research paper example about globalization

Globalization Research Paper

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Introduction

Earlier attempts to grasp globalization, contemporary approaches to globalization, the global political economy, the global cultural economy, questioning “globalization”, globalization and development, governance, sovereignty, and citizenship.

• Bibliography

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Globalization is an inconsistent concept, and definitions of it abound. However, most anthropologists agree that, experientially, globalization refers to a reorganization of time and space in which many movements of peoples, things, and ideas throughout much of the world have become increasingly faster and effortless. Spatially and temporally, cities and towns, individuals and groups, institutions and governments have become linked in ways that are fundamentally new in many regards, especially in terms of the potential speed of interactions among them. Examples of these interactions are myriad: The click of a mouse button on a Wall Street computer can have immediate financial effects thousands of miles away on another continent, and events like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or footage of the 2005 tsunami in southern Asia can be televised internationally, whereby millions of viewers interpret the same images concurrently.

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Beyond these shared perspectives on and approaches to globalization, anthropologists disagree with one another in important regards. The first concerns the “what”: Does globalization name a more-or-less singular and radical transformation that encompasses the globe, in which technoeconomic advancements have fundamentally reorganized time-space, bringing people, places, things, and ideas from all corners of the world into closer contact with one another? Or, is globalization a misnomer, even a fad, a term too general to describe a vast array of situated processes and projects that are inconsistent and never entirely “global”?

A second discussion concerns the “when”: Is globalization new—do we currently live in the “global era”? Or, has the world long been shaped by human interaction spanning great distances?

These debates are not limited to two opposing sides. Some scholars feel that these very questions blunt meaningful analysis of the contemporary world and all of its nuances. By focusing largely on absolutes—that is, what is entirely singular versus wholly chaotic, what is radically new versus something predicated largely on the past— important questions are passed over. For example, what are the specific mechanisms of human interconnection and the particular histories in which they are embedded?

Anthropologists do agree, however, on how to best go about investigating globalization: through long-term, intensive fieldwork, either in a single locality or in several linked analytically together. This fieldwork is ethnographic; that is, it seeks an intimate understanding of the social and cultural dynamics of specific communities, as well as the broader social and political systems they negotiate. In a world of intensifying social relations, ethnography requires engagement in both empirical research and critical theory.

Anthropological attention to ethnographic detail is an important rejoinder to a vast globalization literature centered on macro phenomena, such as the relations between large-scale political and economic bodies like nationstates, political unions, trade organizations, and transnational corporations. Undoubtedly, these “translocal” entities are of great anthropological interest as well. Yet the discipline has taken as its goal the understanding of how specific subjects respond to and act within these large-scale processes, institutions, and discourses through culturally specific lenses. Thus, anthropology’s contribution to this literature lies in its assertion that social change, viewed in both distance-defying connections and inequitable disconnections within the world, can be compellingly grasped in the daily practices of individuals and the groups, institutions, and belief systems they inhabit.

It bears emphasis that a researcher cannot simply board a plane to “the global.” The empirical aspects of human social interaction—while facilitated by the “placelessness” of systems and structures like international finance networks, religious chat rooms, or television broadcasts—are produced, interpreted, and negotiated by people in particular places. It is for this reason that the ethnographic method has continued to define anthropological research, even as it pertains to globalization. The ethnographic emphasis has long been to follow the question, the person, the commodity, or the idea—all things that are continually mobilized or constrained by human activity. As will be argued in further detail below, anthropologists have tended to warn against the erasure of human agency in depictions of such interaction, and the discipline’s commitment to research continues to inform this warning. Some anthropologists have gone so far as to argue that empirically thin accounts of globalization, especially those that embrace it as a natural and ultimately unavoidable force in the world, actually obscure the means by which unequal relations of power are forged. The argument is significant, as anthropologists generally agree that the ability to define globalization and steer discussions pertaining to it greatly informs the decisions of wealthy and influential policymakers.

While often understated in current anthropological scholarship on globalization, early anthropological attempts to grasp translocal phenomena greatly influenced the discipline’s development. Indeed, anthropology has a history of engagement with translocal phenomena and has long argued that exchange across sometimes vast distances has been and is common to human social interaction. Arguably the first incarnation of such a notion is seen in the works of late 19th- and early 20th-century diffusionists, who held that cultural change was a product of initially distinct cultural traits being appropriated and dispersed among individuals and groups over great geographic distances. Franz Boas, often called the father of American anthropology, saw diffusionism as a corrective to unilineal evolutionary conceptions of culture change, which articulated the development of cultural traits as a product of independent and isolated trial and error rather than as a product of permeable social worlds facilitating cultural exchange. Boas argued as follows:

It would be an error to assume that a cultural trait had its original home in the area in which it is now most strongly developed. Christianity did not originate in Europe or America. The manufacture of iron did not originate in America or northern Europe. It was the same in early times. (Boas, 1932, p. 609)

A fellow critic of cultural evolution perspectives during Boas’s time, Bronislaw Malinowski spent over two years in the Trobriand Islands examining the kula ring, a regional system of exchange that Malinowski (1922) claimed functioned to maintain social solidarity and enhance status among males bestowing necklaces and armbands upon one another. Malinowski is most widely renowned as an early practitioner of participant observation, but Malinowski’s study also required him to practice multi-sited research, which is now seen as a sometimes necessary mode of fieldwork to “follow” translocal phenomena.

Two other anthropologists informed by functionalism and influenced by Malinowski’s study of nonmonetary exchange were Mauss and Ortiz, both of whom produced works that challenged readers to think beyond the local. Mauss’s The Gift (first published in 1923) explored the historical beginnings of translocal systems of exchange that often brought about social cohesion through gift giving and reciprocity. Mauss cited examples of this exchange among groups in the South Pacific region, as well as in North America. Originally published in 1940, Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint developed the concept of “transculturation” to describe the different phases of cultural hybridization between ethnically diverse groups (many of whom were arriving from foreign lands) in Cuba under colonialism. Ortiz further argued that the production and export of Cuban commodities like sugar and tobacco came to be deeply entangled with European and U.S. interests.

While the above works demonstrate early insights into the relationships between relatively small populations and an outside world, it is common to read of early 20th-century anthropology’s insular emphasis on closed, internally coherent cultural systems. Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma, first published in 1954, was a powerful response to the “bounded” conceptions of cultural change, as he took a regional scale as his point of entry into the indeterminate dynamics of identity formation in Burma. Leach also emphasized the power and creativity of individual actors to shape culture beyond local contexts.

The 1960s and the two decades that followed were formative in the history of anthropology’s engagement with large-scale processes. The political turmoil of the “libratory,” anticolonial wars, and rising nationalism in the global South during the 1960s are commonly cited as the greatest impetuses of this engagement. In addition, a principled dissatisfaction with the trajectory of anthropology and social science disciplines in general informed the reanimation of the Marxist approach known as political economy. Much of this dissatisfaction stemmed from a lack of engagement with political economy’s most central concerns: the nature of material production, class, and power.

Broadly conceived, the political economic approach within anthropology was utilized to understand the relations between large-scale processes of economic and political change and specific (usually subaltern) communities. The anthropological approach was heavily influenced by the “world-systems” theory of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein and “underdevelopment” perspective of economist Andre Gunder Frank. Both of these thinkers emphasized the imposing gravity of the European- and American-dominated world economy. Concisely, this world economy provided a framework by which Western, or “core,” economies could systematically exploit the non-Western, or “peripheral” nations of the world through the appropriation of their economic surpluses and labor. This perspective laid out a significant critique of economic modernization theory, for both Wallerstein and Frank stressed the causal relationship between worldwide capitalist expansion and subaltern subjugation, or development and underdevelopment.

A common perception among anthropologists sympathetic to political economy was that the “periphery” category was too generalized and unnuanced. Anthropologists believed that their disciplinary proclivities could bring the diverse reactions of “micropopulations” to capitalist penetration into clearer focus and thus provide a more detailed, if not more realistic, explanation of unequal relations of power. Eric Wolf and Sydney Mintz were exemplary in their efforts to conjoin the broad focus of world systems theory with anthropology’s long-established object of study, the social dynamics of the subaltern.

