Impacto da globalização no sistema comercial moderno

IMPACTO DA GLOBALIZAÇÃO NO SISTEMA DE COMÉRCIO MODERNO.
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Os efeitos da globalização no comércio agrícola mundial, 1960 & # x02018; 2050.
A recente globalização caracterizou-se por um declínio nos custos do comércio transfronteiriço de fazendas e outros produtos. Ele foi impulsionado principalmente pela revolução da tecnologia da informação e da comunicação e, no caso dos produtos agrícolas # x02018, por reduções nas distorções governamentais da produção agrícola, do consumo e do comércio. Ambos impulsaram o crescimento econômico e reduziram a pobreza globalmente, especialmente na Ásia. O primeiro, mas talvez o segundo desses drivers continuem nas próximas décadas. Os preços mundiais dos alimentos dependerão também de se (e, em caso afirmativo, de quanto) o crescimento da produtividade agrícola continua a superar o crescimento da demanda e até que ponto as dietas nas economias emergentes se movem para o gado e os produtos hortícolas à custa de produtos básicos. A demanda, por sua vez, será impulsionada não só pelo crescimento da população e do rendimento, mas também pelos preços do petróleo bruto se permanecerem nos níveis historicamente elevados, uma vez que isso afetará a demanda de biocombustíveis. As políticas e adaptações da mitigação da mudança climática, a evolução do mercado de água e os padrões de acesso ao mercado, particularmente para alimentos transgênicos, irão aumentar as incertezas futuras de produção, preço e comércio.
1. O problema.
Uma das características mais marcantes do desenvolvimento econômico é o declínio relativo no setor agrícola nas economias em crescimento. Também típico para países com densidade populacional acima da média é um declínio em sua vantagem comparativa agrícola à medida que a acumulação de capital e a industrialização prosseguem. Um boom liderado por exportações em outro setor, ou grandes influxos prolongados de ajuda externa, também enfraquecem a competitividade internacional do setor agrícola de um país. As mudanças nos padrões de consumo (o lento crescimento no consumo de produtos agrícolas e, nos países de renda média, o afastamento dos grãos e outros produtos básicos e para os produtos pecuários e hortícolas) também alteram a situação comercial líquida dos países. No entanto, se isso leva a um declínio ou aumento da autonomia alimentar total e das exportações líquidas de produtos agrícolas totais depende também do crescimento da produtividade na agricultura em relação à produção não agrícola (Anderson 1987) e nas tendências da assistência governamental aos agricultores em relação aos produtores de outros bens comercializáveis. No passado, as políticas de distorção de preços mudaram gradualmente de desfavorações para favorecer a agricultura em relação a outros setores comercializáveis ​​à medida que crescem os rendimentos per capita (Anderson 2009); globalmente, o crescimento da produtividade foi mais rápido no setor agrícola do que em outros setores (Martin & # x00026; Mitra 2001).
Uma maior influência no comércio agrícola foi a aceleração da globalização ao longo do último quarto de século. Isso se caracterizou por um rápido declínio nos custos do comércio transfronteiriço de produtos agrícolas e outros, impulsionado pelo declínio nos custos de transporte de produtos volumosos e perecíveis de longas distâncias, a revolução das tecnologias da informação e comunicação (TIC) e as principais reduções nos distorções governamentais do comércio agrícola. Juntos, esses desenvolvimentos impulsionaram o crescimento econômico e reduziram a pobreza extrema globalmente e, no processo, alteraram a produção agrícola global, o consumo e, portanto, os padrões de comércio.
Este artigo examina primeiro os principais impulsionadores dos desenvolvimentos acima nas últimas quatro ou cinco décadas e, em seguida, desenhe essa análise e eventos recentes para sugerir prováveis ​​drivers de & # x02018; e incertezas associadas a & # x02018; tendências mundiais de alimentos e outras tendências comerciais sobre nas próximas quatro décadas.
2. Principais fatores de mudança desde 1960.
A primeira parte desta seção resume as mudanças estruturais nos mercados agrícolas globais e no comércio desde a década de 1960. A segunda parte descreve um conjunto de drivers, nomeadamente mudanças tecnológicas rápidas, incluindo aquelas que reduziram os custos de comércio de produtos agrícolas durante o último quarto de século. A terceira parte resume as reformas das políticas agrícolas e comerciais desde a década de 1980 e os resultados da modelagem em toda a economia que sugerem que essas reformas reduziram a metade os efeitos globais de redução do comércio e do bem-estar das políticas que distorcem os preços.
(a) Mudanças estruturais nos mercados agrícolas globais.
Uma das características mais marcantes do desenvolvimento econômico é o declínio relativo do setor agrícola nas economias em crescimento. Também é típico para os países com uma densidade de população razoavelmente alta um declínio na sua vantagem comparativa agrícola à medida que a industrialização prossegue (ou quando outro setor, como mineração, fabricação ou serviços, possui um boom liderado pelas exportações ou há uma entrada sustentada de ajuda externa). Existe uma ampla dispersão em todas as regiões do mundo na importância da agricultura no PIB nacional e no emprego, nas dotações de terras aráveis ​​e de água doce, bem como capital por trabalhador, na disponibilidade de tecnologias agrícolas e não agrícolas modernas que levam em conta dos preços dos fatores relativos e, portanto, na vantagem comparativa agrícola. Os indicadores apropriados da vantagem comparativa agrícola são difíceis de montar, porque as políticas governamentais que distorcem os mercados de alimentos são tão abrangentes e devido à variedade de tecnologias disponibilizadas através de investimentos adaptativos de pesquisa e desenvolvimento (R & # x00026; D) para atender diferentes escassez de fatores relativos ( Hayami & # x00026; Ruttan 1985; Alston et al. 2009 a, b). Assim, a parcela das exportações nacionais do setor em relação à média global, ou mesmo as exportações líquidas como proporção de exportações mais as importações de produtos agrícolas primários (ambos mostrados na tabela # x000a0; 1 para as principais regiões do mundo) são bastante pobres reflexões de vantagem comparativa, e também escondem muita diversidade intra-regional.
Um dos principais determinantes das diferenças de vantagens comparativas agrícolas entre os países é a dotação de fator relativo, que pode mudar substancialmente à medida que as economias crescem a taxas variáveis. Diferentes tecnologias também podem influenciar o lado da oferta do mercado, e essas diferenças podem persistir por longos períodos se os governos não estão investindo em R & # x00026; D. Quanto às diferenças de gostos do lado da demanda, a difusão internacional tende a garantir que eles sejam muito menos importantes do que as diferenças de dotação de fator no longo prazo. No entanto, as mudanças na mistura preferida de alimentos longe dos produtos básicos de amido e para os produtos pecuários e hortícolas à medida que os consumidores passam do status de baixa renda para alto rendimento podem influenciar as vantagens comparativas dentro do setor agrícola.
