Globalisation and Economic Growth: A Historical Perspective

This paper reviews the historical evidence on the relationship between globalisation and economic growth. Divergence in the growth of income and industrialisation in the twentieth century is documented but it is also noted that international income inequality appears to have decreased since about 1870 and that long-run trends in the Human Development Index are much less pessimistic about the experience of developing countries. It is argued that trade liberalisation has been good for growth on average but that successful capital liberalisation requires high institutional quality and that the developmental state may have an important role to play in the early stages of development. The recent claim by Robert Lucas that the 21st century will see a massive reduction in income inequality across countries in a globalised world economy is sceptically discussed in the context of empirical evidence that bad institutions are often persistent and that geography is still a major factor in explaining international income differences.     

Globalisation and Corruption,Revisited

This paper presents new empirical evidence on the determinants of corruption, focussing on the role of globalisation and inequality. The estimates for a panel of 102 countries over the period 1995–2005 point to three main results: (i) Detection technologies, reflected in a high level of development, human capital and political rights reduce corruption, whereas natural resource rents increase corruption; (ii) Globalisation (in terms of both trade and financial openness) has a negative effect on corruption, which is more pronounced in developing countries; (iii) Inequality increases corruption, and once the role of inequality is accounted for, the impact of globalisation on corruption is halved. In line with recent theory, this suggests that globalisation – besides reducing corruption through enhanced competition – affects corruption also by reducing inequality.     

Globalisation,Growth and Convergence

This paper, devoted to the study of globalisation, analyses two distinct but closely related issues: First, it aims at evaluating disparities in the degree of globalisation observed in a sample of 101 countries over the period 1970–2005. Second, the paper tries to shed some light to the much debated issue of whether globalisation affects economic growth and, in so doing, whether convergence in globalisation brings about convergence in per capita income. The results obtained are both encouraging: on the one side, as it is shown that there has been a clear process of globalisation convergence; on the other, the paper concludes that globalisation has been one of the main drivers of economic growth, thus fostering convergence in per capita income.     

The Consequences of Globalisation: India's Software Industry and Cross‐border Labour Mobility1

The Indian software industry is a prime example of globalisation. The industry has been characterised by large cross‐border mobility of its skilled labour force. Using a unique survey of Indian software firms, our paper quantifies the extent and impact of mobility on firm behaviour and performance. Cross‐border labour mobility in the paper refers to both temporary and permanent labour flows by Indian software professionals. The picture that emerges is of a highly mobile world in which temporary mobility has been an important characteristic of the industry. A significant number of workers have work experience abroad in a developed country. Moreover, the share of skilled workers with such experience has been positively associated with the incidence of skilled migration from the firm. This suggests network effects are at work. In terms of the impact on performance – as measured by the change in turnover per worker and the change in the employment size of the firm – the paper finds little evidence of a robust adverse effect. Further, the evidence suggests that there have been important external effects at work, as through changes in the willingness of workers to acquire skills, as well as through increased provision of educational services. These have further abated the risk of a brain drain. However, the software industry may be rather different from other industries. Our results need to be interpreted as the outcome of a particular case of skilled migration and not one necessarily representative of all types of skilled migration and source sectors.     

Governance and Globalisation

Unlike the large literature on ‘democracy and trade’, there is a much smaller literature on the effect of the level of democracy in a nation on the level of its foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow. These few studies reveal mixed empirical results, and surprisingly only one study has examined bilateral FDI flows. Moreover, few of these studies use multiple governance indicators separating the ‘pluralism’ effect of democratic institutions from the ‘good governance’ effect, there are no studies on democratic institutions’ various effects on the level of FDI relative to trade, and there are no studies of democratic institutions’ various effects on the selection of countries into FDI. We focus on three contributions. First, we examine the simultaneous effects of the World Bank's (six) Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGIs) – which allow separating the effects of pluralism from those of five other good governance measures – on bilateral trade, FDI and FDI relative to trade using state‐of‐the‐art gravity specifications. Second, we find strong evidence that – after accounting for host governments’ effectiveness in various roles of good governance – a higher level of pluralism as measured by the WGIs’ Voice and Accountability Index reduces trade levels, likely by increasing the ‘voice’ of more protectionist less‐skilled workers, but not FDI levels. Moreover, we find qualitatively different effects of other WGIs – such as political stability – on trade versus FDI flows. Third, we account for firm heterogeneity alongside a large number of zeros in bilateral FDI flows using recent advances in gravity modelling. We distinguish between the (country) intensive and extensive margins and show that pluralism affects FDI inflows negatively at the intensive margin, but positively at the extensive margin.     

