Globalization

This week’s blog topic is globalization. Because I have don’t have a great deal of knowledge on this subject, I first did a little research to better inform myself on this topic. Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world. The term is sometimes used to refer to economic globalization: “the integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, foreign direct investment, capital flows, migration, and the spread of technology”. Globalization is usually recognized as being fueled by a combination of many factors, including economic, technological, cultural, political, and biological.

Globalization is not a new phenomenon. For thousands of years, people have been buying and selling goods to and from each other in different countries. Likewise, people and corporations have been investing in enterprises in other countries. The current wave of globalization we are experiencing now has been driven by policies that have opened economies domestically and internationally. Many governments have adopted free-market economic systems, increasing their productive potential and creating new opportunities for international trade and investment. Governments also have negotiated dramatic reductions in barriers to business and have established international agreements to promote trade in goods, services, and investment. Taking advantage of new opportunities in foreign markets, corporations have built foreign factories and established production and marketing arrangements with foreign partners. Because of this, we can see that a defining feature of globalization is an international industrial and financial business structure. Technology has been the other principal driver of globalization. Advances in information technology, in particular, have dramatically transformed economic life. Information technologies have given all sorts of individual economic consumers, investors, and businesses valuable new tools for identifying and pursuing economic opportunities.

In my opinion, the world will never completely globalize. There are too many factors that would prevent the whole world from agreeing on political issues, economical issues, technological issues, and cultural issues. Globalizing would take away from the uniqueness of a specific country and the people living in that country. It is evident that globalization would be extremely difficult to accomplish in our society because we see that many countries hold vastly differing opinions on the very issues that globalization strives to integrate. The countries of the world will never be able to come together and agree on one common economy, one common government, one common culture, or one common language. Supporters of globalization argue that it allows poor countries and their citizens to develop economically and raise their standards of living, while opponents of globalization claim that the creation of an international free market has benefited multinational corporations at the expense of local enterprises, local cultures, and common people. Globalization has been shown to carry both positive and negative effects. It is often difficult to measure whether the positive effects are worth the great deal of time and effort but into this complex process.