Positive and Negative Impacts of Globalization

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Social Sciences
24 03 2021
GLOBALIZATION, THE GOOD AND THE BAD
Globalization is a progression driven and engineered by numerous purposes and necessities. It is a process that consequences the exchange and flow of people, culture, money, information, goods, and services beyond continental boundaries. The world has been undergoing rapid and severe changes since the end of the twentieth century. Hence, globalization has emerged and affected almost every aspect of our lives. While many are still on the fence about the concept, its prosperous upsides in growing underdeveloped countries and reducing inequality between the rich and the poor cannot be ignored.
Economic historians affirm the existence of globalization dating several millennia back even before the late 20th century. According to O'Rourke and Williamson, some people may want to dispute that the 1913 world economy, just before World War I, was as well-integrated as the late-twentieth-century standards. But Andre Gunder Frank confirms that, from 1500 onward, the world had a unified global economy with multilateral trade and an international labor division (52). Moreover, Jerry Bentley asserted that trade networks had reached nearly all sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia even before 1500, and commerce intensity enhanced industrial and agricultural production (7). Some historians, however, relate globalization's "big bang" impact to Christopher Columbus's 1492 American voyage and Vasco da Gama's 1498 end-run around Africa, while considering the phase after 1500 as initiating a genuine global era of world history (Bentley 768-9).
From the above illustrations, we can categorically state that globalization is not a new concept after all. It was similarly a critical terminology of the 1990s. During its contested debates of the 1990s in the U.S, optimists contended that trading with underdeveloped countries would lower the American inflation percentage, notwithstanding the ten years of high economic growth rate it had achieved. It was a belief that buttressed the great bull market run of Bill Clinton's Presidency. Conversely, pessimists reasoned that globalization brought a "global trap" into the world, thus escalating inequality and limiting the state's ability to address crucial social challenges (Martin & Schumann). However, a strong consensus between the two camps was that modern globalization was unparalleled.
Globalization has indeed changed the world for the better. There are numerous accounts of its positive impact and avid contribution to the world's development in developed and underdeveloped countries—a case in point, China's ascension to power in the late twentieth century. A few decades after World War II, organizations like the European Union (EU) and other various free trade unions led by the United States commanded most international trade growth. The Soviet Union experienced a similar trade increase, although not through a free-market model but a somewhat centralized planning system. The result was immense. Once again, trade grew to the 1914 levels globally: a second time, exports represented 14% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1989. The phenomenon indicated a steady upsurge in the West's middle-class inco...