Protecting national socio-economic systems from globalization

Reducing vulnerability of national and regional socio-economic systems to globalization

Description

Maintaining the ability of host countries to regulate, in accordance with basic World Trade Organisation principles, economic activity within their national territory.

Context

A potentially worrying trend has been the shift of economic power and decision-making through globalization. At the national level, governments have been the primary mechanisms for the defence of the common good in the environmental and social areas, and for raising resources through taxation to be redistributed to these ends. With globalization and the shift of many activities to the international level, national governments are losing influence. Multinational corporations and institutional investors have become increasingly powerful internationally.

Globalization represents a material and social restructuring of the organization of production, circulation and consumption on a global scale. Globalization policies lead to a number of negative outcomes, including: (1) the rapid diminishment of the powers of local and indigenous communities, states and even nations to control their futures, as economic and political power is transferred to global and transnational institutions; and (2) the reinforcement and expansion of the economic colonization of southern countries by northern countries, while widening the gap between rich and poor in all countries.

With the acceleration in the pace of globalization in the early 1990s came the expectation that growth and development based on global market forces would be more rapid, more sustainable and more widely shared than in the past. The record, however, has been mixed. Many developing countries, especially the LDCs, have not achieved significant or continuous increase in their GDP per capita over the last three decades. While domestic factors have played a role, it seems clear that the international environment has not always been conducive to their development efforts. The income gap is wide between the developed and the developing countries and often within countries. Globalization raises serious problems with risks of instability and marginalization for developing countries in the world economy.

Claim

The inexorable spread of western multinationals into every corner of the globe is creating a globalized system in which wealth is drained out of local economies into the hands of a very few, very rich elite.

Globalization is bound to significantly reduce the autonomy of developing countries in the formulation of economic policies in their pursuit of development.

No country wishes to be excluded from globalization. The choice, then is between a market-driven, passive insertion into the world economy, and a selective strategic integration in which the nation State would play a role. The sensible approach would be the latter. In the international context, the State must endeavour to influence the rules of the game to make the outcome more equitable; developing countries should be allowed the time and the space to learn so that they can become competitive players.