Essays
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Global Income Inequality - Firebaugh, Glenn
This essay describes the evolution of global income inequality over the past two‐and‐a‐half centuries, and its likely evolution during the twenty‐first century. Global income inequality—the sum of inequality within and between nations—is massive today, the legacy of uneven growth in the world's regions since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Because incomes shot up in the West while lagging behind in Asia and Africa over most of this period, between‐nation income inequality grew dramatically, and most global income inequality now lies between nations. Economic growth remains uneven across the world's regions, but the fastest growth is occurring in populous poor regions of the world, compressing between‐nation inequality. As a result, global income inequality is currently receding, according to most (but not all) investigations of the matter. The compression of global inequality is attributable to rapid economic growth in China and India: If the rate of economic growth in China and India were the same as in the rest of the world, global income inequality would not be declining. The slow rate of economic growth in sub‐Saharan Africa, on the other hand, is retarding the decline. A high level of global income inequality is problematic in large part because it results in abject poverty for masses of people. If average income in the world continues to rise, alleviating abject poverty in the twenty‐first century, for future generations the level of global income inequality might matter much less than the level of income inequality within local communities. -
Globalization Backlash - Berezin, Mabel
Backlash against globalization has become a defining feature of the first decade of the twenty‐first century, from the Seattle riots in fall 1999 to the recent riots and strikes within Europe to protest government austerity measures. The global financial crisis has exacerbated nascent backlash and contributed to its spread. Backlash against globalization within global power centers takes two forms: a left leaning collective public protest against global capitalism and a right leaning defense of national sovereignty. The left variation occurs outside of standard political institutions, which is often, but not exclusively, NGO (nongovernmental organization) driven and usually involves expressive public demonstrations and disruption; the right variant occurs within institutions, particularly nationalist political parties and electoral systems. The right and the left share a mutual animus toward globalization and progress narratives. The left variant receives more media attention; the right is more durable as it is embedded within national political systems. Scholars acknowledge “globalization backlash.” Yet, the phenomenon has been under‐theorized as well as under‐empiricized and covers a range of disparate issues. A first step in a research agenda vis‐a‐vis the concept would be to establish the parameters of the phenomenon. What forms of social action might we attribute to the cultural, social, economic, and political forces of globalization, and which actions have other causes? The second issue is to identify the differences between institutional and extra‐institutional backlashes. The former is potentially more enduring, whereas the latter opens the door to iterations of public violence. -
Globalization of Capital and National Policymaking - Hall, Steven R.
Through a combination of economic, political, and technological changes, capital has become increasingly mobile across borders. This globalization of capital markets has created constraints on national policymaking. Fearing the loss capital inflows and the destabilizing effects of capital outflows, governments have incentives to avoid enacting policies that investors dislike. Applied across countries, this creates pressure for governments to compete for capital inflows by progressively reducing regulatory and tax burdens. Ultimately, this could lead to a race to the bottom that ends in complete deregulation. Yet, scholarship shows that while this pressure on governments exists, there has not been complete convergence of policy across countries. Instead, there remains persistent divergence as states do maintain some autonomy across a number of policy choices. This essay explores how recent research explains this interaction between the globalization of capital and national policymaking autonomies. Financial crises in the United States and Europe have challenged our understanding of how systemic risk can and should be managed in a world of mobile capital. Moving forward, scholars must build on the lessons from these crises. -
Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced Capitalist Societies - Elger, Tony
This essay considers the consequences of globalization for work and employment in advanced capitalist societies. It outlines the classic arguments of hyperglobalists, sceptics, and transformationalists. It first discusses the roles of multinational companies (MNCs) in both disseminating and differentiating distinctive models of work organization and employment relations across their international operations, emphasizing the micropolitical mediation of such processes and the interplay of “system,” “societal,” and “dominance” effects in the selection and hybridization of such models. It next considers the roles of corporate and state actors in recasting national institutional configurations, highlighting the contradictory and contested features of such configurations, and the scope for substantive remaking despite apparent institutional continuity. It then considers agendas for future research which build on these arguments but give fuller consideration to service MNCs and MNC operations beyond advanced capitalist societies. Finally, it notes the possible impact of other vectors of globalization on overall trends and variations in work and employment across societies. -
Migration and Globalization - Peters, Margaret E.
Scholarship on globalization since the 1970s has focused on the increasing integration of world markets for goods, services, and capital. International migration, by comparison, has received relatively little attention. As recent scholarship has shown, the absence of migration from studies on globalization has made our understanding of other aspects of globalization incomplete. Immigration policy interacts with trade and capital policy. All three policies affect firms' production strategies and their support for openness in the other policy areas. Migration, trade, and capital flows also interact. For instance, increased migration can increase trade and investment as well as help states maintain fixed exchange rates. This entry discusses these effects in greater detail and discusses paths for future research. -
Transnational Social Practices: A Quantitative Perspective - Teney, Céline
Transnational social practices (TSP) can be defined as sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges between individuals across national borders. Over the last decades, TSP have not only become more common, but they have also developed into an increasingly salient subject of quantitative sociological research. After highlighting seminal foundational research, we introduce a set of salient topics in this emerging strand of research, including the social stratification of TSP, the link between TSP and cosmopolitan attitudes, and the issue of classifying TSP into meaningful subdimensions. We conclude with a discussion of several avenues for future research, including the relation between TSP and the increasing societal polarization between “locals” and “globals,” the need to go beyond the field's current Eurocentrism to study TSP comparatively in all parts of the world, and the prospects of methodological and technical advances in research on TSP, including network‐analytic approaches and geo‐tagged digital‐trace data. -
Visualizing Globalization - Mahutga, Matthew C.
This essay reviews current approaches to visualizing globalization. We give special attention to relational data‐analytic approaches that implement social network analysis and geographic information systems, and emphasize the social structure of globalization as revealed in cross‐national and city‐to‐city relations. Cross‐national relations include international trade, comemberships in international governmental organization (IGO) and international nongovernmental organization (INGO), and other kinds of cross‐national relations. City‐to‐city relations include air‐passenger flows, transnational corporation (TNC) headquarter–subsidiary relations, among others. We conclude by discussing future directions in visualizing globalization. The analytical frontier in visualizing globalization lies squarely in statistical/model‐based approaches to spatial and social network analysis. While these analytical approaches hold much promise for visualizing globalization, the dearth of geocoded subnational relational data and the complexity inherent to modeling them create significant obstacles.