Wolf demonstrated his materialist approach in his influential and ironically titled Europe and the People Without History (1982). The book sought ambitiously to trace the history of capitalism’s expansion and eventual penetration into precapitalist societies, and thus account for the means by which particular non-Western localities were transformed into production sites of primary goods— gold and diamonds in South Africa, coffee in Mexico, and rubber in the Amazon, to name only a few of Wolf’s examples—for Western consumption and profiteering. Wolf’s analytic brush was decidedly broad, as he sought to outline patterns of this expansion and penetration on a massive geographic scale.

Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985), while geographically narrower in its focus, was nevertheless an ambitious anthropological investigation of the politics of production and consumption between a metropole and colony during the 17th through 19th centuries. Mintz argued that slave labor in the Caribbean was a means for sugar to become a highly valued and common commodity in England. His work is important because it demonstrated that the Caribbean producers of sugar were crucial actors in the shaping of the lifeworlds of metropolitan centers of global capitalism.

Much the same as intellectual forebears like Boas, Malinowski, and Mintz, anthropologists today are apt to favor specificity and variation over generalization and central tendency. Anthropology has, subsequently, tended to shy away from grand theories that can essentialize peoples and characterize histories as predetermined. Indeed, a continued interest of anthropologists is to investigate how individuals and groups negotiate their social worlds in creative and unexpected ways. However, this has not prevented anthropologists from using macro theories as frameworks for inquiry nor from intimating how ethnographic detail is indicative of broader social configurations. The main point is that empirically supported arguments are paramount. This is where long-term, immersed fieldwork has been and remains a central element of anthropological contributions to the scholarship on globalization.

Yet the disciplinary interest in globalization has sparked debate about the future of fieldwork methodology. Indeed, while the ethos of anthropology continues to privilege singlesited fieldwork (as this has long been considered the best means to become versed in the social processes of a given community), many argue that a world of intensifying human relations has left traditional fieldwork approaches outmoded. In an effort to address this challenge, George Marcus (1995) outlined two strategies. The first argues for the use of archival data, as well as macro theory, to situate specific communities or individuals in larger socioeconomic processes. Ann Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002), as well as Fernando Coronil’s The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (1997) are prominent examples of this approach.

The second method involves moving out from single sites to conduct “multisited” ethnography in order to examine movements of ideas, peoples, and things. Carolyn Nordstrom’s Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (2004) takes this as its task, using ethnographic methods to track the mobility of goods and money throughout largescale extralegal exchange systems fueling conflict, marginalization, and profiteering.

While definitions of globalization abound, the greatest differences in such definitions are typically a matter of emphasis. Modern-day political economic anthropologists, for example, clearly emphasize political and economic processes that structure and are structured by landscapes of human interaction. Like Wolf and Mintz, these anthropologists view the political economic approach as a necessary corrective to scholarship that historically turned interconnected people and places into distinctive and disconnected phenomena. A great number of medical anthropologists, for example, call for anthropologists to cast light on the historical and contemporary connections and disconnections within the capitalist world system that bring about human affliction. Both Paul Farmer and Nancy Scheper-Hughes are archetypes of this contemporary political economy of health approach. Paul Farmer’s “An Anthropology of Structural Violence” (2004) outlines the historically deep and geographically broad exploitive relations between Haiti and the United States that have predestined the deaths of Haiti’s impoverished to AIDS and tuberculosis. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s “The Global Traffic in Human Organs” (2000) argues that economic globalization has facilitated the creation of an extensive market for the illicit harvest and trade of human body parts. Within this market, impoverished populations are targeted by brokers who, with the help of surgeons, turn high profits by selling these human organs and tissues to wealthier consumers in the global North.

Phenomena like these, political economists assert, are associated with the advent of late-modern capitalism— now commonly called “neoliberal globalization.” Neoliberal globalization refers to the predominate theory of free market capitalism, which these analysts argue continues to be the primary engine of globalization. The term neoliberalism itself underscores an important element of the political economic argument—that globalization is a human-made and ideologically driven set of processes.

The focus on neoliberalism is also one manner in which scholars have come to conceptualize how the contemporary moment is fundamentally different from the past. The most clearly articulated and influential starting point for many scholars of this school of thought is David Harvey, a Marxist geographer who in his significant work The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) argued that economic restructuring and associated social and political changes in Western economies in the early 1970s sparked a fundamental reorganization of global commerce that sped up the turnover times of capital. These changes were characterized, according to Harvey, by an increasing sense of spatial attenuation and temporal acceleration in human economic and social relations. Harvey refered to this sensation as time-space compression , which was brought on by the collapse of significant geographic and temporal barriers to commerce. This collapse was a byproduct of an economic experiment promoted during a crisis of capital accumulation and subsequent recession that existing Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies could do little to stop. The experiment involved the transition from the Fordist model of standardized commodity production and its related system of political and social regulation (the dominant mode of capitalism since the end of World War II) to the post-Fordist model of flexible accumulation. The increased velocity and reach of market transactions this new regime of accumulation prompted were realized through substantial innovations in transport and information technologies. Harvey’s 2005 book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, traces the neoliberal influence behind this shift, arguing that the transition was a political project intended to reinvigorate elite class power and capital accumulation mechanisms.

Perhaps the most recent and representative anthropological effort to further develop this perspective is Jean and John Comaroff’s “Millenial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming” (2000). The Comaroffs argue that neoliberal globalization at the turn of the millennium is a process that alienates capital from labor and marshals consumption as the primary shaper of social and economic phenomena like popular civil society discourses, occult economies and religious movements, and global youth cultures.

Much of the anthropological literature on neoliberalism thus far has focused less on the logic and mechanisms of its production and administration (though this is increasingly a field of study, as some anthropologists turn their eyes to understanding the inner workings of institutions like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank), and more on the impact of, and resistances to, neoliberal globalization. June Nash’s Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization (2001) is a representative ethnography of this focus, as is Jeffrey Juris’s Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization (2008).

A second approach to globalization, coming to prominence in the early 1990s, places greater emphasis on anthropology’s most common focus of attention: culture. (See Kearney, 1995, for an excellent summary of perspectives during the early 1990s.) Many proponents of this cultural approach, while acknowledging the world’s deep history of social interaction, tend to stress the fundamental newness of the present, going so far as to describe a new global era. One of these proponents, Arjun Appadurai, writes a radical reply to center-periphery models of political economy and proposes that any framework emphasizing order in the present globalizing world is deluded. Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996) understands the new global era as having been brought about by a complex and rapidly changing global cultural economy of exchange. The birth of this new era was facilitated by phenomena like media and migration, and both of these have served to reorganize nationstates and mobility on a global scale. Appadurai proposes that this chaotic world be grasped through five dimensions he calls scapes, or the landscapes across which cultural flows travel: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. These scapes overlap to constitute the particular lifeworlds of individuals across the world—each lifeworld being wholly individualized. In short, Appadurai posits a disorganized, centerless world in which no single view yields any grasp of larger processes—the ubiquitous flows of ideas, technologies, objects, and images constituting the global cultural economy are nonisomorphic and indeterminate.

A perspective similar to Appadurai’s, and borrowing from Ernesto Laclau, is that of Inda and Rosaldo (2008), who describe the contemporary world as “dislocated.” The use of this term is intended to emphasize that a plurality of centers serve as the hubs of cultural traffic across the globe. This perspective, as well as Appadurai’s, draws on ethnographic examinations of movements of commodities, people, and images and how these movements are perceived, translated, or appropriated by specific groups with whom they come into contact. At first glance, such movements suggest a significant imbalance in international exchange between the global North and South. Indeed, many Western, and indeed American, products like CocaCola, McDonald’s, and films are promptly visible in a variety of contexts far from Europe and North America. It is from these and other observations that analysts have often come to consider cultural imperialism as a force of homogenization that levels cultural difference throughout the world (see Tomlinson, 1991).

Yet cultural homogenization assumes that the essential meaning of a commodity or idea is consistent and universally legible—meaning that, for example, a Sri Lankan teenager will interpret an Indiana Jones film the same way a German teenager might. Subsequently, it could be inferred that the circulation of Western commodities or ideas will have predictable local effects. Anthropologists argue that there is little inevitability in such exchanges. Rather, a consumer applies her or his own cultural perspectives to the interpretation of objects and ideas, culturally tailoring them in the process. Laura Bohannan (1966) discovered as much in the 1960s when she observed a West African production, and subsequent interpretation, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Liebes and Katz’s The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas (1990) is a modern retelling of Bohannan’s experience, demonstrating how the popular American television program Dallas was quite variously received among Moroccan Jews, Russian Jews, and Arabs.

