Globalization and Inequality

Abstract

The United Nations' 2005 Report on the World Social Situation: The Inequality Predicament opens with the claim that “globalization has helped to accentuate trends that show the wealthiest 20 per cent of the planet accounting for 86 per cent of all private consumption and the poorest accounting for just above 1 per cent”; the first area demanding “urgent attention” in the report is “worldwide asymmetries deriving from globalization” (United Nations 2005: 6, 9). On the other hand, albeit writing about a previous wave of globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Williamson (1997: 405) concluded that “globalization was the critical factor promoting economic convergence” not only between nations, but within nations as well. These two examples illustrate deep disagreements about the impact of globalization on inequality.