Globalization, Meaning and Scope: A collection of essays on Globalization and its Impact

As long as people are living they will strive to have newer ways of doing things. The advent of education and research means that innovation would have come one day or the other. The theory of globalization which I agree with is that of capitalism. This means that capitalism was the driving force behind globalization. With the coming of industrialization that emerged from Feudalism there was excess capacity and production. The profit oriented capitalists sought ways to distribute goods to make more profits. Through the capitalistic motive new transportation system came into effect as well as new means of communication.

Trade spread to all parts of the world, as much as the flow of information, technology and assimilation and diffusion of culture. The international monetary fund and the World Bank have embarked on many projects world over. Some of these projects have been successful, yet some of these have failed. The economic project was entitled the structural adjustment program SAP.

Generally; the project was a failure, although it also brought a few positive economic benefits. New policies were also crafted by the government. The government of Zimbabwe started the Economic Structural Program in The government was made to start this project by the international Monetary fund IMF. Structural adjustment programs have been initiated in many different countries of the world by IMF. Economic structural programs are economic policies and guidelines that must be followed by a country in order that the country gets assistance from IMF and the World Bank.

What happened was that Zimbabwe wanted to boost its economic development in the country, so it sought assistance from IMF.

• Vendere con il Social Commerce - Le nuove leve del business online (Digital LifeStyle Pro) (Italian Edition);
• Globalization, Meaning and Scope!
• Forgot Password?.
• The Last Days Of Heaven.
• BDSM Wonderland.
• Forgot Password?!

IMF agreed to assist Zimbabwe with loans but on the conditions that Zimbabwe implemented the structural adjustment program, as per the guidelines of IMF. The following conditions were to be met by Zimbabwe:. The country was required to cut its expenditures in many areas. This also involved the privatization of the government owned companies or state enterprises. This meant that the country should open trade links with some other countries by removing restrictions of exports and imports. Previously, the government used to control goods that came into the country.

There were many import duties and embargoes. No extra expenditures were required even in cases of emergencies. Before the structural adjustment program, the prices of goods and services were controlled by the government. The government also provided subsidies in many areas of the economy where essential services were provided.

Health services, for example, were heavily subsidized.

This project, which was aimed at poverty alleviation, however brought a lot of suffering to many Zimbabweans. By removing price controls, the cost of living for the people rose remarkably. Most people could not afford to buy basic goods such as food and medication. Many people dropped form schools. Before this program education was subsidized. University students in Zimbabwe did not pay fees, but were given grants and loans for subsistence. This led to many people failing to go to school. The other effect was that hospital costs sky rocketed. The subsidy by government on medication was removed.

This meant people had to pay full cost for their medication. Many people were affected. As a result many people succumbed to diseases and ultimately died since they could not afford medical expenses. Since many companies that were owned by the government were privatized, many people lost their jobs. As companies privatized they cut on labor. Many people therefore became unemployed.

From that time up to now the unemployment rate is very high. Many people left Zimbabwe and sought employment in neighboring countries. Since the government was required to cut cost, it cut the cost related to social services. That led many people to suffer. The standard of living of the people in Zimbabwe worsened. These international financial institutions do not provide assistance in unbiased manner. Most of the employees in the institutions come from developed countries.

The people who choose these leaders are the politicians. What this means is that such institutions are manipulated by such countries. Countries like Cuba and Libya for exampled used not to receive funds from such institutions. These institutions serve the purposes of the countries which are in the United Nations Security Council.

This is so because if a country has economic sanctions, then it can not receive assistance from these international financial institutions. Political agendas take a centre stage in the running of such institutions. What does that mean? This means that there is a lot of bias from selection to posts in these institutions to the decision that these members would make. The needs of the developing world are not taken seriously, because the people running these institutions come from developing countries.

So the policies of these institutions favour developed countries. They do not suit the need s of developing countries. The structural adjustment program brought a lot of hardships and suffering to many Zimbabweans. This essay has further shown the biases that arise in decisions made by such bodies. The sources of the biases come from the employees of these institutions that come mainly from developed countries. By international finance institutions we are referring to both the international monetary Fund IMF and the World Bank. It then moves on to analyze the importance and criticisms of these institutions.

These institutions have certain essential roles to play in international business and relations. Despite their essential roles, there are many limitations and criticisms that are leveled against these Breton Woods Institutions. We will start by looking at the purposes of these two institutions. The monetary policies of nations play a very vital role in stabilizing the economic situation in the country. However, these monetary policies play an equal role on an aggregate level in the international scene.

Globalization: The Concept, Causes, and Consequences | PIIE

The IMF ensures that countries frame their monetary policies based on certain principles that ensures that the world economy is not adversely affected. The need for harmonization of monetary policies is due to how the economic conditions on a global scale are influence by the performance of the economic status of individual countries.

An example is how the Greek debt crisis spilled over to affect the whole European Block. The to economic decline has its genesis from a few countries. The financial instability in USA impacted the entire globe. So harmonization of policies assists the global economy. However, with country fixed effects included, only across time variation i. For 19 out 56 countries including the largest country-India , only one year of data was collected, so with the addition of country fixed effects, these countries would drop out of the analysis. In the specifications that include both individual and country controls, only 9—10 countries out of 56 per globalization dimension had any variation in the globalization quartiles, resulting in a big drop-out of countries from the analysis including some very large ones, e.

As this reduction in the sample is attributable to our transformation of the globalization indices into dummy variables which we adopted for ease of interpretability of the resulting coefficients , this can be remedied by avoiding the transformation of the globalization indicators and using them as un-transformed variables.

What is Kobo Super Points?

Hence, when it comes to the important comparison between the OLS- and FE-based results, we will revert to the use of the untransformed variables. As a first step, we deal with the confounding problem by including a set of country-level covariates contained in vector C 2 ct , as in specification 2 below. The choice of the country-level confounders was informed by the existing literature on the factors which facilitate movement of trade and investment between countries, and therefore are drivers of globalization. In addition, these variables are expected to be related to overweight risk.

The size of a country's GDP is also likely to be related to the level of economic development, and thus, in turn, may affect the obesity risk Goryakin and Suhrcke, In addition, foreign investors may consider it more worthwhile to invest in countries with higher overall levels of education and socioeconomic development Asiedu, ; Walsh and Yu, Globerman and Shapiro , for example, found that HDI and FDI were significantly correlated in specifications which did not control for governance institutions and infrastructure indicators.

Likewise, it was found in several studies e. In addition, another important determinant of globalization and potentially of economic and social development, which in turn may affect overweight prevalence independently of globalization is the quality of economic and legal institutions Asiedu, ; Obwona, ; Walsh and Yu, It takes into account a number of factors potentially important in the decision-making by foreign investors to engage in economic relationships with countries, such as: Therefore this indicator is likely to be particularly valuable in our search for relevant proxies for drivers of country-level globalization.

As we mentioned above, although the above approach is designed to control for a range of potentially important confounders, not taking advantage of the within-country variation, when such option is in principle available, would be too costly. Therefore, as a final check, we also conduct country fixed effects estimations on the untransformed globalization scores. Although parameter interpretation is more difficult in this case, there is much more within-variation when untransformed scores are used, and this allows us to test whether findings from the OLS estimation will also hold when controlling for potential time invariant, unobserved country-level confounding.

The authors of the study did not have to obtain ethical approval, as they only analysed secondary, fully anonymized individual-level data from the publicly available Demographic and Health Surveys, as well as some country-level data. In most countries where there were at least two years worth of observations, overweight prevalence tended to increase over the years, although at different rates. Overweight prevalence was generally considerably higher in Eastern Mediterranean countries, and was the lowest in Africa and South East Asia.

In almost all countries, the value of the score increased, although again, the rate of change did differ. It is evident that the most globalized countries e. Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, Jordan tended to remain the most globalized in most years, while the same consistency was true for the least globalized countries e. There appeared to be more variation in relative ranking for countries that were in between these two extremes, although in most cases the rate of change in the score was modest. These figures reveal that the relationship appears positive, quite pronounced and mostly linear for the social globalization score.

On the other hand, it appears considerably weaker for the economic score. For total and political scores, the relationship seems quite strong, but mostly non-linear. In the former case, it seems that the association is flat for the least globalized countries, before becoming strongly positive. For the political dimension, it appears that there is no relationship to overweight for the majority of countries, except for the most globalized ones, for which we observe a strongly positive association.

Lowess, unconditional association between overweight and total globalization index, — Lowess, unconditional association between overweight and economic globalization index, — Lowess, unconditional association between overweight and social globalization index, — Lowess, unconditional association between overweight and political globalization index, — In the first column, not controlling for any covariates except for time dummies and the Sub-Saharan Africa dummy, we find that living in the countries which are in the top quartile for this metric is related to a There is also a visible gradient: However, as this association may in part be driven by country-level confounding, it is also important to consider its robustness by including relevant controls.

