Chapter 7 – Global Inequality

Global Inequality

• Globalization refers to the increase in interconnections between different parts of the entire world.  
• Today’s form of globalization is unprecedented in its reach and its intensity.  More parts of the world are interconnected today than ever before.
• Much of this is due to improvements in communications and in transportation.
• In that sense, you’re connected to different parts of the world.  Culture and social movements also spread faster now than ever before.  
• However, the interconnection of the world has also led to issues regarding inequality and exploitation.  
• As countries interact economically, the chances of one country exploiting another via their transnational corporations has also increased.  Thus, globalization has connected the world, but also increased the levels of inequality that we find. 

Global Inequality

• Market Oriented Theories – one way to understand why global inequality exists is through market oriented theories.  
• These theories take as their starting point the assumption that the free market is the solution to all economic problems.
• Thus, when some countries are not developing their economies successfully, market oriented theories advocates argue that more needs to be done to allow the market to function freely without so much government intervention.  
• This often leads to the cutting of social programs, attacks on worker unions, reducing taxes and tariffs, which are often set up to protect those who are most vulnerable.  
• Dependency Theories, in contrast, understand the global inequality that exists between countries as the result of international exploitation.  
• This theories argue that today’s international economy still affected by the legacy of colonialism that emerged in the previous centuries.  After colonial powers killed, stole from, and dominated people in other countries, they also established unequal trading relationships.  Thus, poor countries would sell raw materials at cheap prices to richer countries.  In return, those rich countries would sell finished manufactured goods to poor countries at expensive prices.
• The result of this would be a situation in which the poor countries don’t benefit equally from this relationship as they could not buy many finished goods.
• In addition, decency theories argue that today’s form of colonialism exploits people in poor countries through rich countries’ transnational corporations.  These corporations pit workers of the world against one another in search of the cheapest labor.  This creates a race to the bottom in which workers around the world feel increasing pressure to give up decent wages, worker safety, and environmental protection in order to attract jobs from around the world.

Global Inequality Research

• Health: the inequality that we find regarding people’s health around the world is intricately tied to the country’s economy and living standards.  If a country has economic resources, it is in a position to do many things to improve its peoples’ health.  
  • One thing is the obvious ability to provide infrastructure such as hospitals and supplies.
  • The second is that it can provide the resources necessary to educate and train medical professionals.
  • The third is that it can provide better sanitation services, better sewage services, better drinkable water, and trash removal, and other similar services.  
  • Lastly, a richer country can also provide better nourishment for its people, which helps avoid the problem of sickness and disease.  
• Food: “According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 805 million people worldwide are chronically undernourished, and virtually all of them live in developing countries.” (Giddens et. al.)  Hunger is still a big problem around the world.  
  • However, the solution to hunger is not to produce more food.  Believe it or not, the world already creates more food than it needs.  This means that we have enough food to feed everybody in the world.
  • It’s because our system of distribution is not designed to take food to where it is needed most, but to where it is more profitable.  Thus, it is possible for poor countries to produce a lot of food, but this food may be exported to richer countries where people are willing to pay more.  This results in the people in the poor country being left without food, as they are poor, and cannot compete with the resources of people in richer countries.  
• Education:  Education is a big problem for economic development.  When a country is poor, it often times cannot provide the professionals and infrastructure needed to provide good education.
  • This is a big problem because an uneducated work force is not as productive as an educated workforce.  That is to say, people in poor countries with little education are caught in a cycle where they need to improve education in order to fuel their economy with a productive workforce.  Yet, they also need money and a good economy to provide its people with a good education.