Globalization, Inequality, and Poverty: an Overview

Economic and cultural globalization and the attendant concerns for poverty and inequality have captured public imagination and become a focus of international discussion in recent years in a way few other topics (except for international terrorism) have. The events around the theme often have their own drama and also a touch of irony. Just to take an example from two reports in the newspaper on the same day (The New York Times, January 30) at the beginning of 2005: at the fifth annual World Social Forum at Porto Alegre, Brazil---held as a counterfoil to the gathering of the capitalist globalistas at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland---the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the hero of the working class, was booed for ‘selling out’ to global capital; shortly thereafter he flew to the Forum at Davos, where around the same time a Hollywood actress, Sharon Stone, deployed her star power in a highly globalized business to rally attending corporate magnates at a poverty seminar to pledge just in five minutes $1 million to fight malaria in Tanzania.