O modelo mais simples para captar a influência das mudanças nas dotações de fatores relativos em uma economia mundial em crescimento é talvez o fornecido por Leamer (1987). Seu modelo tem apenas três fatores produtivos: recursos naturais, tempo de trabalho e capital produzido (humano e físico, onde o componente humano é definido aqui para incluir não só habilidades, mas também tecnologias disponíveis em cada país). Quanto maior a dotação de recursos naturais de um país em relação aos outros dois fatores, em comparação com a média global, mais forte é a vantagem comparativa em produtos primários. Este último pode ser interpretado como produtos alimentares e agrícolas se os únicos recursos naturais são terra e água agrícola; mas, se um país também tem recursos que podem ser esgotados através da mineração (por exemplo, minerais, matérias-primas energéticas ou florestas naturais), as mudanças na rentabilidade dessa mineração também afetarão as vantagens comparativas agrícolas. Geralmente, um boom da mineração, ou uma entrada sustentada de ajuda externa, diminuirá a vantagem comparativa agrícola de um país (Corden, 1984). No entanto, se o boom fosse impulsionado por um aumento no preço internacional dos produtos transgênicos não agrícolas (em vez de fornecer como a descoberta de uma nova reserva de minerais ou uma nova tecnologia de mineração), e o produto cujo preço aumentou de uma agricultura substituto, então os produtores desse produto da fazenda também poderiam se beneficiar com o n. ° x02018, conforme discutido em 3 de acordo com os biocombustíveis.
Além dos booms minerais ocasionais impulsionados pela oferta, o crescimento econômico sustentável geralmente é devido ao crescimento do capital produzido (incluindo tecnologias disponíveis) por trabalhador. Alguns de qualquer incremento no capital produzido podem ser usados ​​para expandir a produção primária, mas principalmente é usado em outros setores. Essa tendência começa em um estágio anterior de desenvolvimento e, portanto, com uma menor taxa de salário nacional, menor a dotação de terra por país e outros recursos naturais exploráveis ​​por país e menor investimento em novas tecnologias para a agricultura em relação à não - setores agrícolas. Assim, o ranking dos países de acordo com sua vantagem comparativa agrícola está correlacionado com seu índice de produção agrícola / mão-de-obra, enquanto sua intensidade de capital da produção agrícola está correlacionada com a proporção produzida de capital / mão-de-obra. Um índice bruto deste último é simplesmente PIB per capita, reportado para 2005 na tabela # x000a0; 1, juntamente com terras aráveis ​​e água doce per capita.
O comércio agrícola global cresceu muito mais lento do que o comércio de outros produtos. Antes da década de 1960, os produtos agrícolas representavam mais de 30% de todo o comércio de mercadorias a nível mundial, mas, desde o início deste século, sua participação foi em média inferior a 9% (Sandri et al., 2007).
Uma vez que a participação da agricultura no PIB global também caiu, um indicador mais adequado da evolução da ampliação da agricultura é a participação da produção e do consumo de produtos agrícolas e de consumo que são comercializados internacionalmente. Tabela # 2 x000a0; 2 fornece estimativas para várias regiões, com base em uma amostra de 75 países que representam todos, exceto 1/10 da população mundial e PIB agrícola. Esses números sugerem que a comercialização da agricultura aumentou consideravelmente desde a década de 1960, aumentando de cerca de um nono para cerca de um sexto da produção ou consumo global. No entanto, um olhar sobre os dados regionais revela que a maior parte dessa mudança deve-se ao aumento do comércio intra-europeu por trás da barreira comum do comércio externo da UE, além de algum crescimento (de baixas bases) desde a década de 1970 nas importações agrícolas da Ásia e América Latina .
Particularmente marcante é o declínio na medida em que a produção agrícola africana é exportada, reduzindo a autonomia agrícola da região de 120 para 105 por cento ao longo das quatro décadas até 2000 & # x02018; 2004 (tabela # x000a0; 2). No entanto, é necessário ter em mente que isso pode ser em parte devido às mudanças de vantagens comparativas da região e não ao comércio de impostos. Tal mudança na vantagem comparativa poderia ser devido a um boom em outros setores das economias africanas, por exemplo, devido à descoberta local, exploração e exportação de produtos minerais, ou por causa das grandes somas de ajuda externa que flui para a região, seja de o que fortaleceria a moeda de um país e assim tornaria seus agricultores menos competitivos nos mercados internacionais. Outra explicação possível é o crescimento mais rápido da fazenda em relação à produtividade não agrícola no resto do mundo, o que é consistente com o crescimento relativamente lento do rendimento das safras de África. Alston et al. (2009 a) descobriram que o crescimento da produtividade da terra entre 1961 e 2005 aumentou apenas 2,19 por cento por ano em África, em comparação com 2,72 por cento em todos os países em desenvolvimento, e observam que o atraso no crescimento da produtividade do trabalho agrícola foi ainda maior (0,76% para África versus 1,93% ao ano para todos os países em desenvolvimento). Uma terceira possibilidade é que outras regiões reduziram os seus custos comerciais, ou os seus preconceitos políticos anti-agrícolas e anti-comerciais, mais do que os países da África subsaariana nas últimas décadas. Este último é apoiado por evidências compiladas recentemente sobre as tendências políticas relatadas em Anderson (2009).
(b) Mudanças tecnológicas e custos comerciais.
Além das barreiras governamentais para o comércio, existem barreiras comerciais naturais causadas pelos custos de transporte, informação e comunicação. Os produtos agrícolas são produtos relativamente volumosos, tornando-os caros para o transporte em longas distâncias, especialmente se eles são perecíveis. Alguns deles são desejados de forma fresca, um desejo que pode ser satisfeito apenas na temporada. Assim, os preços dos alimentos podem variar substancialmente em tempo e espaço por estas razões.
Se definimos a globalização como um declínio nos custos de fazer negócios em todo o espaço, tem havido, e continua a ser, grande margem para que agricultores e consumidores de alimentos sejam beneficiários de sua aceleração. Quando o espaço relevante inclui as fronteiras nacionais, um efeito-chave dessa redução de custos é aumentar a integração internacional dos mercados. Um indicador padrão dessa integração é a relação comércio / PIB. O comércio de mercadorias por séculos cresceu mais rapidamente do que a produção para todos os períodos (além das duas guerras mundiais), e a diferença foi maior nos anos 90 do que em qualquer período anterior, uma vez que os dados confiáveis ​​ficaram disponíveis. De acordo com Maddison (2001, p.336), as exportações de mercadorias como parte do PIB global eram apenas 1 por cento em 1820, 5 por cento em 1870 e 8 por cento em 1913 a preços de 1990. Entre 1975 e x02018; 1979 e 2000; x02018; 2004, no entanto, a participação de todas as exportações de bens e serviços como participação do PIB global passou de 19% para 26% (Sandri et al., 2007).
Os impactos dos impulsionadores da globalização não são uniformes em todos os países, o que está aparecendo em dados de especialização comercial: entre 1980 e 2005, 1984 e 2000, 2004, a participação dos produtos não alimentares nas exportações de mercadorias aumentou de um pouco mais de um - para quase dois terços dos países de renda média (e de menos de metade para 90% para a China) e a participação dos produtos alimentares processados ​​no valor das exportações de alimentos e agrícolas durante esse período passou de 54% para 69 por cento para países de alta renda (HICs) e de 49% para 67% para a Ásia (Sandri et al., 2007).
O custo reduzido de mover produtos e pessoas foi dominado, na metade do meio do século XX, pela queda do custo do transporte de veículos e avião, graças à produção em massa de tais bens e serviços associados. As taxas de frete marítimo (ajudadas pela contêinera) e as tarifas telefônicas também caíram massivamente ao longo desse período. Os custos de transporte podem ser grosseiramente capturados pela medida em que o preço de importação de custo e frete de um produto (c. i.f.) no seu porto de destino excede o preço de exportação Free On Board (f. o.b.) na sua porta de origem. Para as mercadorias norte-americanas, esse markup caiu de 10% na década de 1950 para 6% na década de 1990 (Frankel 2000). Um exemplo para a agricultura foi a mudança de manipulação de produtos agrícolas, como grãos em sacos a granel para armazenamento e transporte terrestre e aquático, reduzindo substancialmente os custos de transporte e armazenamento, incluindo perdas pós-colheita. A transformação de bagagem para granel começou em países industrializados após a Segunda Guerra Mundial e gradualmente permeou países de renda média, como Argentina e Brasil, e agora está se tornando mais comum em países de baixa renda também. Outras melhorias, que não precisam aparecer como uma redução no f. o.b./c. i.f. gap de preços, são serviços de transporte melhorados, como horários mais rápidos e mais freqüentes e recipientes de atmosfera controlada que permitem que produtos perecíveis, como carnes, produtos lácteos e frutas e vegetais frescos sejam transportados por longas distâncias pelo mar ou pelo ar.
Um fenômeno mais recente, que começa perto do final do século XX, é digital e x02018, a saber, a revolução das TIC. Ajudado pela desregulamentação e privatização dos mercados de telecomunicações em muitos países, vem reduzindo enormemente os custos de comunicação de longa distância, especialmente o custo de acesso rápido e processamento de conhecimento, informações e idéias de qualquer lugar do mundo. A ciência esteve entre os beneficiários da revolução digital, gerando ainda outras revoluções, como a biotecnologia e a nanotecnologia.
A liberalização do investimento estrangeiro direto (IED) às vezes tem sido um complemento da liberalização do comércio. Os países em desenvolvimento até agora são apenas jogadores menores como hospedeiros de IDE em alimentos, bebidas e tabaco processados, no entanto: em 2007, seu ingresso foi inferior a US $ 3 bilhões, em comparação com um ingresso de US $ 46 bilhões em HICs. Os fluxos de IED no setor primário da agricultura foram ainda menores, de modo que o IED representou menos de 0,3 por cento da formação de capital na agricultura do país em desenvolvimento, em comparação com 13 por cento para a economia global desse grupo de países (UNCTAD 2009, cap. 3) . No entanto, Reardon & # x00026; Timmer (2007) argumentou que o IED facilitou a transformação das cadeias de valor de alimentos nas duas últimas décadas, em particular através da expansão e fusão / atividade de aquisição no varejo de supermercados. Na maioria dos HICs agora, não mais do que cinco empresas representam a maioria das vendas, e em muitos desses países, as quatro principais empresas possuem mais de dois terços das vendas.
Os supermercados estão se espalhando ainda mais rapidamente nos países em desenvolvimento do que na HICs. Isso está tendo efeitos dramáticos na cadeia de valor. Os processadores de primeira fase, os fabricantes de alimentos e bebidas e os distribuidores também estão se tornando mais concentrados para combinar melhor o poder de barganha dos supermercados, embora tipicamente em indústrias estreitamente focadas, em vez de serem abrangentes, como no varejo de supermercados. Suas ações também são limitadas pela capacidade dos supermercados para desenvolver suas próprias marcas e até mesmo seu próprio processamento e distribuição. Por sua vez, esses desenvolvimentos estão alterando dramaticamente a maneira como os agricultores devem fornecer esses mercados, com ênfase na entrega atempada de produtos uniformemente de alta qualidade com atributos muito específicos (Reardon & # x00026; Timmer 2007; Swinnen 2007; Reardon et al. 2009). De acordo com Swinnen & # x00026; Vandeplas (2009), porém, os consumidores e, possivelmente, os agricultores dos países em desenvolvimento estão se beneficiando da liberalização do comércio e dos investimentos e da revolução das TIC que estimularam essas mudanças, devido à forte concorrência que se faz entre os intermediários ao longo da cadeia de valor alimentar.
(c) Distorções do comércio agrícola e reformas políticas.
Além do comércio agrícola sendo afetado pelo crescimento econômico e pela queda dos custos comerciais, tem sido muito afetado por políticas governamentais distorcidas. Desde a década de 1950, a agricultura mundial caracterizou-se pela persistência da alta proteção agrícola nos países desenvolvidos, pelas políticas anti-agrícolas e anti-comércio dos países em desenvolvimento e pela tendência de ambos os países usarem medidas comerciais para estabilizar seus alimentos domésticos mercado & # x02018, exacerbando as flutuações de preços no mercado internacional. Este desordem não só foi altamente ineficiente, mas também contribuiu para a desigualdade global e a pobreza (uma vez que a grande maioria dos agregados familiares mais pobres do mundo depende diretamente ou indiretamente da agricultura para seus meios de subsistência, ver Anderson et al., 2018 a). A situação piorou até meados da década de 1980, com a proteção agrícola na Europa, América do Norte e Japão atingindo o pico e os preços internacionais dos alimentos caíram em 1986, graças, em grande medida, a uma guerra de subsídios à exportação agrícola entre os EUA e a comunidade européia. Enquanto isso, muitos países em desenvolvimento haviam reduzido os rendimentos agrícolas, não só pela forte tributação das exportações agrícolas, mas também, embora indiretamente, protegendo os fabricantes contra a concorrência das importações e sobrevalorizando a moeda nacional.
Este desordem na agricultura mundial significou que houve produção excessiva de produtos agrícolas em HICs e subprodução em países em desenvolvimento mais necessitados. Isso também significava que havia menos comércio internacional de produtos agrícolas do que seria o caso sob livre comércio, assim, o desbaste e # x02019; o mercado desses produtos dependentes do clima e tornando-os mais voláteis. A extensão dessa volatilidade é evidente na figura # x000a0; 1. Usando um modelo estocástico de mercados mundiais de alimentos, um estudo estima que o coeficiente de variação dos preços internacionais dos alimentos na década de 1980 era três vezes maior do que teria sido em livre comércio e que o volume de comércio internacional de grãos, produtos pecuários e açúcar foi a metade do que poderia ter sido (Tyers & # x00026; Anderson 1992, tabelas & # x000a0; 6.9 e 6.14).
Durante o último quarto de século, numerosos países em desenvolvimento e HICs começaram a reformar suas políticas de preços e comércio agrícolas. Isso contribuiu para o aumento da medida em que os produtos agrícolas são comercializados internacionalmente, observado acima. Grande parte desta reforma foi realizada unilateralmente ou como parte dos acordos comerciais regionais, mas alguns também foram realizados em resposta a pressões internacionais, como as estipulações da Rodada Uruguai, os compromissos necessários para a adesão à Organização Mundial de Comércio (OMC) e a condicionalidade de empréstimo de ajuste estrutural por parte de organizações internacionais instituições financeiras. Enquanto isso, as reformas em algumas economias de renda média (mais visivelmente a Coréia) têm x02018; overshot & # x02019 ;, passando de desencorajar seus agricultores para protegê-los da concorrência de importação; # x02018, o que suscita preocupações de que outras economias emergentes possam seguir o exemplo e perseguir o mesmo caminho de crescimento da proteção agrícola das economias mais avançadas em estágios iniciais de seu desenvolvimento econômico.