In column 2, the adding of individual control variables improves the precision of the estimates, while also somewhat reducing the magnitude of the association. What matters more, however, is the addition of the country level controls: The relationships between the index of total globalization and overweight in women aged 15—49, Ordinary least squares OLS regression results. Cluster-robust standard errors in parentheses. Sample restricted to women aged 15— No controls except time dummies and Saharan African dummy are included in the baseline specification.

Reference categories for each of the sets of dummy variables: All specifications contain time dummies. Women with no children are less likely to be overweight than women with 6 or more children, whereas women with 1—5 children were more overweight than those with 6 or more children. Moreover, an increase in the size of the market i. With HDI ranging from 0 to 1, an increase by 0.

Interestingly, better economic and legal institutions have an opposite effect: Prior to entering into the regression results, we determined whether each of the sub-components of globalization indeed captured distinct phenomena. The results in column 1 without controls for any factors except time dummies and a sub-Saharan African dummy, indicate that greater economic globalization is associated with a greater risk of being overweight. Adjusting for individual covariates, however, reduces the magnitude of the association.

The biggest impact on parameter sign, however, occurs after adding country controls: The relationship between economic, political and social globalization and overweight in women aged 15—49 years, OLS regression results. No controls except time dummies and sub Saharan African dummy are included in the baseline specification columns 1, 4, and 7. In columns 2, 5 and 8, controls also include education, age, number of children, occupation and urban residence dummies.

In columns 3, 6, 9, 10, the following controls are also added: In the basic specification, column 4 , the relationship appears convex, with a fall in the probability of being overweight in the second and third quartile, before an increase for the most politically globalized countries column 4. However, the addition of individual, and especially country level controls, leads to a more pronounced association: This is also true for people living in the third quartile, although the increase in the probability of overweight is considerably smaller.

It appears that this dimension has the most stable and pronounced association with overweight across dimensions, as adding different sets of control variables changes the magnitude of the association only slightly. People living in the most socially globalized quartile have an about 18 p. Next, we consider the association between overweight and all globalization indices taken together. On the other hand, putting these scores together in the same model may help ensure an additional degree of control for residual confounding. Some of our findings may be partly driven by the differences in sample size across specifications.

In columns 3, 6 and 9, the following controls are also added: Earlier in the paper, the analysis with OLS using globalization scores transformed into quartiles was presented as this allowed a more intuitive interpretation of results. However, we recognize that this approach is costly, as it effectively precludes a country fixed effects analysis which would allow controlling for an important source of unobserved confounding due to a very small within-variation.

Even though interpretation of our key parameter estimates now becomes less clear, this comparison is useful in that it allows us to examine whether the OLS findings continue to hold when the assumption of no correlation between globalization scores and time-invariant unobservables is relaxed. We also see that the magnitude of the CFE associations remains substantive. For example, a 50 percentage point p. This compares with an about The following controls are added in all specifications: We also estimate overweight as a quadratic polynomial function of globalization dimensions results not shown here, but available on request.

In order to ensure better interpretability and to mitigate the multicollinearity problem, we centred our estimation on the mean values of the globalization dimension scores. We found the main parameters to be virtually identical for all dimensions. In addition, there appears to be a convex relationship between total and political globalization and overweight, a mostly linear negative relationship between economic globalization and overweight, and a mostly linear positive association between social globalization and overweight.

While most of the existing literature focussed on the relationship between economic globalization and obesity, specific quantitative measures of the range of potentially very different globalization-related drivers involved have not been examined previously. In this analysis we find that the relationship between overweight and globalization depends on the specific dimension of globalization.

• Globalization, transnationalism, diasporas: facing new realities and conceptual challenges.
• I Like To Eat Fruit (I Like... Book 1).
• Justines Secret Challenge.
• Works of Andrew Marvell.
• Financial Freedom: A Guide to Achieving Lifelong Wealth and Security?
• Les mystères du peuple, Tome IV Histoire dune famille de prolétaires à travers les âges (French Edition)?
• Die Rezeption von fiktionaler Gewalt im Fernsehen und deren mögliche Auswirkung (German Edition).

