Re: globalization

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) is an alliance of sixty leading activists, scholars, economists, researchers
and writers formed to stimulate new thinking, joint activity, and public education in response to economic globalization.

Representing over 60 organizations in 25 countries, the International Forum on Globalization associates come together out of
a shared concern that the world's corporate and political leadership is undertaking a restructuring of global politics and
economics that may prove as historically significant as any event since the Industrial Revolution. This restructuring is
happening at tremendous speed, with little public disclosure of the profound consequences affecting democracy, human
welfare, local economies, and the natural world.
http://www.ifg.org/pubs.htm

The "globalization" we are witnessing today is in fact an acceleration of historical political and economic trends, hastened
by the advent of increasingly sophisticated and rapid communications and transportation technologies, the decline of the
nation-state (especially in the South), the absence or ineffectiveness of
democratic systems of global governance, and the rise of neoliberal economic ideology. Its primary beneficiaries are both
the transnational corporations, as well as the privileged consumer classes in the North and to a growing degree, in the
industrializing nations of the South.

Excerpted from CorpWatch Executive Director Joshua Karliner's The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of
Globalization (Sierra Club Books, 1997)
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PII.jsp?topicid=104

And from the pro-globalization corner:

A popular version of the globalisation myth has existed for about 10 years. It claims that until 1989, the
world consisted of separate, sovereign, autonomous nation states, with separate histories. Then, borders
collapsed, the internet appeared, but also the international Mafia. So now it is a dangerous world, but also
perhaps full of opportunities.

You can find this version, almost literally, in Ruud Lubbers' article The Globalization of Economy and
Society (now offline):

The term "globalization" implies that the becoming and making worldwide of various phenomena has accelerated at such a pace
that it is giving rise to a variety of new phenomena. Globalization entails a quantitative shift of several autonomous
national economies to a global marketplace for production, distribution, and technology. All this has resulted in the
emergence of a worldwide confrontation of political, societal, and ethical insights...

Lubbers was a former Netherlands premier, and is now UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He filled
the time between these posts as a Professor of Globalization Studies at Tilburg University. Lubbers
explains what caused the 'quantitative shift'...

The far-reaching integration of electronics and computers on the one hand, and communication  technology, on the other, led
to what Toffler christened "the third wave." And thus today's world came into being....People everywhere were confronted
with the effects of the emergence of modern comunication technologies and the Sputnik, Soyuz, and Apollo heralded the birth
of a new world. CNN and the Internet, global sourcing, electronic capital flows signalled the emergence of the information
and communication age. It has been said that the bits provoke one world, accomplishing the globalization of
information/communication and technology.
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/globalisation.html

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_janfeb_2001/top20chart.html


Kazuhiro Kurose wrote:

> This is a trivial question. The terms of "global" or "globalization" are used to express the contemporary world economy,
> whose definition is not sufficiently clear. Does anyone know the first economist who uses the terms in 1990's ?
>
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>   Graduate School of Economics and Business
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