The cultural tailoring described above has, in many instances, become a rather common element of cultural interaction across the world, especially in light of myriad technological advances and their ability to radically compress time and space (see Harvey, 1989). Due to this, many researchers have come to see culture as less stabilized and more diffuse, going so far as to claim that globalization has “deterritorialized” culture.

As argued earlier, many anthropologists have historically mapped culture onto territorially demarcated places, understanding distinctiveness as a product of social structures within supposedly locally bounded spheres. Said differently, place was the container of culture. (For example, the nation-state of China contained “Chinese culture.”) Gupta and Ferguson rebuke these analyses and call for anthropologists to examine how such conceptions produce difference and reinforce unequal relations of power. They further argue that cultural forms cannot be conceptualized as being fastened to specific geographic locations. Rather, the contemporary world is characterized by the freeing of culture from specific localities, and the notion of deterritorialization captures this process.

Deterritorialization also stresses the tension central to the commonly articulated local/global dichotomy. Indeed, as individuals and groups engage with and are shaped by processes that connect their local worlds with others, cultural forms can come to have an impact regardless of whether they originate in the global North or South. Thus, the significance of non-Western cultural forms circulating in contexts outside of their origins should not be underestimated. Examples of this are everywhere visible, from the ethnic cuisine consumed in the global North, to popularly imported and exported religious beliefs like Buddhism, to non-Western modes of dress like headscarves that have engendered much debate in some European countries. This is due to the fact that while cultural forms become unfastened from one locality, they simultaneously fasten themselves to new contexts and can become highly relevant. Anthropologists cite examples like these to suggest that cultural and even political-economic exchange between the North and South can be mutually significant, or “relational” in its character. Hannerz (1996), borrowing from linguistics, referred to this relationality as the “creolization” of the core and periphery.

Further examples of this exchange are human migration and trafficking, which have left many culturally uprooted peoples “reterritorialized” in foreign lands where they navigate new ways of living with aspects of their cultural identity they have carried with them. Analysts often refer to such individuals and groups as transnational, as they move across and between national boundaries. At times, the connections between these “old” and “new” communities are so strong that anthropologists have argued they should be understood as single communities scattered in multiple localities.

Ultimately, the arguments and examples outlined above suggest that the world be viewed as a complex global society composed of interweaving cultural, political, and economic processes and forms. This is not to suggest that globalization engenders a homogenous global population, but rather to recognize the untethered nature and intensified potential of interactions between populations. Anthropologists argue that only continued heterogeneity within this global society can be assumed.

Of course, the discipline has been careful not to assume that movements are experienced by all peoples, things, and ideas or that all experience movements in the same way.

Indeed, many have argued that such processes have left areas and peoples excluded and marginalized. David Graeber (2002) made the point that processes of economic globalization like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have in fact tightened many national borders, and he cited numbers suggesting that since NAFTA’s inception in 1992, the number of guards along the border between the United States and Mexico has more than tripled. Moreover, anthropologists like Escobar (2001) have argued that too great a focus on the deterritorialization of culture can obscure processes of place making, as well as the fact that people continue to imagine and build cultural forms that are situated in specific localities.

As intimated earlier, the anthropological commitment to fieldwork has led many researchers to avoid nonempirical assumptions as to what globalization might be or what effects it might engender. Subsequently, the concept of globalization has been disputed by some anthropologists frustrated with its imprecise and assumptive nature. This view is summarized by Cooper (2005), who separates “global” from its affix “ization” to call attention to the term’s problematic insinuations.

The first of these pertains to the scale of globalization— namely, that it is singular and worldwide, that it is something that encompasses the earth. Cooper argues that empirical truths about the world do not reflect the notion of global interconnection. Indeed, vast stretches of the planet, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa, remain largely disconnected from the wider world. As Ferguson (2006) has noted, movements of commodities, images, and ideas tend to hop over these geographic expanses, rather than smoothly envelop them. Equally problematic, according to Cooper, is the fact that a process that is global is everywhere and immeasurable, and therefore of little analytic value.

Second, the affix suggests the “when” of globalization— that it is currently happening, that this is the “global era.” Cooper contends that one must be cautious in asserting that such mobilizations and exchanges are historically novel—or an original product of a contemporary global framework. Such an assertion ignores the fact that massive labor migrations (forced or otherwise) in the past engendered the diverse cultures with which we currently identify. In fact, Cooper has argued that movements of laborers in the 19th century were in fact more substantial than those of the present day. It is therefore more accurately stated that human mobility and interaction have been processes long defining cultures across the globe, though contemporary movements of people continue to create novel cultural dynamics and milieus. Similarly, Tsing (2000) has asserted that theories contending the absolute newness of a global era tend to obscure historical happenings that offer insight into both the past and present.

These analysts call attention to the fact that, due to its magnitude, globalization is a concept that must be imagined rather than directly experienced. Yet this is not to suggest that a singular system is out there—that it is simply a matter of lacking the proper tools to see it in its entirety. A metaphor commonly invoked to describe globalization imagines several blind men examining the extremities of an elephant. One man touches the trunk, another a tusk. Several stroke the elephant’s legs. Each man will argue that he knows what the elephant is, or how the elephant in its entirety appears. Yet due to the size of the elephant and the sensory limitations of the men, none has the ability to know it fully. The problem with this metaphor is that it assumes a singular entity—the elephant—or a coherent framework that one claims to know is there but cannot fully experience. The consensus among critical anthropologists like Cooper and Tsing disputes this, arguing that globalization is an analytic construct, not a coherent world-making system. Moreover, they argue that collecting the variety of exchanges shaping relationships in the world under a single moniker makes for an inadequate analytic category, for it fails to capture the specific mechanisms of interconnection and the histories in which they are embedded. This is a view that rejects a singular world-making system in favor of a pluralization and inconsistency of agendas, projects, and processes. These international projects may be grand in scale, but they are not uniformly consistent or all encompassing. They vary according to the terms of their creation as well as their sites of origin.

These anthropologists call for examining globalization from a critical distance, paying attention to the arguments and mechanisms by which theories of globalization are mobilized. One example of this would be to challenge the exclusively celebratory espousals of globalization—what is often referred to as the “globalist” perspective—that, through popular media information, attempt to influence ideas of wealth and mobility. The power in this information lies in its ability to reproduce a specific logic that many globalist pundits advance—that of globalization’s huge potentiality. This can be misleading, however, as the life of a farmer or laborer in the global South may be so socially and economically constrained as to prevent her from traveling to the closest major city, much less jet-set about the world.

Moreover, the critical distance approach is especially important in light of the fact that influential discourses defining globalization inform the decisions of the world’s powerbrokers, especially transnational governing bodies like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, as well as powerful nations whose leaders read popular political pundits. It is important to emphasize here that talk about difference can move quickly about the world, mobilizing individuals and institutions to act upon it for the purposes of security, economic profit, stability, and other aspirations. In this sense, talk about globalization, when wielded by actors embedded in complex relations of power, can have very real effects in people’s everyday lives.

By way of example, a number of recent dialogues in North American academic and public circles have focused less on the homogenization of culture (or cultural imperialism) and more on cultural difference, while maintaining that a more or less singular global framework brings about foreseeable effects. This talk articulates a gray zone between globalization’s positive and negative consequences, sketching a context in which cultural heterogeneity and increasing global mobility create both opportunity and threat. These claims to know a singular global system can have powerful effects. On the one hand, recent national best sellers by popular political pundits hail globalization as a force that flattens the world, creating an even playing field for those “willing” to participate. They inform international policy at the World Economic Forum and chastise governments resisting privatization and deregulation of large industries. On the other hand, these works instill a sense of fear in the post–9/11 world, as many nations and groups are depicted as foils to global connection—their own development complicated by dated cultural beliefs and traditions that ultimately threaten to violently derail the future. Thus, while globalization has brought us closer to allies, it has also compressed the world in such a way as to make it more vulnerable to conflict and resistance. Ultimately, these are fears of difference in which cultural heterogeneity, rather than the worldwide “McDonaldization” of societies, is emphasized.

A number of anthropologists have felt compelled to respond to these conceptions of globalization. Besteman and Gusterson’s Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (2005), for example, takes its inspiration from public anthropologists like Boas and Mead and wields an anthropological sensibility with ethnographic evidence to challenge the destructive myths of America’s most popular pundits writing about globalization. The volume’s chapters are written in clear and compelling language, and are thus geared toward a general audience.

