Arthur Néron-Bancel

The overarching objective of the following paper is an examination into whether globalization serves as a positive force for sustainable social and economic development. Our focus is on highlighting the importance of politics (power structures, ideologies) in shaping the direction and ultimate outcomes of what otherwise largely constitutes a broad wave of technological change. We look at how these political factors manifest themselves through an influence over both policy formulation and policy/results evaluation.

 

In order to illustrate our argument, we adopt a political economy approach to the vast and multi-faceted topic of globalization, and conduct an analysis that, while remaining schematic given the scope of this paper, looks at how the rise of the ‘Washington consensus’ during the early 1990s influenced a specific dimension of economic globalization - the integration of developing countries into the international system. We see how the exogenous forces of globalization are re-formulated as they are processed through the prism of socio-political order, harnessed and exploited by particular interest groups as tools to either protect an existing status quo or further a given ideological transformational agenda.

 

 

Professor: Ian Goldin

Date: December 2012

Words: 5,100