Um recente projeto de pesquisa do Banco Mundial (ver Anderson (2009) e worldbank / agdistortions) desenvolveu uma série de indicadores para medir o impacto dessas intervenções e subsequentes desenvolvimentos políticos sobre os incentivos dos agricultores. Sua medida mais básica, a taxa nominal de assistência (NRA) é a porcentagem pela qual as políticas governamentais elevaram os rendimentos brutos aos agricultores acima do que seria sem a intervenção do governo (ou os abaixaram, se a NRA for negativa). Os agricultores são afetados não apenas pelos preços de seus próprios produtos, mas também (embora indiretamente através de mudanças nos preços do mercado e da taxa de câmbio) pelos incentivos oferecidos aos produtores não agrícolas. Ou seja, são os preços relativos e, portanto, as taxas relativas de assistência do governo que afetam os incentivos dos produtores, então uma taxa relativa de assistência (RRA) também foi calculada.
As ARN do estudo do Banco Mundial, que envolvem 75 países (incluindo 20 HICs) que, em conjunto, representam 92% do PIB agrícola global, são sumarizadas na figura # 2, x000a0; 2. Eles revelam que a assistência aos agricultores nas HICs aumentou de forma constante a partir de meados da década de 1950 até o final da década de 1980, além de um pequeno mergulho quando os preços internacionais dos alimentos (ver figura n. ° x000a0; 1) aumentaram em 1973 e 1974; 1974. Depois de atingir um pico em mais de 50 por cento em meados da década de 1980, a NRA média para HICs caiu um pouco, dependendo da medida em que se acredita que alguns novos programas de fazenda são & # x02018; desacoplados e # x02019; no sentido de não influenciar mais as decisões de produção. Para os países em desenvolvimento, a NRA média para a agricultura vem aumentando, mas de um nível de cerca de 25% no período de meados da década de 1950 ao início da década de 1980 para quase 10% na primeira metade do presente década.
A NRA média para países em desenvolvimento esconde o fato de que os subsectores exportadores e importadores da agricultura possuem ARN muito diferentes. Figura 3: revela que, enquanto a NRA média para exportadores foi negativa em todo (passando de & # x02212; 20% para & # x02212; 30% antes de voltar para quase zero em 2000; # x02018; 2004), a NRA para os agricultores que compõem as importações nos países em desenvolvimento tem flutuado entre 20% e 30% (e até atingiu 40% nos anos de baixos preços em meados da década de 1980). O desvio anti-comércio na agricultura (tributação tanto das exportações quanto das importações) diminuiu para os países em desenvolvimento desde meados da década de 1980, mas o hiato da NRA entre os subsectores das importações e das exportações ainda é de cerca de 20 pontos percentuais (e cresceu para 40 pontos percentuais para HICs, embora existam até mesmo exportadores de NRAs positivas). Figure + # x000a0; 3 também revela que a NRA para agricultores que compõem as importações nos países em desenvolvimento aumentou praticamente o mesmo ritmo que as HICs, sugerindo que o crescimento da proteção agrícola contra a concorrência das importações é algo que tende a começar em níveis modestos de renda da população, em vez de ser um fenômeno exclusivo para HICs.
A melhoria dos incentivos dos agricultores nos países em desenvolvimento é subestimada pelas estimativas da ANR acima, porque esses países também reduziram sua assistência aos produtores de bens não comercializáveis ​​agrícolas, principalmente através de cortes nas restrições às importações de manufaturas. O declínio da NRA média ponderada para este último, representado na figura n. ° x000a0; 4, foi claramente muito maior do que o aumento da NRA média para setores agrícolas comercializáveis ​​para o período até meados da década de 1980, consistente com a descoberta de Krueger et al. (1988, 1991) há duas décadas. Durante o período compreendido entre meados da década de 1980, as mudanças nas ARN de ambos os setores contribuíram quase igualmente para a melhoria dos incentivos aos agricultores. O RRA para países em desenvolvimento como um grupo passou de & # x02212; 46 por cento na segunda metade da década de 1970 para 1 por cento na primeira metade da presente década. Esse aumento (de um coeficiente de 0,54 a 1,01) é equivalente a quase dobrando o preço relativo dos produtos agrícolas, o que é uma grande mudança na fortuna dos agricultores dos países em desenvolvimento em apenas uma geração. Isto é principalmente devido às mudanças na Ásia, mas mesmo para a América Latina, esse aumento de preços relativos é metade, enquanto que para a África este indicador melhora apenas um oitavo. Quanto às HICs, a assistência à fabricação foi, em média, muito menor do que a assistência aos agricultores, mesmo na década de 1950, e seu declínio desde então teve apenas um menor impacto na RRA média desse grupo (figura # x000a0; 4). As exceções são a Austrália e a Nova Zelândia, onde a proteção de fabricação foi muito alta e seu declínio ocorreu várias décadas depois que em outras HICs (Anderson et al., 2007).
As influências acima das políticas se concentram nas tendências de longo prazo, mas as políticas também influenciam as flutuações ano-a-ano em torno dos preços tendenciais e das quantidades enquanto os governos procuram reduzir as flutuações nos mercados domésticos de alimentos. Um caminho para que um país atinja esse objetivo é variar as restrições em seu comércio internacional de alimentos de acordo com as condições sazonais domésticas e as mudanças nos preços internacionalmente. Anderson et al. (2018 b) capturam esse fenômeno estimando as elasticidades da transmissão do preço do produto internacional para o mercado doméstico, utilizando uma formulação de atraso geométrico para cada produto para todos os países focados no período desde 1985. A estimativa média não ponderada para o curto prazo A elasticidade para 12 produtos-chave é de 0,54, sugerindo que, no primeiro ano, pouco mais de metade do movimento nos preços internacionais desses produtos agrícolas é transmitido internamente.
Para avaliar o quão longe o mundo chegou, e até onde ele ainda tem que ir, na retificação do desordem na agricultura mundial, Valenzuela et al. (2009) usam o modelo mundial de economia global conhecido como Linkage para fornecer uma análise retrospectiva e prospectiva combinada. Ele quantifica os impactos tanto das reformas passadas quanto das políticas atuais, comparando os efeitos das estimativas de distorção do projeto do Banco Mundial para o período de 1980 x02018, 1984 com as de 2004. As descobertas desse estudo de modelagem em toda a economia sugerem que:
3. Futuros condutores e incertezas até 2050.
Com isso, como base, podemos agora considerar os drivers prováveis ​​das mudanças nas vantagens comparativas agrícolas nacionais, custos comerciais e políticas pertinentes nas próximas quatro décadas e suas incertezas e impactos associados ao comércio agrícola global. A lista inclui o seguinte, cada um dos quais é considerado, por sua vez, no restante desta seção do artigo:
(a) Taxas de crescimento da população, renda e produtividade.