Thus, while both political and especially social globalization dimensions appear strongly positively related to the greater overweight risk, the same is not apparent for economic globalization. More concretely, comparing different dimensions of globalization and including suitable adjustments for confounders and covariates we find for the first time that political and social globalization consistently show a positive association with the individual odds of overweight: This finding is also confirmed in the models using the untransformed globalization scores, although the magnitude of the association is notably smaller for the social but not for the political dimension in the CFE compared to the OLS model.

Although arguably the biggest attention has so far been directed at the impact of economic globalization, we have found that living in the most economically globalized quartile of countries predicts a 1 p. This is a rather surprising finding, given the focus of most of the literature on the potential link between obesity and economic globalization Hawkes, , and the scant attention paid to other dimensions.

Having said that, the parameter sign for the economic dimension was quite sensitive to the inclusion of country-level controls. This appears to be consistent with the hypothesis that at least part of the relationship between economic globalization and overweight may be driven by country-specific factors such as economic development and infrastructure, education, attractiveness of economies to investors, as well as the size of the market. Inevitably, our study suffers from several limitations.

For example, the sample was necessarily restricted to women only, and mostly of child-bearing age. Nevertheless, since the age group of 15—49 represents the most productive group of women, who also typically have a number of dependants, focussing attention on this demographic segment may be warranted for informing policies to tackle overweight.

Most importantly, we are limited in drawing major causal claims about our findings, especially in relation to 19 countries that were only present in the sample for one year and thus could not provide any within-variation for the fixed effects analysis.

There are a few other intrinsic data-related concerns which call for caution when interpreting the findings. This is potentially problematic in that such women may more likely be overweight, although the reverse may be true in the lowest income countries, where both pregnancy and breastfeeding may lead to large energy needs relative to family resources and thus potentially to malnourishment. Another problem is that very few countries stayed in the sample for all periods, given the nature of the DHS data collection.

Whereas in some countries e. Egypt, Ghana data was collected every five years or even more frequently, in many others it was collected for no more than two years. In 19 countries, data was only available for one year. There was also very little variation in our categorical globalization variable across years, which prevented us from undertaking country fixed effects analysis using the globalization indicator dummies.

It remains possible, however, that some time-varying variables which country fixed effects cannot control for may still be a source of bias for our results.

Essay on Globalisation: Definition, Nature, History and Impact

For example, availability of infrastructure, wars, economic shocks and famine may affect both the extent of globalization and overweight risk. However, although we are not controlling for these factors explicitly, we nevertheless control for the Human Development Index, as well as the Index of Economic Freedom which proxies for the quality of economic and legal institutions.

Both of these variables, in our view, should to a large extent account for such confounders. It is possible that it may operate with some time lag, but there was little variation across time for globalization indices, and therefore the effect of time lags is unlikely to be estimated with any precision, if the distributed lag model as seems appropriate is used. While these results cannot be given a causal interpretation, they do provide evidence of statistically significant positive association between some dimensions of globalization and overweight.

If more robust statistical evidence were found on the causal link between globalization and obesity, what might appropriate policy responses be? It bears emphasising that such evidence would not imply that it would be appropriate to halt or slow down the progress of globalization, but the challenge would be to find ways of limiting and countering the adverse health consequences of globalization while preserving its beneficial effects. Having said that, not all types of globalization appear to affect the risk of obesity equally: These conclusions have two implications.

First, more research is needed to understand the ways in which social and political globalization — as well as economic — influence overweight. The composite elements within the globalization indices could be examined to identify those which are most closely related to overweight risk. For example, it would be useful to know if the increase in McDonald's outlets, an arguably more direct index of the availability of energy dense diets, is more closely associated with the development of overweight than the increase in IKEA outlets, and if the former retains its association after controlling for the latter.

Open societies and cultural globalization go hand in hand with open markets and open media, with rapid penetration of advertising and brand promotion by global corporations, together with the depiction of supposedly desirable Western lifestyles which in turn help create a merging of food environments and food cultures as globalization progresses. Secondly, with greater clarity about the key aspects of globalization becoming available, the challenge to public health policy becomes better focused.

For example, if it is shown that fast food outlets are closely associated with overweight prevalence, then what are the policy implications? While these policy proposals are widely discussed in the public health arena, they remain marginal to the larger discussions on economic growth and global development. Thus there was no expression of the need to tackle the negative health effects of globalization in the Millennium Development Goals UN, which are due to expire in The following is the supplementary data related to this article:.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. James , d and Marc Suhrcke b, e. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer.