Also dealt with, in this Chapter, is development imbalances, obstacles to direct investments, reduced development assistance, and the present international trade order. The report elaborates on the general policies adopted with the purpose of promoting trade exchange and of averting reliance on staple commodity exports. In Chapter Three, the report reviews the experiments of East Asian countries with special emphasis placed on national and regional policies set to upgrade businesses and to raise competitiveness. In this part of the report, the focus is on the means to promoting small and medium enterprises. The report concludes that with ideological barriers down, concord has replaced confrontation in international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.
Globalization can be a powerful motor either for integration or for marginalization.
For the first time in history, billions of men and women in countries with rapidly growing economies can be brought into the mainstream of active interaction with the global economy while hundreds of millions of other people stand threatened to be run over by this same powerful motor. In the limbo of time between past and present, between old and new, symptoms of all kinds of manias may come to surface. Fear and insecurity may coexist side by side along with hope and great expectations. A crisis in international relations may be the motive for comprehensive reforms. Things have changed but not at all as people generations away would have preferred to change them.