In this “age of globalization,” countless studies offer confl icting conclusions about overall poverty rates and income inequality worldwide. All observers agree that the rapid integration of international economies is one of the dominant experiences of the post–Cold War world. Many critics have assailed globalization as a form of extreme capitalism that is leaving the world’s poor behind. At a...

Ilona Kickbusch’s thought provoking editorial is criticized in this commentary, partly because she fails to refer to previous critical work on the global conditions and policies that sustain inequality, poverty, poor health and damage to the biosphere and, as a result, she misreads global power and elides consideration of the fundamental historical structures of political and material power tha...

Global refers to worldwide in scope and substance and de-emphasizes the concept of nation, but without negating it. Globalization, in general, is the flow of technology, knowledge, people, values, ideas, capital, goods, and services across national borders, and affects each country in a different way due to the nation’s individual history, traditions, culture, and priorities (Knight 2004). Econ...

 This essay challenges claims by economists and management scholars that ‘offshoring’ is simply another form of trade with mutual benefits. I argue that reducing wages through offshoring leads to wealth creation for shareholders but not necessarily for countries and employees, and that many displaced workers have difficulty ‘trading up’ to higher skilled jobs. Offshoring is a new phenom...

This paper examines the recent growth of the opium economy in North Eastern Afghanistan. A detailed analysis of one village in Badakshan Province reveals profound changes in the local economy and social institutions. The paper describes two major shifts in the local economy (1) the switch from wheat to poppy cultivation (2) the shift from the livestock trade to the opium trade. It then examines...