Globalisation and Obesity

The WHO has recently announced the global obesity epidemic. An economic model is developed in which globalisation factors generate health externalities and contribute to global obesity growth. The unbalanced panel data set contains the information for 79 countries over the period 1986–2008. Fixed‐effects panel data estimation and quantile regression analysis were used to analyse the data. The fixed‐effects panel model results indicate that the impact of trade openness and the globalisation social index (GSI) on global obesity rates is positive and significant, which is consistent with prior expectations, while surprisingly the foreign direct investments (FDI) has no impact on global obesity. While these results are interesting, they are hiding the effect of globalisation processes across the conditional distribution of the obesity variable. The use of quantile regression uncovered that the impact of the FDI and the GSI on low and average quantiles (low and average obesity rates in our sample) is positive and significant, while high quantiles are not affected. Since low and average quantiles (low and average obesity rates) are representative of the less‐ and medium‐developed countries, this result implies that social globalisation and FDI adversely impact obesity in less‐to‐medium developed countries. Trade openness generally has no impact on changes in obesity rates across quantiles.     

China and Globalisation

Since the initiation of economic reforms in 1978 China has become one of the world’s fastest growing economies and has emerged as a global economic and trade power. What are the implications for the world economy, in particular for the distribution of income and wealth? How will China contribute to shaping not only the globalised world economy but also the institutions and policies of global governance?The authors wish to thank the participants of the international seminar in Shanghai on 18-20 March 2005 for their valuable contributions, which have been incorporated into this paper.     

Labour Practice,Decent Work and Human Rights Performance and Reporting: The Impact of Women Managers

Journal of Business Ethics - This paper uses a sample of 1243 international firms for the period 2013–2017 to analyse the effect that a greater presence of women in management teams has on...     

Heterogeneous Firms,Globalisation and the Distance Puzzle

Despite the strong pace of globalisation, the distance effect on trade is persistent or even growing over time (Disdier and Head, 2008). To solve this distance puzzle, we use the recently developed gravity equation estimator from Helpman et al. (2008) (HMR henceforth). Using three different data sets, we find that the distance coefficient increases over time when ordinary least squares (OLS) is used, while the non‐linear estimation of HMR leads to a decline in the distance coefficient over time. The distance puzzle, thus, arises from a growing bias of OLS estimates. The latter is explained by an increase in the importance of the bias from omitting the number of heterogeneous exporting firms relative to the bias from omitting zero trade flows. Furthermore, we show that including zero trade flows cannot solve the distance puzzle when using HMR. The HMR estimates are strongly correlated with the time pattern in freight costs reported by Hummels (2007).     

WTO体制下劳工权益保护的未来之路——以WTO争端解决机制为视角

当今国际社会,发达国家通过多种渠道将劳工权益保护的要求和自由贸易相结合。尽管WTO本身对是否将劳工权益保护问题纳入到WTO贸易协议中持不积极的立场,但是与劳工权益保护相关的贸易争端却极可能诉诸于WTO。从欧共体诉美国"301条款"案、印度诉欧共体普惠制案以及美国对中国彩电采取反倾销措施案中,都可以看到涉及劳工权益保护的贸易争端在WTO发生的可能。于此,WTO必须解决对此类案件的管辖权以及法律适用的问题。发展中国家应当警惕此类问题的发生,并利用WTO的相关规定,维护自身的权益。     

Globalisation,trade, and growth: A macroeconomic perspective

On the basis of economic theory, what effects can globalisation be expected to have on trade and growth? Does the empirical evidence support this? What developments will the next phase of globalisation bring?     

市场化条件下的妇女就业及其劳动权益保护——对上海非公有制企业女工的调查

根据复旦大学人口研究所2002年的调查资料,介绍上海市非公有制企业女工的工资报酬、她们所享有的一般劳动权益和特殊劳动保护权益.在市场化条件下,现有的法律和法规对妇女劳动权益的保护作用呈现减弱的趋势.呼吁全社会在关心妇女就业的同时,必须以极大的热情关注妇女劳动权益的保护.     

Globalisation,inequality and redistribution: Theory and evidence

This paper constructs a simple theoretical model to study the implications of globalisation for inequality and redistribution. It shows that when globalisation increases inequality, a policymaker interested in maximising the sum of welfares of all agents increases redistribution. Empirically, the paper examines the effects of globalisation on inequality and redistribution in a panel data set of 140 countries for the period from 1970 to 2012. It finds that both inequality and redistribution have been increasing with globalisation. The results are robust to the inclusion of many different controls and the exclusion of outliers.     

市场化条件下的妇女就业及其劳动权益保护--对上海非公有制企业女工的调查

根据复旦大学人口研究所2002年的调查资料,介绍上海市非公有制企业女工的工资报酬、她们所享有的一般劳动权益和特殊劳动保护权益.在市场化条件下,现有的法律和法规对妇女劳动权益的保护作用呈现减弱的趋势.呼吁全社会在关心妇女就业的同时,必须以极大的热情关注妇女劳动权益的保护.     

Globalisation and its policy repercussions

The increasing cross-border flows of information, trade, capital and technology have profoundly changed the macroeconomic fabric of nations. In the emergent borderless world macroeconomic theories and policy-making confront new challenges. This paper identifies and evaluates some of these challenges.