Globalizacion

KEY TEXT: GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY. JOHN RAVENHILL. CHAPTER 11: GLOBALIZATION, POVERTY AND INEQUALITY.
This chapter presents some doubts about the reality of falls in world poverty and incomeinequality that liberal’s arguments suggest. “It concludes by asking whether we should be concerned about rising inequality, and how we might analyze the political economy of statistics.”
For a start itshows through graphics that substantial regional variation has occurred in economic growth in the last two decades and that African and many central and east european have performed really poorly whileeast asia´s share of world income has risen rapidly. It also a underline that the world bank data could be underestimating the number of people living in poverty because their measures contains alarge margin of error benefiting the liberal´s argument.
Trough several pages the author refutes the Liberal´s argument by cases of study, graphics, and by showing different ways to measure inequalityand world´s poverty level. He claims that the impact that globalization has had on inequality depends on the measure used and that a fall in inequality between countries is due entirely to rapideconomic growth in china, while inequality between this country and India has increased substantially in recent years. Also he affirms that large increases on inequality have occurred in allEnglish-Speaking industrialized economies.
Another important fact that the author describes is that “the failure of globalization to reduce global poverty is not because of a lack of industrialization in developingcountries; rather it is because there is a cluster of higher value-added activities in the high-wage zone of the world economy; increasing competition and decreasing returns in manufacturing in lessdeveloped economies”.
After exposing the neo-liberal argument the liberal one, the author points out at the end of the chapter, that if the trends in poverty and inequality really are in the wrong…