A recessão econômica nos EUA e na Europa desde 2007 reduziu o crescimento econômico global. Quanto tempo durará a recuperação, é incerto porque depende da rapidez com que as percepções de risco diminuem, o que depende, por sua vez, das respostas das políticas macroeconômicas e comerciais governamentais em andamento (McKibbin & # x00026; Stoeckel 2009). Nesse processo de reajuste, enquanto as taxas de crescimento de longo prazo até 2050 podem não ser muito afetadas, as moedas podem ser realinhadas de forma a ter efeitos a longo prazo sobre vantagens comparativas em produtos agrícolas. No entanto, há uma grande incerteza em torno de tais possibilidades nesta etapa para fazer mais do que simplesmente anotá-las.
Um conjunto recente de projeções populacionais e de crescimento de renda per capita para 2050 é resumido na tabela # x000a0; 3. Claramente, essas projeções implicam mudanças significativas nos centros econômicos de gravidade do consumo na economia global, tendo em conta as diferentes elasticidades de renda da demanda por diversos produtos. Eles também afetam o lado da oferta de cada economia: o crescimento da população, juntamente com as mudanças demográficas e o trabalho, as escolhas de lazer influenciam o crescimento da força de trabalho e o crescimento da renda per capita sugere uma expansão da doação de capital, seja na forma of physical assets, workforce skills or new technologies.
In economy-wide computable general equilibrium model projections, it is common to represent physical capital assets and human skills explicitly, but to incorporate new technologies simply as shocks to total factor productivity (TFP; the number of units of each input needed to produce a unit of output). The latter can be determined endogenously if the modeller accepts projections of growth in per capita income and in the various factors of production, but it is then a challenge to allocate that aggregate TFP shock to different sectors and to different industries within those sectors. Typically, the agricultural sector's TFP growth rate is assumed to exceed that for the rest of the economy, based on historical experience (see Martin & Mitra 2001), so as to ensure the relative price of farm products declines over time as in the second half of the twentieth century (see figure 1 ). With the growth in international food prices over the 2003‘2008 period, however, expectations about their future trend are now less certain. Is that rise just due to a rundown of grain stocks globally, or is it also because of the greater neglect of public investment on agricultural R&D in recent decades (Alston et al . 2009 b ; Royal Society 2009)? The possibilities of technological catch-up by lagging regions through faster international technology transfer also need to be considered (e. g. via the Green Revolution for Africa initiative of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, but also bearing in mind the apparent recent surge in inflow of FDI in farming from countries relatively poorly endowed with farm land and water; see von Braun & Meinzen-Dick 2009). This suggests that more than one set of assumptions about productivity growth is needed in developing a family of baselines for projections of agricultural productivity to 2050.
Also of more relevance to projections now than in the past are assumptions about food consumption growth. Previously, modellers have relied on past econometric evidence, suggesting that price and income elasticities of demand for food decline with per capita income, and earlier for lower-valued foods such as staple grains and tubers than for livestock and horticultural products. The latter switch will be especially important with the rapid income growth in populous emerging economies such as Brazil, China and India. However, consumer concerns for food quality, food safety and the environment also need to be considered, especially for HICs. Environmental concerns affect things such as the disposal of packaging or the carbon footprint associated with the transport of goods and hence a desire to ‘buy local’ or at least to know of the country of origin. Increasing numbers of consumers wish to know how products are produced on-farm and processed, so as to assess whether they are causing environmental damage or reducing animal welfare. The continuing preference of some consumers to avoid foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is a clear case in point (Qaim 2009). This consumer concern has already led to significant government barriers to trade based on production processes and to constraints on domestic production. If that behaviour persists, models of international trade need to differentiate between products that may or do not contain GMOs. Now that traceability information along with other attributes can be stored on barcodes, these and related biosecurity concerns can be reflected in the demands that the large supermarket chains place on their suppliers for information on myriad attributes of products. This is adding to the need to incorporate greater agricultural product differentiation across suppliers in trade models.
It could be argued that the above concerns of consumers are confined to HICs, especially Western Europe and Japan, where the quantity of food consumed is unlikely to grow rapidly over the next four decades because of relatively low population and income growth and low-income elasticities of demand for farm products there. However, that would be to miss the point that high-income consumers are willing to pay substantial premia for foods that are perceived to be safer, of higher quality and produced with minimal damage to the environment and animal welfare. They are thus potentially highly profitable markets to which all farmers seek access, including those in developing countries‘notwithstanding the disadvantage due to their higher carbon footprint insofar as more transportation is probably required to get their produce to those northern markets than is the case for local import-competing farmers.
(b) Crude oil price trends: effect on biofuel demand.
While the real price of crude oil spiked briefly in mid-2008 at nearly three times its previous record, it provides no guidance as to the long-term trend price of petroleum and other energy raw materials. Spikes in the spot price can occur whenever there is a sudden change in expectations (including about OPEC cartel actions), given the low short-term price elasticities of demand and supply for crude oil. Long-term trend prices, on the other hand, are affected by government taxes and developments in known reserves and in demand, which tend to change relatively slowly as economies grow. Technological innovations in exploration and exploitation have caused reserves to expand faster than demand, so the world is apparently not running out of fossil fuels: according to Smith (2009), the ratio of reserves to annual production of crude oil has grown from a multiple of 29 years in 1980 to 45 years in 2008, and if unconventional petroleum resources (heavy oil, oil sands and oil shale) are included, that adds another 160 years of available supplies at current consumption levels.
The capacity of petroleum prices to spike occasionally is not unlike that for grains. As Wright (2009) pointed out, wheat, rice and maize are highly substitutable in the global market for calories, and when aggregate stocks decline to minimal feasible levels for trading and processing, prices become highly sensitive to small shocks. By the middle of the past decade, grain stocks-to-use ratios had declined to their lowest levels for 25 years due to high-income growth in emerging economies and de-stocking in China (Wiggins & Keats 2018). When there were then some crop failures plus a surge in demand because of biofuel mandates and subsidies, grain prices started rising. The crude oil price spike in 2008 raised further the demand for biofuels (as well as fuel and fertilizer input costs for farmers), and a sequence of trade restrictions by key grain exporters, beginning in the thin global rice market in the autumn of 2007, led to panic buying.
The linkage between crude oil and food prices will remain strong when petroleum prices exceed the threshold that makes biofuel production privately profitable on a significant scale, as in 2005‘2008 (FAO 2008; IMF 2008; DEFRA 2018; Pfuderer et al . 2018). A continuation of biofuel subsidies and mandates will make this co-movement in above-trend prices more common, as will the development of new biofuel crop production technologies that effectively lower the threshold oil price above which ethanol or biodiesel production is profitable (Chakravorty et al . 2009; Rajagopal et al . 2009). The latter has considerable potential over the next four decades, especially if private life science companies view investments in biofuel crop R&D as more profitable than R&D in politically sensitive GM food crops.
Mandates to include an increasing proportion of biofuels in road transport fuel are now in place in most OECD countries and in Brazil. The current targets in the EU mandate go through to 2020, and those of the US to 2022. These policy measures, if they continue and remain inflexible, will add a certain demand for biofuel crops no matter what happens to fossil fuel and food prices. This will not reduce the extent of any downward food price spike, however, because biofuel production will be privately profitable and so the mandates will tend to be redundant when grain and oilseed prices are very low relative to fossil fuels prices. On the other hand, mandates will exacerbate the extent of any upward food price spike, because fuel retailers will be required to include in their road fuel mix at least the mandated quantity of biofuel regardless of its high cost.
(c) Trade costs, the supermarket revolution and related changes in food value chains.
The ICT revolution will continue to lower trade costs, including for supermarkets as they search globally for the lowest-cost suppliers of products with the attributes desired by their customers. Such searching by supermarkets will increase also in response to governments lowering the remaining barriers to FDI in retailing and associated logistics services. This will more or less offset the impact of any new carbon taxes or their equivalent on transportation costs. The consequences of a continuing supermarket revolution will spread right along the food value chain. One is that first-stage processors, food and beverage manufacturers, and distributors will become more concentrated so as to better match the bargaining power of supermarkets. Even so, supermarkets will exploit their capacity to develop their own brands and even their own processing and distribution. In turn, these developments will alter dramatically the way farmers supply those markets, with the emphasis on timely delivery of uniform-quality products leading to more-efficient (possibly larger) farmers displacing less-efficient ones and thereby raising agricultural productivity growth. Insofar as large supermarkets in HICs source also from farmers in other countries, their private standards will be set with at least some consideration to the costs they impose on foreign suppliers, and so may be less trade restricting than they would be without that feature of globalization.
(d) Policies distorting agricultural incentives.
The reasons why some countries have reformed their price-distorting agricultural and trade policies more than others in recent decades provide hints as to what to expect in coming decades. The reasons are varied. Some countries reformed unilaterally, apparently having become convinced that it is in their own national interest to do so. China is the most dramatic and significant example of the past three decades among developing countries, and Australia and New Zealand among the HICs (Anderson 2009). Other developing countries may have done so partly to secure bigger and better loans from international financial institutions and then, having taken that first step, they have continued the process, even if somewhat intermittently. India is one example, but there are numerous other examples in Africa and Latin America. And some countries have reduced their agricultural subsidies and import barriers at least partly in response to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade's multilateral Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and to opportunities to form or expand regional integration agreements. The EU is the most important example of committing to reductions in farm protection, helped by its desire for otherwise costly preferential trade agreements including its expansion eastwards.
The EU reforms suggest that growth in agricultural protection can be slowed and even reversed if accompanied by re-instrumentation away from price supports to decoupled measures or more direct forms of farm income support‘but the wealthiest Western European countries (Norway and Switzerland), like Japan, continue to resist external pressure to undertake major reform. The stark example of Australia shows that one-off buyouts can bring faster and even complete reform. In the USA, by contrast, most subsidy cuts in the 1990s proved to be short lived and have since been reversed, with one set of analysts seeing few signs of that changing in the foreseeable future (Orden et al . 2018).
In the developing countries, where levels of agricultural protection are generally below those in HICs, there are fewer signs of a slowdown of the upward trend in protection from agricultural import competition over the past half-century. Indeed, there are numerous signs that the governments of developing countries want to keep open their options to raise agricultural NRAs in the future, particularly via import restrictions. One indicator is the high tariff bindings to which developing countries committed themselves following the Uruguay Round (Anderson & Martin 2006, table 1.2). Another is the demand by many developing countries to be allowed to maintain their rates of agricultural protection from import competition for reasons of food security, livelihood security and rural development. This view has succeeded in bringing ‘special products’ and a ‘special safeguard mechanism’ into the multilateral trading system's agricultural negotiations, even though such policies would raise domestic food prices in developing countries and thus may worsen poverty and food security of the urban poor while exacerbating instability in international markets for farm products.
If the WTO's Doha Development Agenda collapses, or if Doha leads to only a weak agricultural agreement full of exceptions for politically sensitive products and safeguards, the governments of HICs may find it more difficult to ward off agricultural protection lobbies. This would make it more likely that developing countries choose an agricultural protection path. The potential cost of this alternative counterfactual could be several times the estimated benefit of a successful Doha agreement when the counterfactual is assumed to be current policies (Bouët & Laborde 2008). Regional and other preferential trading arrangements may be able to reduce farm protection growth somewhat, but the experiences with regional integration arrangements to date is mixed.
(e) Climate change and policy responses.
Effects of climate change on aggregate global agricultural production and its location across countries and regions without and with mitigation and adaptation are great unknowns, not least because there are many possible government policy responses unilaterally and multilaterally. Moreover, the uncertainties about what policy instruments will be adopted by whom and when will be spread over decades rather than just the next few years. Land use undoubtedly will be affected non-trivially; carbon credits and emissions trading will have unknown and possibly major effects depending among other things on whether/how/when agriculture and forestry are included in the schemes of various countries, as will any border tax adjustments or other sanctions imposed on imports from countries deemed to be not sharing the burden of reducing greenhouse gases; biofuel mandates and subsidies and emerging biofuel crop technologies are likely to increasingly affect food markets, and even more so if carbon taxes or emission caps raise the user price of fossil fuels; crop yield fluctuations will be greater because of weather volatility and especially more extreme weather events, leading to further triggers for trade policy interventions aimed at stabilizing domestic food markets and so on.
The literature on these and myriad other ways in which agricultural markets are expected to be affected directly and indirectly by climate change and associated policy and technological responses are growing exponentially. Numerous global economic modellers have begun analysing the possible effects of some of the above influences on the international location of agricultural production and trade in particular. One of the more widely cited is Cline (2007), who predicted that by the 2080s, even with carbon fertilization, agricultural output will be 8 per cent lower in developing countries, 8 per cent higher in HICs and 3 per cent lower globally. However, mitigation policies could have an adverse effect on industrialization in developing countries and lead to their agricultural sector in aggregate benefitting indirectly, although different types of border tax adjustments by HICs would affect the outcome non-trivially (Mattoo et al . 2009 a , b ). It is clearly very difficult to discern what the main influences are likely to be over the next four decades, let alone to quantify the effects of even the most likely of them. This underscores the need for sensitivity analysis around any baseline scenario to 2050 that does not include any of the influences listed in the previous paragraph.
(f) Reforms to water institutions and policies.
Water is essential for growing food and critical for food security, but in many parts of the world it has been one of the most-abundant factors of production used in agriculture. Certainly, it is not evenly spread across the world (see column 2 of table 1 ), and irrigation water property rights and water markets are poorly developed in most countries.
With population growth and the increasing need for non-farm uses of water, the urgency for policy reform in this area is growing, especially outside temperate, well-watered areas such as Europe (Rosegrant et al . 2002). The experiences with reforms to date, such as in the USA and Australia, indicate there will be much trial and error in policy design and implementation and it will take many decades before water markets are as efficient as farm land markets. This suggests that irrigation water costs could well rise in coming decades but to varying extents across the globe and in ways that could have non-trivial impacts on the optimal location of certain water-intensive crops.
(g) Agricultural research and development investments.
Agricultural R&D investments have had a huge payoff (Alston et al . 2000). Yet there has been a considerable slowdown in such investments over the past two decades, and this may already be contributing to a slowing of agricultural productivity growth (Alston et al . 2009 a , b ). If that slowdown in investment was in response to the low prices of food in international markets in the mid-1980s, then the rise in those prices in recent years, together with the newly perceived need for adaptive research in response to climate change and increased water scarcity, may boost farm productivity growth over the next four decades. Advances in biotechnology will help raise potential yields in field trials and thus attainable yields in the best farms, but much can also be gained by reducing the gap between those attainable yields and average on-farm yields, particularly in developing countries.
Part of the slowdown in traditionally measured gains from agricultural research in recent decades may be due to research being directed away from things such as maintaining and improving yields and towards conservation of natural resources and the environment. It is likely that climate change concerns will also lead to some re-direction of R&D investment, to goals such as crop tolerance to drought and other extreme weather events.
Another large dilemma for research administrators, both public and private, is how much effort to direct to transgenic foods. While there remains strong opposition by some consumers and governments of large countries to GM food production and imports, the returns from such research will be dampened, both absolutely and relative to efforts to produce non-food GM crops (cotton, biofuels and other industrial crops). R&D on the latter will reduce the upward pressure that demands for those non-food crops would otherwise put on food prices, but the anti-GM food stance will continue to reduce the potential for biotechnology to lower food prices in countries where GM food is discouraged or banned‘with major implications for bilateral trade flows since it effectively divides the world food supplies into two separate markets (Anderson & Jackson 2006).
4. Conclusions and policy implications.
Recent globalization has been characterized by a decline in the costs of cross-border trade in farm and other products. It has been driven by the ICT revolution, declines in real transport costs and‘in the case of farm products‘by reductions in governmental distortions to agricultural incentives and trade. The first but maybe not the second of these drivers will continue in coming decades. World food prices will depend also on whether/by how much farm productivity growth continues to outpace demand growth. Demand in turn will be driven not only by population and income growth, but also by crude oil prices if they remain at current historically high levels, since that will affect the biofuel demand. Climate change mitigation policies and adaptation, water market developments and market access standards including for transgenic foods add to future agricultural production, price and trade uncertainties.
The key issues that modellers need to grapple with in projecting world agricultural markets to 2050‘assuming they have already dealt with simulating the macro-policy settings and the evolving pattern of international capital flows and their effects on currency exchange rates and broad comparative advantages‘are what to assume about trends and fluctuations for each country and hence globally in:
Governments can do, and some already are doing, things to reduce the uncertainties associated with the above issues. First, WTO members are trying to conclude the Doha trade negotiations. Trade opening can lead to more effective resource conservation, improve global welfare and reduce inequality, poverty, malnutrition and hunger (Anderson et al. 2018 a ). The signs are not promising for a very ambitious outcome from Doha, however. It is even possible that exceptions for ‘sensitive’ and ‘special’ agricultural products and a special safeguard mechanism to protect developing countries from import surges could discount heavily the value of any new commitments. In that case, and perhaps even more so if WTO members fail to reach a conclusion to the Doha round, agricultural protection growth could resume in HICs and/or be emulated in developing countries, with both country groups varying their protection rates in an attempt to stabilize their domestic market‘but at the expense of destabilizing international food markets and thereby encouraging even more countries to thus intervene at their national border.
Second, governments could commit to a more ambitious programme of support for agricultural R&D investment, so as to slow or reverse the decline since the 1990s in such investments. Lags between R&D investments and farm productivity growth are very long, but certainly results would show within the next four decades. Governments yet to embrace the relatively new agricultural biotechnologies could reassess their stance in the light of (i) the experiences of countries that have accepted this technology (as environmental effects have been mostly benign or positive and no food safety issues are evident) and (ii) the higher benefits from expanding such investments now that food price levels are higher and climate changes are requiring farmer adaptation.
Finally, governments could make clear what their policy responses will be to climate change. The difficulties associated with this global issue make multilateral trade negotiations look easy, as was clearly demonstrated by the difficulty in drafting a communiqué at the end of the Copenhagen global conference on the issue in December 2009.
Agradecimentos.
The author is grateful for helpful comments from the editor and referees as well as for financial assistance for some of the underlying research from the World Bank and the Australian Research Council. Opinions and any errors are the responsibility of the author alone.

Globalization: A Brief Overview.
A perennial challenge facing all of the world's countries, regardless of their level of economic development, is achieving financial stability, economic growth, and higher living standards. There are many different paths that can be taken to achieve these objectives, and every country's path will be different given the distinctive nature of national economies and political systems. The ingredients contributing to China's high growth rate over the past two decades have, for example, been very different from those that have contributed to high growth in countries as varied as Malaysia and Malta.
Yet, based on experiences throughout the world, several basic principles seem to underpin greater prosperity. These include investment (particularly foreign direct investment), the spread of technology, strong institutions, sound macroeconomic policies, an educated workforce, and the existence of a market economy. Furthermore, a common denominator which appears to link nearly all high-growth countries together is their participation in, and integration with, the global economy.
There is substantial evidence, from countries of different sizes and different regions, that as countries "globalize" their citizens benefit, in the form of access to a wider variety of goods and services, lower prices, more and better-paying jobs, improved health, and higher overall living standards. It is probably no mere coincidence that over the past 20 years, as a number of countries have become more open to global economic forces, the percentage of the developing world living in extreme poverty—defined as living on less than $1 per day—has been cut in half.
As much as has been achieved in connection with globalization, there is much more to be done. Regional disparities persist: while poverty fell in East and South Asia, it actually rose in sub-Saharan Africa. The UN's Human Development Report notes there are still around 1 billion people surviving on less than $1 per day—with 2.6 billion living on less than $2 per day. Proponents of globalization argue that this is not because of too much globalization, but rather too little. And the biggest threat to continuing to raise living standards throughout the world is not that globalization will succeed but that it will fail. It is the people of developing economies who have the greatest need for globalization, as it provides them with the opportunities that come with being part of the world economy.
These opportunities are not without risks—such as those arising from volatile capital movements. The International Monetary Fund works to help economies manage or reduce these risks, through economic analysis and policy advice and through technical assistance in areas such as macroeconomic policy, financial sector sustainability, and the exchange-rate system.
The risks are not a reason to reverse direction, but for all concerned—in developing and advanced countries, among both investors and recipients—to embrace policy changes to build strong economies and a stronger world financial system that will produce more rapid growth and ensure that poverty is reduced.
The following is a brief overview to help guide anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of the many issues associated with globalization.
What is Globalization?
Economic "globalization" is a historical process, the result of human innovation and technological progress. It refers to the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through the movement of goods, services, and capital across borders. The term sometimes also refers to the movement of people (labor) and knowledge (technology) across international borders. There are also broader cultural, political, and environmental dimensions of globalization.
The term "globalization" began to be used more commonly in the 1980s, reflecting technological advances that made it easier and quicker to complete international transactions—both trade and financial flows. It refers to an extension beyond national borders of the same market forces that have operated for centuries at all levels of human economic activity—village markets, urban industries, or financial centers.