Finally, some anthropologists have cast a critical eye on the theoretical underpinnings of anthropological approaches to globalization, calling attention to the problematic gendering of epistemologies attempting to capture large-scale social change. Freeman’s “Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine?” (2001) provocatively examines the implications of the partition of masculine macro theories of globalization (which largely ignore gender) and ethnographic approaches to globalization emphasizing locality and gender.

Globalization is a term that has, in many instances, come to replace the older and no less complex notion of “development.” In fact, Edelman and Haugerud (2005) have argued that globalization has replaced the term development as the new action word of contemporary international governance discourse. Not simply a term that describes an inevitable process that is shaping the modern world, globalization, when conflated with development, is a metapolicy guiding the way to social and economic well-being in the global South.

The replacement of development by globalization is also evident in South American contexts like Venezuela and Bolivia, where supposed antiglobalization social movements and nationalization policies have been viewed by many Northern countries and transnational organizations as detrimental to international peace and global economic stability. In contrast, these Northern governing bodies espouse state-led implementation of globalizationfriendly principles for the sake of individual nations’ prosperity, as well as prosperity for the world. Thus, it is by ultimately opening up borders and financially connecting to the wider world that nations soar themselves out of poverty and into the global marketplace, developing in the process.

The two most influential anthropological works on development, Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine (1994) and Escobar’s Encountering Development (1994), challenge this widespread thinking. Ferguson argued that in fact such development schemes usually fail and in the process further embed countries in the exploitative systems that were intended to help them. Ferguson also faulted these schemes for overlooking the social and historical specificities of countries and favoring techomanagerial solutions that are generally applicable to all “developing” countries.

In his influential book, Escobar attempted to denaturalize “development” by situating it in the political aftermath of World War II, when, in 1949, President Harry Truman argued for “developed” nations of the world to systematically restructure the global South, reconfiguring the world in the image of “advanced” nations. Following

Walt Whitman Rostow and his work The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), many policymakers and social scientists in the years following Truman’s speech came to view development as the establishment of preconditions for the “take off ” from traditionality to modernity. Escobar examined how this language and categorization of development problems becomes the official knowledge of international development experts and how this expertise subsequently becomes unanchored to any political, cultural, or historical context. He ultimately argued that this categorization, or naming, of peoples and places as objects of development interventions has devastating material effects: Targeted “underdeveloped” communities are often left worse off than they were prior to the intervention, and in addition, increasingly reliant of foreign aid.

To what extent can it be said that recent transformations have changed how states govern and with what efficacy? Globalist claims have often declared the demise of the state with the dissolving of national borders and the rise of international governing institutions like the WTO, World Bank, and IMF. Yet, as Tsing (2000) noted, this idea assumes that nationstates have been historically consistent and omnipresent.

There is little doubt that the development of international law and institutions upholding it have changed the means by which many states govern their populations. However, proclamations of the global dissolving of nationstates are exaggerated, according to anthropologists. This does not mean that states have not changed at all. Indeed, contrary to the traditional doctrine of sovereignty, many states are now held accountable by international authorities and in many instances are forced to comply with their policies. The degree to which such states are actually constrained and reshaped by international institutions varies, of course, from context to context. (Merry’s 2006 overview of anthropology’s engagement with international law is instructive on the above points.) Thus, one could argue that the sovereignty of states in the present has been to a large degree reorganized, if not in many instances greatly circumscribed. Sharma and Gupta (2005), in their important volume The Anthropology of the State, argued that “sovereignty can no longer be seen as the sole purview or ‘right’ of the modern state but is, instead, partially disentangled from the nation-state and mapped onto supra-national and non-governmental organizations” (p. 7).

The shifting nature of governance and states at present comes to heavily bear on conceptions of citizenship within countries. Many anthropologists argue that globalization has reformulated many notions of and policies pertaining to citizenship. Ong (1999), for example, used the term flexible citizenship to grasp how individuals and groups deploy various strategies to evade, as well as profit from, various national regimes of citizenship. Ong argues that the elite, flexible Chinese citizens have discarded traditional notions of nationalism in favor of a “postnational ethos” that transcends national boundaries for the sake of participation in the global capitalist market.

When considering the various viewpoints outlined above, it is important to remember that anthropologists’ commitment to fieldwork and the empirical evidence it produces significantly informs their perception of the global. Said succinctly, where anthropologists work shapes their perspective on globalization. It is not surprising to find, then, that the most influential anthropologists working in sub-Saharan Africa talk of global disconnection, while many working in the metropolitan cities of India stress the interconnection brought about by a global cultural economy. Due to this, it should equally be stressed that every view of the global is always a view from somewhere. There is no perch from which an analyst can ascertain the world from an objective, comprehensive position.

Yet the contrasts in the above perspectives are highly positive in that they produce a creative tension that thwarts stagnation in favor of fresh approaches and directions for the study of globalization. One product of this tension has been an active emphasis on “studying up,” or turning a critical eye to national and international institutions and actors whose projects aim to influence social and economic change. The recent anthropological concentration on the predominate economic philosophy of the present—neoliberalism—is laudable in this regard. Important recent works—like Ong and Collier’s Global Assemblages (2005); Petryna, Lakoff, and Kleinman’s Global Pharmaceuticals (2006); and Fisher and Downey’s Frontiers of Capital (2006)—take states, transnational governing bodies like the World Bank and WTO, human rights NGOs, corporations, and even powerful individuals like the U.S. chairman of the Federal Reserve as objects of ethnographic analysis.

Furthermore, the means by which anthropologists go about examining these objects, as well as the way they write about them, is changing. The fact that anthropologists are increasingly turning their focus to the world’s powerbrokers means that they take the discourses and policies of these powerbrokers very seriously. This is all the more important because anthropologists tend to disagree with these discourses and policies and subsequently wish to dispute them. Yet in order to successfully dispute them, anthropologists must write for audiences outside of the discipline. Two works already mentioned, Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong and Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, are prominent examples of this endeavor.

All told, the above discussion signals a much more general development in which anthropologists are increasingly seeking to bring their disciplinary perspective to bear on public discussions of globalization. Anthropology is one among many disciplines that can greatly contribute to this ongoing discussion.

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Globalization and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence on the Role of Complementarities

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Faculty of Management, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Johor, Malaysia, Department of Management, Mobarakeh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran

Affiliation Applied Statistics Department, Economics and Administration Faculty, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

• Parisa Samimi, 
• Hashem Salarzadeh Jenatabadi

• Published: April 10, 2014
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087824
• Reader Comments

This study was carried out to investigate the effect of economic globalization on economic growth in OIC countries. Furthermore, the study examined the effect of complementary policies on the growth effect of globalization. It also investigated whether the growth effect of globalization depends on the income level of countries. Utilizing the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator within the framework of a dynamic panel data approach, we provide evidence which suggests that economic globalization has statistically significant impact on economic growth in OIC countries. The results indicate that this positive effect is increased in the countries with better-educated workers and well-developed financial systems. Our finding shows that the effect of economic globalization also depends on the country’s level of income. High and middle-income countries benefit from globalization whereas low-income countries do not gain from it. In fact, the countries should receive the appropriate income level to be benefited from globalization. Economic globalization not only directly promotes growth but also indirectly does so via complementary reforms.

Citation: Samimi P, Jenatabadi HS (2014) Globalization and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence on the Role of Complementarities. PLoS ONE 9(4): e87824. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087824

Editor: Rodrigo Huerta-Quintanilla, Cinvestav-Merida, Mexico

Received: November 5, 2013; Accepted: January 2, 2014; Published: April 10, 2014

Copyright: © 2014 Samimi, Jenatabadi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The study is supported by the Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia, Malaysian International Scholarship (MIS). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Globalization, as a complicated process, is not a new phenomenon and our world has experienced its effects on different aspects of lives such as economical, social, environmental and political from many years ago [1] – [4] . Economic globalization includes flows of goods and services across borders, international capital flows, reduction in tariffs and trade barriers, immigration, and the spread of technology, and knowledge beyond borders. It is source of much debate and conflict like any source of great power.

