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Abstract
Economic globalisation occupies an increasingly crucial place in social science research and is central to the analysis of challenges of 21st-century global society. Although neo-classical concepts, such as marginal utility, rational choice, perfect information of agents and the optimisation of economic results, are used to analyse the outcome of intense international mobility of capital and labour, no discussion is undertaken for the emerging new spatialisation of economic activities. This paper evolves as a critique of the dominant neo-liberal approach of economic globalisation, suggesting that the world economic system is characterised by unprecedented tensions, economic asymmetries and technological gaps between developed and developing nations. Identifying the ideological, political and economic logics that have driven the current version of economic globalisation, the paper presents three main findings. First, the timing and sequencing of economic globalisation depend on both external (to the state) and domestic variables. Second, it still remains a crucial issue for poorer countries, how to create the kinds of balanced regimes of knowledge and capital accumulation, while guaranteeing that income disparities remain within the limits of socially tolerable. Third, to overcome spatial and structural inequalities of economic globalisation, the world community should develop effective aid and risk-sharing mechanisms.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and their insightful suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.
Notes
Williamson suggests specific measures concerning fiscal discipline, public expenditure, tax reform, financial liberalisation, exchange rates, trade liberalisation, FDI, privatisation, deregulation, and property rights.
Gill Citation(1995) refers to the way that the neo-classical paradigm seeks to separate politics from economics through legal mechanisms designed to ‘lock-in’ conservative policies.
According to Kindleberger (Citation1969, p. 207), ‘The state is about over as an economic unit.’
Cox (Citation1996, p. 301) argues that: ‘there is a transnational process of consensus formation among the official caretakers of the global economy. This process generates consensual guidelines, underpinned by an ideology of globalisation, that are transmitted into the policy-making channels of national governments and big corporations’.
For a detailed analysis, see World Bank Citation(2007a).