The No-Growth Imperative by Zovanyi Gabor;

Author:Zovanyi, Gabor; [Gabor Zovanyi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1097821
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

However, the claimed benefits of economic globalization have not gone uncontested.

Critics of economic globalization find fault with many of the touted benefits presumed to flow from the ongoing spread of free-market capitalism. With respect to the claim that economic globalization will reduce poverty worldwide, they point to statistics indicating that it has actually increased unemployment and thereby exacerbated poverty across the globe.59 In a competitive global marketplace, transnational corporations are driven to realize greater production efficiencies, including reductions in labor inputs per unit of output. Critics point out that “[s]pecialization inevitably leads to chronic unemployment and to lower wages.”60 In order to compete effectively, corporations engage in “downsizing, streamlining, and automating their operations, using the most advanced technologies to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs.”61 The result ends up being “jobless economic growth.”62 Globally, “transnational companies build state-of-the-art, high-tech production facilities, and shed millions of low-wage laborers who can no longer compete with the cost efficiency, quality control, and speed of delivery achieved by automated manufacturing.”63 Jobs are being lost in “all three key employment sectors— agriculture, manufacturing, and services—[because] machines are quickly replacing human labor.”64 In terms of another economic shortcoming associated with globalization, critics point to growing income and wealth disparities nationally and globally associated with the spread of free-market capitalism. To illustrate the point, the income gap between the bottom 20 percent and the top 20 percent of the world’s population has more than doubled since 1950, growing from 30 times in 1950 to more than 60 times as large today.65

In terms of other economic drawbacks for nation states, critics point to threats associated with the homogenization of global culture.66 They point out that the push for standardization of markets within the Western conceptual framework serves to diminish the viability of traditional local cultures and tastes. Threats to local cultures and the traditional communities from which they spring are of concern, since any losses of cultural diversity are believed to impoverish the earth. This viewpoint draws on the idea propounded by environmentalists that biological diversity is a precious global resource worthy of protection because it ensures ecosystem resilience beneficial to humans and all of life. In a similar vein, loss of cultural diversity is seen as a degradation of world culture, which also increases vulnerability and endangers humanity. Critics also argue that economic globalization serves to undermine national economic, health, safety, and environmental standards. All such standards come to be seen as trade barriers that harm a county’s competitive standing in a free-trade world. “Wage raises, environmental protection, national health insurance, and liability lawsuits—anything that raises the cost of production and makes a corporation less competitive—threatens [a country’s] economy.”67 As summed up by one critic, “free international trade encourages industries to shift their production activities to the countries that have the lowest standards of cost internalization.”68 “In effect, unrestricted trade imposes lower standards.”69 In what is seen as a “race to the bottom,” transnational corporations “are free to scour the globe and establish themselves wherever labor is

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