WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT GLOBALIZATION? IS THERE REALLY NO ALTERNATIVE?
GOOD OR BAD? NEGATIVES OF GLOBALIZATION
The influx of foreign goods and services on hapless developing countries especially in the Caribbean region has resulted in an increase in job losses due to small business owners inability to compete on the world stage. MNC's have eroded the market in the borderless process of trade masked as 'development'.
WINNERS AND LOSERS
Farmers are not given their just dues for fresh milk supplied to a major foreign owned firm operating in Trinidad. We have to take what we get. In many instances profits earned by these companies are transferred to their main headquarters without being used for any local development. But then again globalization has allowed us to connect with the rest of the world and allows for exchanges of cultures,technology has eliminated barriers and allowed for increases in knowledge. We have acquired new taste that would have been alien to us. The world can now proceed at a faster pace. Globalization is a capitalist paradise. In it's wake large corporations rise even higher and smaller ones are eliminated.
According to Richard Bernal ' the pace, extent and character of globalization differ among the economic, political and social. It is a process in which barriers are being increasingly eroded and or eliminated.
There were Caribbean development models that embraced currently favoured economic views in regard to national planning and industrialization. A favoured model came from one of the region's favourite sons, Nobel Laureate Sir Arthur Lewis. Puerto Rican development took its great step forward with Operation Bootstrap and the attempt to attract footloose industries. "industry by invitation" was the more derogatory label applied by radical economists at the UWI (the New World Group) to efforts encouraging international corporate penetration. Puerto Rico provided a regional showcase for this model. T&T attempted a variant on this industrialization model. Trinidad was blessed with oil and gas resources, both on and offshore, and so the politicians spent thoughtlessly. Its own "alternative path' was labelled 'state capitalism' or what Prime Minister Eric Williams termed a 'middle path for development' (Conway 1984; Sandoval 1983).
ReplyDeleteC. Samuel