The broad effects of globalization on different aspects of life grab a great deal of attention over the past three decades. As countries, especially developing countries are speeding up their openness in recent years the concern about globalization and its different effects on economic growth, poverty, inequality, environment and cultural dominance are increased. As a significant subset of the developing world, Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries are also faced by opportunities and costs of globalization. Figure 1 shows the upward trend of economic globalization among different income group of OIC countries.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087824.g001

Although OICs are rich in natural resources, these resources were not being used efficiently. It seems that finding new ways to use the OICs economic capacity more efficiently are important and necessary for them to improve their economic situation in the world. Among the areas where globalization is thought, the link between economic growth and globalization has been become focus of attention by many researchers. Improving economic growth is the aim of policy makers as it shows the success of nations. Due to the increasing trend of globalization, finding the effect of globalization on economic growth is prominent.

The net effect of globalization on economic growth remains puzzling since previous empirical analysis did not support the existent of a systematic positive or negative impact of globalization on growth. Most of these studies suffer from econometrics shortcoming, narrow definition of globalization and small number of countries. The effect of economic globalization on the economic growth in OICs is also ambiguous. Existing empirical studies have not indicated the positive or negative impact of globalization in OICs. The relationship between economic globalization and economic growth is important especially for economic policies.

Recently, researchers have claimed that the growth effects of globalization depend on the economic structure of the countries during the process of globalization. The impact of globalization on economic growth of countries also could be changed by the set of complementary policies such as improvement in human capital and financial system. In fact, globalization by itself does not increase or decrease economic growth. The effect of complementary policies is very important as it helps countries to be successful in globalization process.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between economic globalization and growth in panel of selected OIC countries over the period 1980–2008. Furthermore, we would explore whether the growth effects of economic globalization depend on the set of complementary policies and income level of OIC countries.

The paper is organized as follows. The next section consists of a review of relevant studies on the impact of globalization on growth. Afterward the model specification is described. It is followed by the methodology of this study as well as the data sets that are utilized in the estimation of the model and the empirical strategy. Then, the econometric results are reported and discussed. The last section summarizes and concludes the paper with important issues on policy implications.

Literature Review

The relationship between globalization and growth is a heated and highly debated topic on the growth and development literature. Yet, this issue is far from being resolved. Theoretical growth studies report at best a contradictory and inconclusive discussion on the relationship between globalization and growth. Some of the studies found positive the effect of globalization on growth through effective allocation of domestic resources, diffusion of technology, improvement in factor productivity and augmentation of capital [5] , [6] . In contrast, others argued that globalization has harmful effect on growth in countries with weak institutions and political instability and in countries, which specialized in ineffective activities in the process of globalization [5] , [7] , [8] .

Given the conflicting theoretical views, many studies have been empirically examined the impact of the globalization on economic growth in developed and developing countries. Generally, the literature on the globalization-economic growth nexus provides at least three schools of thought. First, many studies support the idea that globalization accentuates economic growth [9] – [19] . Pioneering early studies include Dollar [9] , Sachs et al. [15] and Edwards [11] , who examined the impact of trade openness by using different index on economic growth. The findings of these studies implied that openness is associated with more rapid growth.

In 2006, Dreher introduced a new comprehensive index of globalization, KOF, to examine the impact of globalization on growth in an unbalanced dynamic panel of 123 countries between 1970 and 2000. The overall result showed that globalization promotes economic growth. The economic and social dimensions have positive impact on growth whereas political dimension has no effect on growth. The robustness of the results of Dreher [19] is approved by Rao and Vadlamannati [20] which use KOF and examine its impact on growth rate of 21 African countries during 1970–2005. The positive effect of globalization on economic growth is also confirmed by the extreme bounds analysis. The result indicated that the positive effect of globalization on growth is larger than the effect of investment on growth.

The second school of thought, which supported by some scholars such as Alesina et al. [21] , Rodrik [22] and Rodriguez and Rodrik [23] , has been more reserve in supporting the globalization-led growth nexus. Rodriguez and Rodrik [23] challenged the robustness of Dollar (1992), Sachs, Warner et al. (1995) and Edwards [11] studies. They believed that weak evidence support the idea of positive relationship between openness and growth. They mentioned the lack of control for some prominent growth indicators as well as using incomprehensive trade openness index as shortcomings of these works. Warner [24] refuted the results of Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000). He mentioned that Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) used an uncommon index to measure trade restriction (tariffs revenues divided by imports). Warner (2003) explained that they ignored all other barriers on trade and suggested using only the tariffs and quotas of textbook trade policy to measure trade restriction in countries.

Krugman [25] strongly disagreed with the argument that international financial integration is a major engine of economic development. This is because capital is not an important factor to increase economic development and the large flows of capital from rich to poor countries have never occurred. Therefore, developing countries are unlikely to increase economic growth through financial openness. Levine [26] was more optimistic about the impact of financial liberalization than Krugman. He concluded, based on theory and empirical evidences, that the domestic financial system has a prominent effect on economic growth through boosting total factor productivity. The factors that improve the functioning of domestic financial markets and banks like financial integration can stimulate improvements in resource allocation and boost economic growth.

The third school of thoughts covers the studies that found nonlinear relationship between globalization and growth with emphasis on the effect of complementary policies. Borensztein, De Gregorio et al. (1998) investigated the impact of FDI on economic growth in a cross-country framework by developing a model of endogenous growth to examine the role of FDI in the economic growth in developing countries. They found that FDI, which is measured by the fraction of products produced by foreign firms in the total number of products, reduces the costs of introducing new varieties of capital goods, thus increasing the rate at which new capital goods are introduced. The results showed a strong complementary effect between stock of human capital and FDI to enhance economic growth. They interpreted this finding with the observation that the advanced technology, brought by FDI, increases the growth rate of host economy when the country has sufficient level of human capital. In this situation, the FDI is more productive than domestic investment.

Calderón and Poggio [27] examined the structural factors that may have impact on growth effect of trade openness. The growth benefits of rising trade openness are conditional on the level of progress in structural areas including education, innovation, infrastructure, institutions, the regulatory framework, and financial development. Indeed, they found that the lack of progress in these areas could restrict the potential benefits of trade openness. Chang et al. [28] found that the growth effects of openness may be significantly improved when the investment in human capital is stronger, financial markets are deeper, price inflation is lower, and public infrastructure is more readily available. Gu and Dong [29] emphasized that the harmful or useful growth effect of financial globalization heavily depends on the level of financial development of economies. In fact, if financial openness happens without any improvement in the financial system of countries, growth will replace by volatility.

However, the review of the empirical literature indicates that the impact of the economic globalization on economic growth is influenced by sample, econometric techniques, period specifications, observed and unobserved country-specific effects. Most of the literature in the field of globalization, concentrates on the effect of trade or foreign capital volume (de facto indices) on economic growth. The problem is that de facto indices do not proportionally capture trade and financial globalization policies. The rate of protections and tariff need to be accounted since they are policy based variables, capturing the severity of trade restrictions in a country. Therefore, globalization index should contain trade and capital restrictions as well as trade and capital volume. Thus, this paper avoids this problem by using a comprehensive index which called KOF [30] . The economic dimension of this index captures the volume and restriction of trade and capital flow of countries.

Despite the numerous studies, the effect of economic globalization on economic growth in OIC is still scarce. The results of recent studies on the effect of globalization in OICs are not significant, as they have not examined the impact of globalization by empirical model such as Zeinelabdin [31] and Dabour [32] . Those that used empirical model, investigated the effect of globalization for one country such as Ates [33] and Oyvat [34] , or did it for some OIC members in different groups such as East Asia by Guillaumin [35] or as group of developing countries by Haddad et al. [36] and Warner [24] . Therefore, the aim of this study is filling the gap in research devoted solely to investigate the effects of economic globalization on growth in selected OICs. In addition, the study will consider the impact of complimentary polices on the growth effects of globalization in selected OIC countries.

Model Specification

Methodology and Data

This paper applies the generalized method of moments (GMM) panel estimator first suggested by Anderson and Hsiao [38] and later developed further by Arellano and Bond [39] . This flexible method requires only weak assumption that makes it one of the most widely used econometric techniques especially in growth studies. The dynamic GMM procedure is as follow: first, to eliminate the individual effect form dynamic growth model, the method takes differences. Then, it instruments the right hand side variables by using their lagged values. The last step is to eliminate the inconsistency arising from the endogeneity of the explanatory variables.

The consistency of the GMM estimator depends on two specification tests. The first is a Sargan test of over-identifying restrictions, which tests the overall validity of the instruments. Failure to reject the null hypothesis gives support to the model. The second test examines the null hypothesis that the error term is not serially correlated.

