Essay: Summarise the main effects of globalisation and discuss to what extent they are beneficial to your subject area

INTRODUCTION

Doha is well known to people in every corner of the world not for its geographical location, but a WTO trade negotiation round. This round appears to resemble a dark-bright coloured picture. In the meeting, world economic leaders were discussing a number of economic issues related to "the global trade liberalisation". At the same time, hundreds of thousand protestors gathered outside in an attempt to send warning messages to those leaders. This picture proves a double-faced globalization. On the one hand, more foreign investment and technology transfer have provided developing countries with new jobs and skills for people, financing their economies and supporting local development. According to the World Bank, an extra trade of 145 billion pounds could be generated by 2015, helping to lift some developing countries out of poverty and end the food crisis (Guardian, 2008). On the other hand, workers in these countries have been exploited dramatically with more hours and bad working conditions, but the wealth has been brought back to multinational companies (John Pilger - BBC, 2006). It would appear that this liberal trade system has negative impacts mainly on working people in developing countries. Moreover, this has created a wider gap and inequality between the rich and poor, developed and developing countries. In this essay, I will discuss the costs that globalisation has brought to developing countries and also its effects on international relations.

THE OUTLINE OF MY ESSAY
My essay would be divided into 3 main parts as follows:

1. INTRODUCTION (as above)

2. COSTS OF GLOBALISATION FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Before I start my argument, I will give some ideas on what globalisation is.

P1: Developing countries have been requested to open their markets more, so that putting their domestic industries under threat.
- Newly-established domestic industries are facing huge foreign competitors;
- Products are less competitive in price, quality, post-sale service…
- Domestic companies might be forced to merge into foreign companies; therefore, they are losing domestic markets.

P2: The countries may become a dumping ground for out-of-date and dirty technologies.
- Due to the low standard of production, they have to accept these technologies;
- These technologies are parts of package aids or investment projects;
- Being imported suspiciously.

P3: Multi-nationals have considered developing countries as lucrative baits to exploit
- Low wages;
- More initial preferential treatment;
- Easy to exploit workers by longer hours and bad working conditions, even being maltreated.
- Exhausting their natural resources.

P4: Flows of capital and technologies have been with conditions:
- Forced imports of well-paid skilled labours and specialist; even loans are made with assigned project contractors.
- To be squeezed more concessions in their policies and regulations;
- Losing their “sovereignty” inside their land

P5: Many social problems have been rising:
- Increasing unemployed farmers;
- Bad cultural habits have been borrowed, undermining the traditional culture.
- Giving a rise to prostitutions, transmitted diseases, and child workers.

P6: Relationship between loans receiving countries and lending countries has changed
The nature of multi-lateral fora is negotiating and compromising or in another word, “give and take” rules, so loans receiving countries are supporters of landing countries for granted; E.g: If India or Japan to be a UN Security Council permanent member, Japan may have been chosen by many developing countries in Asia-Pacific.

3. CONCLUSION
In the last part, I will present some conclusions and then go on to make some recommendations for further study on the subject after having done this research on globalization.