Economic Globalisation and the Environment Entry prepared for the Internet Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics

• Enlarging complexity of global production and consumption chains (internationalisation of production), connecting economic agents and nodes located in very distant places, whose overall control is normally in the hands of transnational corporations. This constitutes a radical shift in relation to the traditional economic paradigm that conceived production essentially as an endogenous and national process. • Increasing market concentration due to mergers and fusions of large transnational corporations in several sectors (UNCTAD, 2000). • Increasing relative size of trade (in relation to GDP) and a general dismounting of trade barriers in almost all regions of the world. • At least until some few years ago, enlarging foreign direct investments between developed countries and from industrialized to developing countries, accompanied by a generalized liberalization of investment regimes. • A considerably much larger scale of global financial flows in comparison to investments in the “real” economy, which has been coined as “casino” capitalism. • Although statistics are not yet systematically produced all around the world, there is some evidence suggesting a rising share of intra-firm trade to total trade at the global level (OECD, 2002; Zeile, 1997). • Appearance of significant cases of financial “mega-frauds” inside transnational corporations (Enron, Parmalat, WorldCom, Aldelphia, Tyco, Imclone, Qwest, Xerox ,etc.) with worldwide impacts.