The GMM can be applied in one- or two-step variants. The one-step estimators use weighting matrices that are independent of estimated parameters, whereas the two-step GMM estimator uses the so-called optimal weighting matrices in which the moment conditions are weighted by a consistent estimate of their covariance matrix. However, the use of the two-step estimator in small samples, as in our study, has problem derived from proliferation of instruments. Furthermore, the estimated standard errors of the two-step GMM estimator tend to be small. Consequently, this paper employs the one-step GMM estimator.

In the specification, year dummies are used as instrument variable because other regressors are not strictly exogenous. The maximum lags length of independent variable which used as instrument is 2 to select the optimal lag, the AR(1) and AR(2) statistics are employed. There is convincing evidence that too many moment conditions introduce bias while increasing efficiency. It is, therefore, suggested that a subset of these moment conditions can be used to take advantage of the trade-off between the reduction in bias and the loss in efficiency. We restrict the moment conditions to a maximum of two lags on the dependent variable.

Data and Empirical Strategy

We estimated Eq. (1) using the GMM estimator based on a panel of 33 OIC countries. Table S1 in File S1 lists the countries and their income groups in the sample. The choice of countries selected for this study is primarily dictated by availability of reliable data over the sample period among all OIC countries. The panel covers the period 1980–2008 and is unbalanced. Following [40] , we use annual data in order to maximize sample size and to identify the parameters of interest more precisely. In fact, averaging out data removes useful variation from the data, which could help to identify the parameters of interest with more precision.

The dependent variable in our sample is logged per capita real GDP, using the purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates and is obtained from the Penn World Table (PWT 7.0). The economic dimension of KOF index is derived from Dreher et al. [41] . We use some other variables, along with economic globalization to control other factors influenced economic growth. Table S2 in File S2 shows the variables, their proxies and source that they obtain.

We relied on the three main approaches to capture the effects of economic globalization on economic growth in OIC countries. The first one is the baseline specification (Eq. (1)) which estimates the effect of economic globalization on economic growth.

The second approach is to examine whether the effect of globalization on growth depends on the complementary policies in the form of level of human capital and financial development. To test, the interactions of economic globalization and financial development (KOF*FD) and economic globalization and human capital (KOF*HCS) are included as additional explanatory variables, apart from the standard variables used in the growth equation. The KOF, HCS and FD are included in the model individually as well for two reasons. First, the significance of the interaction term may be the result of the omission of these variables by themselves. Thus, in that way, it can be tested jointly whether these variables affect growth by themselves or through the interaction term. Second, to ensure that the interaction term did not proxy for KOF, HCS or FD, these variables were included in the regression independently.

In the third approach, in order to study the role of income level of countries on the growth effect of globalization, the countries are split based on income level. Accordingly, countries were classified into three groups: high-income countries (3), middle-income (21) and low-income (9) countries. Next, dummy variables were created for high-income (Dum 3), middle-income (Dum 2) and low-income (Dum 1) groups. Then interaction terms were created for dummy variables and KOF. These interactions will be added to the baseline specification.

Findings and Discussion

This section presents the empirical results of three approaches, based on the GMM -dynamic panel data; in Tables 1 – 3 . Table 1 presents a preliminary analysis on the effects of economic globalization on growth. Table 2 displays coefficient estimates obtained from the baseline specification, which used added two interaction terms of economic globalization and financial development and economic globalization and human capital. Table 3 reports the coefficients estimate from a specification that uses dummies to capture the impact of income level of OIC countries on the growth effect of globalization.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087824.t001

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087824.t002

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087824.t003

The results in Table 1 indicate that economic globalization has positive impact on growth and the coefficient is significant at 1 percent level. The positive effect is consistent with the bulk of the existing empirical literature that support beneficial effect of globalization on economic growth [9] , [11] , [13] , [19] , [42] , [43] .

According to the theoretical literature, globalization enhances economic growth by allocating resources more efficiently as OIC countries that can be specialized in activities with comparative advantages. By increasing the size of markets through globalization, these countries can be benefited from economic of scale, lower cost of research and knowledge spillovers. It also augments capital in OICs as they provide a higher return to capital. It has raised productivity and innovation, supported the spread of knowledge and new technologies as the important factors in the process of development. The results also indicate that growth is enhanced by lower level of government expenditure, lower level of inflation, higher level of human capital, deeper financial development, more domestic investment and better institutions.

Table 2 represents that the coefficients on the interaction between the KOF, HCS and FD are statistically significant at 1% level and with the positive sign. The findings indicate that economic globalization not only directly promotes growth but also indirectly does via complementary reforms. On the other hand, the positive effect of economic globalization can be significantly enhanced if some complementary reforms in terms of human capital and financial development are undertaken.

In fact, the implementation of new technologies transferred from advanced economies requires skilled workers. The results of this study confirm the importance of increasing educated workers as a complementary policy in progressing globalization. However, countries with higher level of human capital can be better and faster to imitate and implement the transferred technologies. Besides, the financial openness brings along the knowledge and managerial for implementing the new technology. It can be helpful in improving the level of human capital in host countries. Moreover, the strong and well-functioned financial systems can lead the flow of foreign capital to the productive and compatible sectors in developing countries. Overall, with higher level of human capital and stronger financial systems, the globalized countries benefit from the growth effect of globalization. The obtained results supported by previous studies in relative to financial and trade globalization such as [5] , [27] , [44] , [45] .

Table (3 ) shows that the estimated coefficients on KOF*dum3 and KOF*dum2 are statistically significant at the 5% level with positive sign. The KOF*dum1 is statistically significant with negative sign. It means that increase in economic globalization in high and middle-income countries boost economic growth but this effect is diverse for low-income countries. The reason might be related to economic structure of these countries that are not received to the initial condition necessary to be benefited from globalization. In fact, countries should be received to the appropriate income level to be benefited by globalization.

The diagnostic tests in tables 1 – 3 show that the estimated equation is free from simultaneity bias and second-order correlation. The results of Sargan test accept the null hypothesis that supports the validity of the instrument use in dynamic GMM.

Conclusions and Implications

Numerous researchers have investigated the impact of economic globalization on economic growth. Unfortunately, theoretical and the empirical literature have produced conflicting conclusions that need more investigation. The current study shed light on the growth effect of globalization by using a comprehensive index for globalization and applying a robust econometrics technique. Specifically, this paper assesses whether the growth effects of globalization depend on the complementary polices as well as income level of OIC countries.

Using a panel data of OIC countries over the 1980–2008 period, we draw three important conclusions from the empirical analysis. First, the coefficient measuring the effect of the economic globalization on growth was positive and significant, indicating that economic globalization affects economic growth of OIC countries in a positive way. Second, the positive effect of globalization on growth is increased in countries with higher level of human capital and deeper financial development. Finally, economic globalization does affect growth, whether the effect is beneficial depends on the level of income of each group. It means that economies should have some initial condition to be benefited from the positive effects of globalization. The results explain why some countries have been successful in globalizing world and others not.

The findings of our study suggest that public policies designed to integrate to the world might are not optimal for economic growth by itself. Economic globalization not only directly promotes growth but also indirectly does so via complementary reforms.

The policy implications of this study are relatively straightforward. Integrating to the global economy is only one part of the story. The other is how to benefits more from globalization. In this respect, the responsibility of policymakers is to improve the level of educated workers and strength of financial systems to get more opportunities from globalization. These economic policies are important not only in their own right, but also in helping developing countries to derive the benefits of globalization.

However, implementation of new technologies transferred from advanced economies requires skilled workers. The results of this study confirm the importance of increasing educated workers as a complementary policy in progressing globalization. In fact, countries with higher level of human capital can better and faster imitate and implement the transferred technologies. The higher level of human capital and certain skill of human capital determine whether technology is successfully absorbed across countries. This shows the importance of human capital in the success of countries in the globalizing world.

Financial openness in the form of FDI brings along the knowledge and managerial for implementing the new technology. It can be helpful in upgrading the level of human capital in host countries. Moreover, strong and well-functioned financial systems can lead the flow of foreign capital to the productive and compatible sectors in OICs.

