Talk:Globalization

Economist Robert Kuttner argues that since the late 1970s economic globalization has become a vehicle for the spread of neoliberal economic policies, which have systematically benefited financial elites at the expense of workers, citizens, and democracy.^[1] This has been enacted primarily through the weakening of governmental regulations and labor unions, including laws regulating the international movement of finance. "The orthodox view is that these shifts resulted from changes in the nature of the economy...[However] nothing in the structure of the late-twentieth-century economy compelled a reversion to an unregulated nineteenth-century market. This was a political shift." Kuttner contrasts this with the more benign rules and goals of economic globalization that were formulated at the Bretton Woods conference near the end of World War II, which enabled national governments to enact policies that led to widespread growth, stability, and increasing equality throughout the developed world.^[2]

Trade agreements have been used to curtail the right of national governments to regulate their own economies, thus subordinating the sovereignty of democratically-elected governments to international bodies dominated by corporate interests. As such, "trade agreements defined a broad range of domestic financial, health, consumer, environmental, and labor regulations as infringements on free commerce. A radical reinterpretation of private property rights adopted the far-right claim that regulation was an uncompensated "taking" of property. Business leaders had failed to persuade US courts that this was a reasonable [interpretation]...but the doctrine became a part of the common structure of international law, via the back door of trade...the newly invented rights of corporations to challenge regulations as illegal restraints crowded out the ability of national democracies to manage capitalism. Agendas for these trade deals were set mainly by corporations, facilitated by allies in government; the official advisers to trade deals were mainly corporate." The panels created to enforce these trade agreements, under the rubric of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), were "private, and riddled with conflicts. A panel member could literally serve as a "judge" one day and a lobbyist the next. Ex parte contacts - secret undisclosed lobbying to work the referee - were permitted, and flagrant."^[3]

Under this neoliberal version of globalization, democratic reforms and regulations have been undermined or removed in the name of competitiveness in the global economy. "With global markets and no global standards, domestic workers are thrown into direct competition with more desperate overseas workers. A century’s worth of democratic struggles to regulate labor standards are hosed away. At the other end of the spectrum, the worldwide liberation of finance creates astronomical incomes for the elite."

The deregulation of international finance is a key aspect of neoliberal globalization, and essential to understanding the trade policies of the US and UK since the 1980s. While the US and Britain long embraced the doctrine of free trade, East Asian nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China flourished by adopting an informal trade policies of protectionism and neomercantilism, which discouraged imports while encouraging industrialization and exports.^[4] This fostered an unequal playing field, in which manufacturing industries in the US and UK declined or moved some of their activities overseas, leading to factory closings and job losses. American "manufacturing went from having a rough trade balance with the rest of the world in the early 1980s, to having a deficit of over $700 billion in 2006. The trade deficit in goods in 2016 was $347 billion with China alone." ^[5] Although these policies undermined American and British manufacturing, they helped to fulfill certain diplomatic goals of the US - except in the case of China.^[6] Yet while the US did little to support American manufacturing, political leaders in the 1980s and 1990s made great efforts to bring down barriers to American finance, including opening up China to American firms such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.^[7]

The systematic weakening of organized labor, controls on capital, and democratic sovereignty resulting from neoliberal globalization have led to widening inequality, greater insecurity and dislocation, and stagnating standards of living for a majority of people in both developed and developing nations.^[8][9][10] Many observers argue that this has fueled a widespread backlash against globalization throughout the West, evidenced by Brexit, and the rise of populist leaders on both the political right, such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Viktor Orban, and the left, such as Bernie Sanders.^[11] “The fact that the far-right backlash is occurring in nearly all Western nations at the same time is no coincidence, nor is it accidental contagion. It is a common reaction against the impact of globalization on the livelihoods of ordinary people.”

Furthermore, the promised benefits of globalization to less-developed nations have rarely materialized, and often led to severe inequality and dislocation of the poor. For example, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) forced Mexican farmers to compete with large, subsidized American agribusiness, decimating Mexico's corn growers, and causing millions of Mexican agricultural workers to abandon their homes and migrate to the United States looking for work as undocumented, low-paid wage laborers.^[12][13] Mr. Malarkey (talk) 01:31, 16 July 2020 (UTC)Mr Malarkey

Hello, I have been assigned to edit this article as part of my class. Please notify me of any mistakes or lack of etiquette, I'm quite new to editing on this platform. I was looking at the article Biological globalization and found it to be quite lacking in information. Perhaps that article could simply be merged with the main globalization article, and of course improved on.

Looking at a few sources to include information from, let me know what you think.

1. Olmstead, Alan L. and Rhode, Paul W., Biological Globalization: The Other Grain Invasion (May 2006). ICER Working Paper No. 9/2006, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=932056 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.932056

2. https://www.britannica.com/science/cultural-globalization/Entertainment#ref225002

3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4371972/

4. https://www.britannica.com/event/Columbian-exchange#ref1274353

Alex Oeser (talk) 20:35, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi Alex, welcome to Wikipedia, and thanks for your interest in this article! I took a brief look at your sandbox and my first thought is that this is a very small number of sources compared to the amount of text you want to add. This would result in the sources you're using having undue emphasis compared to the other ~220 sources in the article, most of which are only used for 1-2 sentences each. This is especially important for an article on a topic as broad as this one, which normally contains a very high-level summary of many different topics with much of the detail spread out into subarticles (this is called summary style). The general rule is that the amount of emphasis given to any particular subject should reflect the amount of emphasis on that subject within the reliable sources as a whole, especially those sources that are most authoritative such as textbooks and academic review papers. Sunrise (talk) 17:29, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for posting here. Biological globalization certainly deserves an expansion, through I'd suggest discussing this at Talk:Biological globalization (but it is good to make a note here, as many more people follow the talk here than at the bg page which is unlikely to be on many watchlists compared to this talk page). Regarding your sandbox idea, first, we would prefer a more academic, secondary source to the tetriary (anther encyclopedia). And I'd suggest expanding the article on biological globalization first, only then summarizing any key points here. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:45, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

With regards to this line: The political movement 'BREXIT' was considered a step back in globalisation, it has greatly disrupted food chains within the UK as they import 26% of food produce from the EU.

This seems a highly disputable statement and features no citation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.101.249.254 (talk) 06:51, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I think we can do a better job of introducing the measurement of globalization than the sparse "One index is x and another is y", what can be a better preface? Forich (talk) 03:13, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

This is a term which from 2008 - present means the slowing down of globalization. should this be included in the article? Ikipedia2 (talk) 03:53, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Because there's nothing left to globalize? Maybe Antarctica?213.230.87.219 (talk) 14:21, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 January 2025 and 14 May 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Aglz5 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Aglz5 (talk) 04:37, 21 April 2025 (UTC)