Hollow and speculative?

• Author: Balser, Markus
• Position: Globalization and social issues - Brief Article

1,500,000,000,000...one and a half trillion...dollars are exchanged each day around the globe, the number of international telephone calls has doubled in the last four years alone. 44,000 companies are global today-compared to 3,500 in the 1960s. "For some", said Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former President of Costa Rica, "the new economic system meant being able to make investments with a worldly perspective, minimizing labour costs and maximizing profits. For others, it meant facing the end of job security and, at the same time, witnessing the reappearance of sweatshops" The frantic quest for quick riches had created a hollow, speculative economy, unattached to human labour and unaccountable to human need, he continued.

Mr. Arias took issue with the fact that the world's three richest individuals had assets exceeding the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the poorest 48 countries and that 1.3 billion people still lived on incomes of less than a dollar a day. And, although globalization opened up great opportunities to the world' s less developed countries, it is not as inclusive as it should be. The revolution in information technology, led by the Internet, for example, allows poorer countries to leap-frog stages in technology advances. But the access costs are very high. "Reform of the costs of service provision is very important", Kwesi Botchwey, the Director for Africa Research and Programmes, Center for International Development of Harvard University, stressed.

Globalization indeed does not only mean Internet-shopping or new trade records as companies are looking for the lowest production costs. Martha Ojeda, Executive Director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (factories), said free trade came to Mexico in 1994 with a lot of promises, but it turned out to be a failure for many. Workers in maquiladoras were underpaid and exposed to dangerous chemicals and rampant sexual harassment. "International labour agreements required teeth-to-force implementation", she argued, quoting assessments that per capita income has risen 13 per cent in the United States in the last five years, while in Mexico it fell 70 per cent from its 1994 mark. Craig Kielberger, Chairman of Free the Children, said that the true face behind globalization included children as young as nine who lived and worked in garbage dumps (see photograph), trying to find something to help them survive.

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