The growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through the increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services and of international capital flows, and also through the more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology . To a large extent, because governments around the world have chosen, consciously and deliberately, to remove barriers around their markets, which have impeded trade and international investment. Sometimes they have acted together, notably through agreements in the GATT to liberalise world trade. Sometimes, they have gone it alone - as Britain did when it abolished exchange controls in the early 1980s and as many Asian developing countries have done in liberalising their trade and investment regimes. There is, therefore, no intrinsic inevitability to globalisation.
Governments can accept it, or reject it.
Some have done just that, by continuing to insulate their economies from global markets and international competition. But look at the countries which have pursued that logic most tenaciously. Among the obvious examples are Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya. And just look at the results. Industrial backwardness, abject penury and even mass famine.