In addition, the results show that economic globalization does affect growth, whether the effect is beneficial depends on the level of income of countries. High and middle income countries benefit from globalization whereas low-income countries do not gain from it. As Birdsall [46] mentioned globalization is fundamentally asymmetric for poor countries, because their economic structure and markets are asymmetric. So, the risks of globalization hurt the poor more. The structure of the export of low-income countries heavily depends on primary commodity and natural resource which make them vulnerable to the global shocks.

The major research limitation of this study was the failure to collect data for all OIC countries. Therefore future research for all OIC countries would shed light on the relationship between economic globalization and economic growth.

Supporting Information

Sample of Countries.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087824.s001

The Name and Definition of Indicators.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087824.s002

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: PS. Performed the experiments: PS. Analyzed the data: PS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: PS HSJ. Wrote the paper: PS HSJ.

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Research on Globalization Impact Factors and Sustainable Development Strategies

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Economic globalization itself is known for facilitating the distribution of the means of production, but it often has a negative impact because the distribution process is not efficient enough. COVID-19 has largely curbed globalization since its massive outbreak in late 2019 and shifted the process of globalization, which had been experiencing protectionist shocks, into reverse globalization. Globalization seems to be in a tense situation and at risk of extinction: Differences in policy responses among nation-states reveal different attitudes toward economic globalization; Individual psychological satisfaction with the sense of recognition and the rapid development of the market economy are opposing and circular features. This paper addresses the question of the pros and cons of globalization, used literature research to study the imbalance rules of globalization, the mechanism of populism’s influence on globalization, found the cyclical development trend of globalization, and used China’s response as a practical case to support and analyze, with a view to providing reference for other countries to deal with globalization in the current internationally situation.

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The State of Globalization in 2021

• Steven A. Altman
• Caroline R. Bastian

Trade, capital, and information flows have stabilized, recovered, and even grown in the past year.

As the coronavirus swept the world, closing borders and halting international trade and capital flows, there were questions about the pandemic’s lasting impact on globalization. But a close look at the recent data paints a much more optimistic picture. While international travel remains significantly down and is not expected to rebound until 2023, cross-border trade, capital, and information flows have largely stabilized, recovered, or even grown over the last year. The bottom line for business is that Covid-19 has not knocked globalization down to anywhere close to what would be required for strategists to narrow their focus to their home countries or regions.

Cross-border flows plummeted in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world, reinforcing doubts about the future of globalization. As we move into 2021, the latest data paint a clearer — and more hopeful — picture. Global business is not going away, but the landscape is shifting, with important implications for strategy and management.

• Steven A. Altman is a senior research scholar, adjunct assistant professor, and director of the DHL Initiative on Globalization at the NYU Stern Center for the Future of Management .
• CB Caroline R. Bastian is a research scholar at the DHL Initiative on Globalization.

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Globalization: Benefits and Challenges Research Paper

All four education lenses: historical, humanities, natural and applied sciences, and social sciences are essential to developing a well-analyzed research outcome. When I began my research on the human trafficking topic, I only had a historical perspective on slavery. However, by incorporating the other education lenses, I was able to change my perspective. Therefore, it is clear that if I used one lens over the others, I would have a totally biased perspective and would change the view of my topic. For example, if I had explored more from the historical perspective, I would not have learned about social justice, diversity, and the impacts of globalization, which are key to understanding the causes of human trafficking.

Over recent years, globalization has developed dramatically as a result of technology. According to Achmad (2021), people have changed socially from a technological point of view. There are the citizens, the individuals who can express their points of view in public freely, and the netizens, who are only active in online communities. Therefore, it is imperative to understand different individuals to know how to interact with them. The citizen society is free and is prone to sharing information with other people in public. Therefore, they ought to be aware of other cultures to avoid conflicts. For instance, in workplaces where diverse workers are available, the management needs to help their employees appreciate each other’s cultures and viewpoints. This is paramount in promoting unity and eliminating workplace conflicts.

On the other hand, the netizens’ society also needs to understand globalization and how to interact respectfully. Various concerns about cyber security have been on the rise with increased globalization. According to Awoyemi et al. (2021), the main challenge of globalization is cybercrime. Some of the main forms of cybercrimes discussed in their study include hacking, spoofing, identity theft, password sniffing, and credit card fraud, among others (Awoyemi et al., 2021). This drawback makes many people fear interacting freely on the internet. Therefore, analyzing and understanding the positive side of globalization can enhance healthy interactions even on the internet.

Understanding the benefits of globalization and assessing its disadvantages, is imperative in knowing how to deal with its challenges. Makarova et al. (2019) did research to understand the role of globalization in cultural and social perspectives. According to Makarova et al. (2019), the globalization process is an essential aspect of human development and evolution and cannot be disregarded. Moreover, globalization has made people embrace diversity; where different cultures can interact freely. In contemporary society, people have learned to appreciate other people’s cultures. Workplaces also incorporate people from varied cultures, and their viewpoints are respected. Therefore, it is vital to analyze and understand globalization to enhance the social interactions of people with varied viewpoints.

Globalization awareness is essential, and everyone should embrace understanding what it entails and its advantages. One of the benefits of globalization is that one can access new cultures without limitations. For instance, it is possible to make orders for foods from other cultures; it is also easy to listen to different types of music, which may contain important messages. Thus, it strengthens conversations since people can interact across borders and share diverse information.

Another advantage of having globalization awareness is that if one has a business, it is easy to reach new markets through online advertisements. One can also access new talents for their company; many talented people may only be accessed through online platforms. Therefore, the presence of online platforms like social media enhances conversations. One does not have to travel to meet new talents, but every communication can be performed from their locations. In my life, globalization has helped me understand and appreciate diverse cultures. My colleagues are from different cultures, and I have not had conflicts in conversations due to cultural differences.

Achmad, W. (2021). Citizen and Netizen Society: The meaning of social change from a technology point of wiew. Jurnal Mantik , 5 (3), 1564-1570. Web.

Awoyemi, B. O., Omotayo, O. A., & Mpapalika, J. J. (2021). Globalization and cybercrimes: A review of forms and effects of cybercrime in Nigeria. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Modern Education, 7 (1), 18-25.

Makarova, E. A., Makarova, E. L., & Korsakova, T. V. (2019). The role of globalization and integration in interdisciplinary research, culture and education development. Journal of History Culture and Art Research , 8 (1), 111-127. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, November 18). Globalization: Benefits and Challenges. https://ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-benefits-and-challenges-research-paper-examples/

"Globalization: Benefits and Challenges." IvyPanda , 18 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-benefits-and-challenges-research-paper-examples/.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "Globalization: Benefits and Challenges." November 18, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-benefits-and-challenges-research-paper-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "Globalization: Benefits and Challenges." November 18, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-benefits-and-challenges-research-paper-examples/.

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• UAE Cybercrime Policy and Its Effects
• Cybercrime and Its Impact in the GCC Region
• Cybercrimes: Theories and Sociological Perspective
• The Globalization Impact on the European Region
• Globalization and Development of Contemporary Cities
• The Importance of the Rule of Law in Global Business
• Importance of Being a Global Citizen
• Globalization and Japanese Cultures

Cultural Competence: Definitions and Significance in a Globalized World

This essay about cultural fluency explores its importance in fostering understanding and empathy across diverse cultural landscapes. It highlights how cultural fluency, characterized by deep respect and open-mindedness, enhances communication, promotes inclusivity, and supports social justice. The text discusses the application of cultural fluency in various fields such as business, healthcare, education, and diplomacy, emphasizing its role in building harmonious and cooperative global relations.

How it works

In our contemporary era, the concept of cultural fluency emerges as a guiding light illuminating the path through our intricately interconnected global landscape. As the forces of globalization persist in erasing geographical boundaries and weaving intricate webs of cultural exchange, the imperative to navigate this tapestry of diversity with sensitivity and understanding becomes ever more pronounced. This discourse embarks on a journey to unravel the multifaceted layers of cultural fluency, revealing its nuanced definitions and profound significance in shaping our collective human experience.

Through a lens tinted with creativity, we embark on a quest to explore the essence of cultural fluency, probing its dimensions and unveiling its transformative potential in fostering harmony amidst diversity.

At its heart, cultural fluency transcends the superficial layers of cultural awareness, delving into the depths of empathy and comprehension. It embodies a profound capacity to engage authentically with individuals hailing from diverse cultural backgrounds, transcending linguistic and social barriers to forge genuine connections. Cultural fluency beckons individuals not only to acknowledge but to celebrate the kaleidoscope of human experience, fostering an environment where differences are not merely tolerated but embraced as catalysts for growth and enrichment.

