Economic globalization defined loosely is the reliance of one country’s production, trade, and financial transactions on other country’s production, trade and financial transactions. Summed up more tightly, factors attributing to the image of one unified, global market. Economic globalization isn’t new as a trend, occurring in the earliest times as foreign trade, but has become more and more influential in the world within the past twenty years.
While the opinion on globalization shifts between positive and negative depending on the individual, one major consequence of the movement towards a uniform international market is a uniform financial class system. For Americans, this means a dissipating middle class. With outsourcing becoming more frequent, manufacturing jobs that once supported the mid range of the American class system are moving overseas. Service jobs are taking the lead as America’s main industry but fail to pay as much as their manufacturing counterparts. Half of Americans now make $500 or less within a week, an amount that after inflation is taken into account is less substantial than what Americans made in the 1970’s.
But all is not negative. Though some third world countries are struggling still to keep up, particularly ones that are agricultural based without exports, other underdeveloped parts of the world have been able to achieve economic growth and internal development at a rate five times faster than countries in the past due to economic globalization. China has especially been able to take advantage of this. While much of China still lies below the poverty line, China’s GDP (gross domestic product) has grown from 299.3 in 1970 to 3,422.9 in 2000. Such growth is attributed to not only its ability to produce but export to multiple nations as well. Other countries benefiting include India, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Jordan, Lithuania, Vietnam, Tunisia, Latvia, and Romania.