Pros and Cons Essay

Globalization can be defined as the increasing flow of products, people, money, and ideas across the globe. National economies are being swept into the global economy. One can thus think of globalization as rushing through four channels: †¢ Freer trade goods; †¢ Freer mobility of labor; †¢ Freer investment; and †¢ Freer communication, thanks to telecommunications and the Internet. Pros and Cons 1. Capitalism Free enterprise is now the dominant economic system in the world. China is very much capitalist and her late Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping coined the slogan, â€Å"To get rich is glorious. † Only Cuba and North Korea are holding on to the central planning system of running the economy. Capitalism brings along free trade and the free flow of money across the earth. Countries belonging to the World Trade Organization are trying to bring down tariff barriers. Today, immense portfolio investments zip in and out of countries at the click of a mouse (Baylis & Smith, 2001). With free trade comes economic integration. It is possible to download an album of songs in the United States of America, turn it into CDs in Europe, print the cover and lyric sheet in France, and sell it in Asia. The greatest story of economic integration is the European Union, with its common currency, the euro (Brecher & Costello, 2004). 2. Information economy Another driving force is the knowledge economy. Land, labor and capital are bowing in importance to brain creativity. In the United Kingdom, over a three-year span, manual jobs dropped by 750,000, while professional jobs shot up by 1. 5 million (Brecher & Costello, 2004). 3. Mass Media The invention of the printing press helped scattered people become a national community. In the same way, the evening news is nurturing world’s community. The suffering in India and Indonesia are brought home through CNN. 4. Telecoms There is a global boom in telecommunications. A fourth of all Europeans, have mobile phones. The people in Finland gave the greatest access to cell phones at 417 for every 1,000 people (Brecher & Costello, 2004). Reference: 1. Baylis, John, and Smith, Steve, eds. The Globalization of World Politics. 2nd ed. , 2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2. Brecher, Jeremy, and Costello, Tim. Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up. Boston, MA: South End Press, 2004. Radical critique of recent patterns of economic globalization.