Globalization

Throughout history, the world has seen horrible things such as poverty, discrimination, and war. However, globalization can help counter these. Many people say globalization only benefits the rich, but that's simply not true. Globalization has been one of the largest factors of decreasing poverty rates. Globalization has been decreasing poverty since its early days. For example, as European countries began trading with other countries in the Middle Ages, a new middle class of merchants formed and feudalism began to die out. (1) The world has also seen global poverty rates decrease dramatically in the past few decades. (2) Asian countries which were in poverty after World War II, were among the countries that have benefited the most from globalization. The first was Japan who had just been devastated after several American bombing raids. Japan began reestablishing its industries which produced things such as textiles and toys to be exported to wealthier countries (such as the United States). (3) Japan then continued its economic growth as it began relying less on exporting light manufacturing goods as mentioned above and more on products such as consumer electronics and ships. (3) The reason Japan had to begin growing its economy by exports to meet global demand was because the majority of Japanese people were in poverty so they were unable to purchase goods to help grow the Japanese economy. (3) Therefore, it is unreasonable to assume Japan would be the 3rd largest economy it is today without globalization. However, Japan is not the only example of this. Many East Asian economies went through the same process decades after Japan (3), four of the strongest being the "Four Asian Tigers", South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. (4) However, the most well known example is China. After World War II, China had little manufacturing and virtually no services. China attempted central planning, but as they shifted to a more free market approach and received foreign investment and began exporting manufactured goods, their economy boomed. (5 & 6) In fact, today China is now beginning to end its manufacturing dependence and shift to more of a service economy like countries like the US. (7) Finally, wealth gaps have shrunk in globalized developing countries and overall poverty too as shown in IMF studies. (8) People across the world are often discriminated because of things such as race and national origin. (9) However, studies have shown the more people are surrounded by people of different races and ethnicities the more tolerant they will be. (10) Going off the definition of globalization, globalization sees "interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations". Therefore, racism should go into decline due to greater interaction between people of different backgrounds. Also, many wars throughout history have been started due to discrimination or differing beliefs (e.g. the Crusades). Therefore, with less discrimination in the world it is reasonable to expect there will be less wars. In fact, most of the wars that have been fought in the past few years haven't even been between foreign nations, but foreign nations and terror groups, (11) yet historically the majority of wars were fought between two or more countries, kingdoms, empires ,etc. (12) This is because countries that trade don't want to ruin a good trading relationship. (13) Overall, globalization is good. 1-http://www.brown.edu... 2-http://www.economist.com... 3-http://www.brookings.edu... 4-http://oecdinsights.org... 5-http://en.wikipedia.org... 6-http://www.cato.org... 7-http://money.cnn.com... 8-http://www.imf.org... 9-http://www.dragndropbuilder.com... 10-http://www.dailymail.co.uk... 11-http://en.wikipedia.org... 12-http://en.wikipedia.org... 13-http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu...