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Journal of International Money and Finance, 2002
Abstract: In this paper, I combine long multi-country time series data for interest rates and stock returns with the institutional evidence for much earlier centuries amassed by economic historians to study the question of financial globalization and how it has altered since the late classical era. At their longest, for Dutch and English short-term interest rates, the quantitative data that I use extend back slightly more than three centuries. The institutional history provides information on an additional millennium's worth of experience. The conclusion that I reach is that the internationalization of money and finance and the globalization of financial markets are not new phenomena.

Globalization, Democracy, and Effective Welfare Spending in the Developing World
2005 SAGE Publications
Nita Rudra, University of Pittsburgh
Stephan Haggard, University of California–San Diego
The literature on the effects of globalization on social policy and welfare, and the parallel literature on the effects of democracy, operate in mutual isolation to a surprising degree. This article extends the debate on the welfare state in the developing world by examining the social policy reactions of democratic and authoritarian governments to globalization. Using unbalanced panel data on 57 developing nations, and considering social security and health and education spending, the authors examine whether democratic and authoritarian regimes exhibit similar or different social spending priorities in the context of increasing economic openness. The results show that social spending in "hard" authoritarian regimes is more sensitive to the pressures of globalization than in democratic or intermediate regimes.

Green and Brown? Globalization and the Environment
James K. Boyce
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Abstract: Globalization—viewed as a process of economic integration that embraces governance as well as markets—could lead to worldwide convergence toward higher or lower environmental quality, or to environmental polarization in which the ‘greening’ of the global North is accompanied by the ‘browning’ of the global South. The outcome will not be dictated by an inexorable logic. Rather it will depend on how the opportunities created by globalization alter balances of power within countries and among them.

Debate: Globalization and local response to epidemiological overlap in 21st century Ecuador
William F Waters
Introduction: epidemiologic transition and globalization: This paper begins with the premise that global public health is not at its core only a medical issue but is, rather, embedded in social, cultural, political, and economic structures and processes. Moreover, changes in those structures and processes involve the evolution of patterns of health and wellness, which can be described in terms of epidemiologic transition and overlap. While this transition is part of broader processes related to globalization, globalization is not necessarily an essentially monolithic force that inevitably, invariably, and uniformly affects nations, communities, and households in the same manner. Rather, local specificities and forms of organization can and do shape the way that both globalization and the epidemiologic transition take place. Thus, globalization has affected Ecuador in specific ways and is, at the same time, intimately related to the form in which the epidemiologic transition has transpired in that country.
Globalization has been viewed from a variety of perspectives and is at the center of overlapping debates. One debate focuses on the fundamental nature of globalization: is it essentially a narrowly-defined economic and financial process of integration of national economies into an international economy, or does it also include more broadly-defined interweavings of political, technological, and cultural processes? This debate is framed by a broader issue: has globalization benefited most people in the world or not? A different debate concerns the relationship between globalization, public health, and the epidemiologic transition.

Experiences of Globalization and Health in the Narratives of Women Industrial Workers in Sri Lanka
Chamila T. Attanapola
This article explores how women workers in EPZs in Sri Lanka experience their health status since accessing economic opportunities, various forms of health care services and information relating to health and the opportunity to purchase nutritious food. Their narratives provide evidence of occupational health problems, mental health problems, malnutrition, abortion and the increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Most women workers do not spend their increased income on health benefits for themselves, but instead give priority to saving for their futures and helping their poor families. Consequently, a majority are unable to enjoy the benefits of globalization. Only a few women are able to increase their potential for empowerment by participating in organizational activities and raising women’s own awareness on workers’ rights and health related issues.

Globalization, Technological Changes and the Search for a New Paradigm for Women's Work
Swasti Mitter
This paper provides the background for the essays included in the volume. In the context of the opportunities and challenges that the current technology-led globalization has brought to women's employment in Asia, the paper gives the rationale for a new conceptual paradigm. Such a paradigm is necessary, the paper argues, for analyzing the consequences of an emerging techno-economic order that is imported and does not take into account the specific needs of women. The arguments of the paper are placed in the context of the current debate on the desirability of globalization from the perspective of women in Asia. The paradigm acknowledges the liberating aspects of new technologies and modernization. At the same time, it emphasizes the role of the state, the family and women workers' organizations in counteracting the negative consequences of current globalization.