Globalization
세계화
The process by which the economies, markets, societies and cultures of different countries become more interdependent and integrated, driven by lower barriers to trade, the liberalisation of capital movements and advances in transport and information technology. Economic globalization refers to the widespread movement of goods, capital, services, technology and information across borders. Supporters point to growth and social development; critics point to inequality, environmental damage and cultural assimilation. In South Korea the word (segyehwa) was also the slogan of the Kim Young-sam government's opening policy of 1995.
In depth
The word globalization appeared in English as early as the 1930s but without a clear meaning. The French economist François Perroux used a similar concept in the early 1960s, and in the mid-1980s Theodore Levitt popularised the term among business audiences; by the 1990s it was in common use for the growing international connectivity of the post-Cold War world. The phenomenon is older. In 1848 Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that "the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country". Large-scale globalization began with the transport revolution in the 1820s, and nineteenth-century globalization was decisively shaped by imperialism and colonialism.
After the Second World War the Bretton Woods Conference laid down the framework for international money, trade and finance, and under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor the World Trade Organization (WTO) countries cut trade barriers and opened their current and capital accounts. Between 1990 and 2010 globalization advanced rapidly, driven by the information and communication revolution, trade liberalisation and the shift of manufacturing to emerging economies, particularly China. Economic globalization comprises the globalization of production, finance, markets, technology, corporations and people, and the boom since the 1990s rested largely on developed economies integrating with developing countries through foreign direct investment.
In South Korea "globalization" (segyehwa) was also a policy slogan. The Kim Young-sam government concluded the Uruguay Round in 1993, launched a Globalisation Promotion Committee in January 1995 to raise the competitiveness of lagging sectors, and joined the WTO in 1995 and the OECD in 1996; English Wikipedia describes segyehwa as his internationalisation policy. The opening of financial and capital markets led to a surge of short-term foreign debt, and after the 1997 currency crisis the speed and sequence of this opening became a major controversy.
Assessments of globalization diverge. Supporters point to growth and poverty reduction: by one calculation per capita growth in the developing countries that globalised after 1980 rose from 1.4 percent a year in the 1960s to 5.0 percent in the 1990s. The economist Dani Rodrik pointed to the tensions between the global market and social stability in Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (1997) and in 2000 coined the "political trilemma of the world economy". Joseph Stiglitz criticised the IMF for forcing premature capital market liberalisation. In the late 1990s an anti-globalization movement, also called the movement against neoliberal globalization, rose against multinational corporations and deregulated financial markets and staged mass protests in Seattle, Genoa and elsewhere. William I. Robinson, criticising world-systems theory, argued that a new and distinct form of globalization that began in the 1980s fragments production across national borders.