Central to the ethos of cultural fluency is the notion of cultural humility—a humble acknowledgment of the limitations of one’s own cultural perspective. This humility serves as a guiding principle, urging individuals to approach cross-cultural interactions with an open heart and a willingness to learn from others. It fosters a spirit of mutual respect and collaboration, laying the groundwork for meaningful dialogue and exchange amidst the tapestry of cultural diversity.

In the grand tapestry of our globalized world, cultural fluency emerges as a cornerstone of harmonious coexistence for myriad reasons. Firstly, it serves as a potent catalyst for effective communication and collaboration across diverse settings, whether in the realms of business, academia, or everyday social interactions. By honing an understanding of cultural intricacies and nuances, individuals can navigate the maze of cross-cultural encounters with finesse and empathy, cultivating an environment where trust and understanding flourish.

Moreover, cultural fluency assumes a pivotal role in championing inclusive societies and fostering social justice. By dismantling stereotypes and challenging prejudices, individuals can pave the way for a world where every voice is not only heard but also valued. This inclusive ethos serves as a bulwark against discrimination and exclusion, nurturing a sense of belonging and solidarity among diverse communities.

Beyond its societal implications, cultural fluency yields tangible dividends in domains such as healthcare, education, and diplomacy. In healthcare, for instance, culturally fluent practitioners can deliver tailored and empathetic care by recognizing and respecting the unique cultural backgrounds of their patients. Similarly, in education, culturally fluent educators can create inclusive learning environments that resonate with students from diverse walks of life, nurturing their intellectual curiosity and personal growth.

In the realm of diplomacy, cultural fluency emerges as an indispensable tool for bridging chasms between nations and fostering international cooperation. Diplomats well-versed in the nuances of cultural diplomacy can navigate diplomatic waters with finesse, forging alliances grounded in mutual respect and understanding.

In conclusion, cultural fluency stands as a guiding star leading humanity towards a future where diversity is not merely tolerated but celebrated. By embracing cultural diversity and fostering meaningful cross-cultural connections, we can chart a course towards a world where empathy, understanding, and collaboration reign supreme. As we traverse the intricate mosaic of our globalized world, let us heed the call of cultural fluency—a call to transcend barriers, foster unity, and forge a brighter, more inclusive tomorrow.

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• 09 May 2024

Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

• Carissa Wong

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Rendering based on electron-microscope data, showing the positions of neurons in a fragment of the brain cortex. Neurons are coloured according to size. Credit: Google Research & Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University)

Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science 1 and is available online , reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other.

The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?”

Slivers of brain

The brain fragment was taken from a 45-year-old woman when she underwent surgery to treat her epilepsy. It came from the cortex, a part of the brain involved in learning, problem-solving and processing sensory signals. The sample was immersed in preservatives and stained with heavy metals to make the cells easier to see. Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues then cut the sample into around 5,000 slices — each just 34 nanometres thick — that could be imaged using electron microscopes.

Jain’s team then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D. “I remember this moment, going into the map and looking at one individual synapse from this woman’s brain, and then zooming out into these other millions of pixels,” says Jain. “It felt sort of spiritual.”

A single neuron (white) shown with 5,600 of the axons (blue) that connect to it. The synapses that make these connections are shown in green. Credit: Google Research & Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University)

When examining the model in detail, the researchers discovered unconventional neurons, including some that made up to 50 connections with each other. “In general, you would find a couple of connections at most between two neurons,” says Jain. Elsewhere, the model showed neurons with tendrils that formed knots around themselves. “Nobody had seen anything like this before,” Jain adds.

The team also found pairs of neurons that were near-perfect mirror images of each other. “We found two groups that would send their dendrites in two different directions, and sometimes there was a kind of mirror symmetry,” Jain says. It is unclear what role these features have in the brain.

Proofreaders needed

The map is so large that most of it has yet to be manually checked, and it could still contain errors created by the process of stitching so many images together. “Hundreds of cells have been ‘proofread’, but that’s obviously a few per cent of the 50,000 cells in there,” says Jain. He hopes that others will help to proofread parts of the map they are interested in. The team plans to produce similar maps of brain samples from other people — but a map of the entire brain is unlikely in the next few decades, he says.

“This paper is really the tour de force creation of a human cortex data set,” says Hongkui Zeng, director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. The vast amount of data that has been made freely accessible will “allow the community to look deeper into the micro-circuitry in the human cortex”, she adds.

Gaining a deeper understanding of how the cortex works could offer clues about how to treat some psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. “This map provides unprecedented details that can unveil new rules of neural connections and help to decipher the inner working of the human brain,” says Yongsoo Kim, a neuroscientist at Pennsylvania State University in Hershey.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01387-9

Shapson-Coe, A. et al. Science 384 , eadk4858 (2024).

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Google helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain

A small brain sample was sliced into 5,000 pieces, and machine learning helped stitch it back together.

• Cassandra Willyard archive page

A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. Although the map covers just a fraction of the organ—a whole brain is a million times larger—that piece contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million synapses. It is currently the highest-resolution picture of the human brain ever created.

To make a map this finely detailed, the team had to cut the tissue sample into 5,000 slices and scan them with a high-speed electron microscope. Then they used a machine-learning model to help electronically stitch the slices back together and label the features. The raw data set alone took up 1.4 petabytes. “It’s probably the most computer-intensive work in all of neuroscience,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the research. “There is a Herculean amount of work involved.”

Many other brain atlases exist, but most provide much lower-resolution data. At the nanoscale, researchers can trace the brain’s wiring one neuron at a time to the synapses, the places where they connect. “To really understand how the human brain works, how it processes information, how it stores memories, we will ultimately need a map that’s at that resolution,” says Viren Jain, a senior research scientist at Google and coauthor on the paper, published in Science on May 9 . The data set itself and a preprint version of this paper were released in 2021 .

Brain atlases come in many forms. Some reveal how the cells are organized. Others cover gene expression. This one focuses on connections between cells, a field called “connectomics.” The outermost layer of the brain contains roughly 16 billion neurons that link up with each other to form trillions of connections. A single neuron might receive information from hundreds or even thousands of other neurons and send information to a similar number. That makes tracing these connections an exceedingly complex task, even in just a small piece of the brain..  

To create this map, the team faced a number of hurdles. The first problem was finding a sample of brain tissue. The brain deteriorates quickly after death, so cadaver tissue doesn’t work. Instead, the team used a piece of tissue removed from a woman with epilepsy during brain surgery that was meant to help control her seizures.

Once the researchers had the sample, they had to carefully preserve it in resin so that it could be cut into slices, each about a thousandth the thickness of a human hair. Then they imaged the sections using a high-speed electron microscope designed specifically for this project. 

Next came the computational challenge. “You have all of these wires traversing everywhere in three dimensions, making all kinds of different connections,” Jain says. The team at Google used a machine-learning model to stitch the slices back together, align each one with the next, color-code the wiring, and find the connections. This is harder than it might seem. “If you make a single mistake, then all of the connections attached to that wire are now incorrect,” Jain says. 

“The ability to get this deep a reconstruction of any human brain sample is an important advance,” says Seth Ament, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. The map is “the closest to the  ground truth that we can get right now.” But he also cautions that it’s a single brain specimen taken from a single individual. 

The map, which is freely available at a web platform called Neuroglancer , is meant to be a resource other researchers can use to make their own discoveries. “Now anybody who’s interested in studying the human cortex in this level of detail can go into the data themselves. They can proofread certain structures to make sure everything is correct, and then publish their own findings,” Jain says. (The preprint has already been cited at least 136 times .) 

The team has already identified some surprises. For example, some of the long tendrils that carry signals from one neuron to the next formed “whorls,” spots where they twirled around themselves. Axons typically form a single synapse to transmit information to the next cell. The team identified single axons that formed repeated connections—in some cases, 50 separate synapses. Why that might be isn’t yet clear, but the strong bonds could help facilitate very quick or strong reactions to certain stimuli, Jain says. “It’s a very simple finding about the organization of the human cortex,” he says. But “we didn’t know this before because we didn’t have maps at this resolution.”

The data set was full of surprises, says Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University who helped lead the research. “There were just so many things in it that were incompatible with what you would read in a textbook.” The researchers may not have explanations for what they’re seeing, but they have plenty of new questions: “That’s the way science moves forward.” 

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