There are countless indicators that illustrate how goods, capital, and people, have become more globalized.
The value of trade (goods and services) as a percentage of world GDP increased from 42.1 percent in 1980 to 62.1 percent in 2007.
The growth in global markets has helped to promote efficiency through competition and the division of labor—the specialization that allows people and economies to focus on what they do best. Global markets also offer greater opportunity for people to tap into more diversified and larger markets around the world. It means that they can have access to more capital, technology, cheaper imports, and larger export markets. But markets do not necessarily ensure that the benefits of increased efficiency are shared by all. Countries must be prepared to embrace the policies needed, and, in the case of the poorest countries, may need the support of the international community as they do so.
The broad reach of globalization easily extends to daily choices of personal, economic, and political life. For example, greater access to modern technologies, in the world of health care, could make the difference between life and death. In the world of communications, it would facilitate commerce and education, and allow access to independent media. Globalization can also create a framework for cooperation among nations on a range of non-economic issues that have cross-border implications, such as immigration, the environment, and legal issues. At the same time, the influx of foreign goods, services, and capital into a country can create incentives and demands for strengthening the education system, as a country's citizens recognize the competitive challenge before them.
Perhaps more importantly, globalization implies that information and knowledge get dispersed and shared. Innovators—be they in business or government—can draw on ideas that have been successfully implemented in one jurisdiction and tailor them to suit their own jurisdiction. Just as important, they can avoid the ideas that have a clear track record of failure. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and frequent critic of globalization, has nonetheless observed that globalization "has reduced the sense of isolation felt in much of the developing world and has given many people in the developing world access to knowledge well beyond the reach of even the wealthiest in any country a century ago." 3.
International Trade.
A core element of globalization is the expansion of world trade through the elimination or reduction of trade barriers, such as import tariffs. Greater imports offer consumers a wider variety of goods at lower prices, while providing strong incentives for domestic industries to remain competitive. Exports, often a source of economic growth for developing nations, stimulate job creation as industries sell beyond their borders. More generally, trade enhances national competitiveness by driving workers to focus on those vocations where they, and their country, have a competitive advantage. Trade promotes economic resilience and flexibility, as higher imports help to offset adverse domestic supply shocks. Greater openness can also stimulate foreign investment, which would be a source of employment for the local workforce and could bring along new technologies—thus promoting higher productivity.
Restricting international trade—that is, engaging in protectionism—generates adverse consequences for a country that undertakes such a policy. For example, tariffs raise the prices of imported goods, harming consumers, many of which may be poor. Protectionism also tends to reward concentrated, well-organized and politically-connected groups, at the expense of those whose interests may be more diffuse (such as consumers). It also reduces the variety of goods available and generates inefficiency by reducing competition and encouraging resources to flow into protected sectors.
Developing countries can benefit from an expansion in international trade. Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico, has observed that, "In every case where a poor nation has significantly overcome its poverty, this has been achieved while engaging in production for export markets and opening itself to the influx of foreign goods, investment, and technology." 4 And the trend is clear. In the late 1980s, many developing countries began to dismantle their barriers to international trade, as a result of poor economic performance under protectionist polices and various economic crises. In the 1990s, many former Eastern bloc countries integrated into the global trading system and developing Asia—one of the most closed regions to trade in 1980—progressively dismantled barriers to trade. Overall, while the average tariff rate applied by developing countries is higher than that applied by advanced countries, it has declined significantly over the last several decades.
The implications of globalized financial markets.
The world's financial markets have experienced a dramatic increase in globalization in recent years. Global capital flows fluctuated between 2 and 6 percent of world GDP during the period 1980-95, but since then they have risen to 14.8 percent of GDP, and in 2006 they totaled $7.2 trillion, more than tripling since 1995. The most rapid increase has been experienced by advanced economies, but emerging markets and developing countries have also become more financially integrated. As countries have strengthened their capital markets they have attracted more investment capital, which can enable a broader entrepreneurial class to develop, facilitate a more efficient allocation of capital, encourage international risk sharing, and foster economic growth.
Cross-Border Assets and Liabilities (Percent GDP)
Yet there is an energetic debate underway, among leading academics and policy experts, on the precise impact of financial globalization. Some see it as a catalyst for economic growth and stability. Others see it as injecting dangerous—and often costly—volatility into the economies of growing middle-income countries.
A recent paper by the IMF's Research Department takes stock of what is known about the effects of financial globalization. 5 The analysis of the past 30 years of data reveals two main lessons for countries to consider.
First, the findings support the view that countries must carefully weigh the risks and benefits of unfettered capital flows. The evidence points to largely unambiguous gains from financial integration for advanced economies. In emerging and developing countries, certain factors are likely to influence the effect of financial globalization on economic volatility and growth: countries with well-developed financial sectors, strong institutions, sounds macroeconomic policies, and substantial trade openness are more likely to gain from financial liberalization and less likely to risk increased macroeconomic volatility and to experience financial crises. For example, well-developed financial markets help moderate boom-bust cycles that can be triggered by surges and sudden stops in international capital flows, while strong domestic institutions and sound macroeconomic policies help attract "good" capital, such as portfolio equity flows and FDI.
The second lesson to be drawn from the study is that there are also costs associated with being overly cautious about opening to capital flows. These costs include lower international trade, higher investment costs for firms, poorer economic incentives, and additional administrative/monitoring costs. Opening up to foreign investment may encourage changes in the domestic economy that eliminate these distortions and help foster growth.
Looking forward, the main policy lesson that can be drawn from these results is that capital account liberalization should be pursued as part of a broader reform package encompassing a country's macroeconomic policy framework, domestic financial system, and prudential regulation. Moreover, long-term, non-debt-creating flows, such as FDI, should be liberalized before short-term, debt-creating inflows. Countries should still weigh the possible risks involved in opening up to capital flows against the efficiency costs associated with controls, but under certain conditions (such as good institutions, sound domestic and foreign policies, and developed financial markets) the benefits from financial globalization are likely to outweigh the risks.
Globalization, income inequality, and poverty.
As some countries have embraced globalization, and experienced significant income increases, other countries that have rejected globalization, or embraced it only tepidly, have fallen behind. A similar phenomenon is at work within countries—some people have, inevitably, been bigger beneficiaries of globalization than others.
Over the past two decades, income inequality has risen in most regions and countries. At the same time, per capita incomes have risen across virtually all regions for even the poorest segments of population, indicating that the poor are better off in an absolute sense during this phase of globalization, although incomes for the relatively well off have increased at a faster pace. Consumption data from groups of developing countries reveal the striking inequality that exists between the richest and the poorest in populations across different regions.
As discussed in the October 2007 issue of the World Economic Outlook , one must keep in mind that there are many sources of inequality. Contrary to popular belief, increased trade globalization is associated with a decline in inequality. The spread of technological advances and increased financial globalization—and foreign direct investment in particular—have instead contributed more to the recent rise in inequality by raising the demand for skilled labor and increasing the returns to skills in both developed and developing countries. Hence, while everyone benefits, those with skills benefit more.
It is important to ensure that the gains from globalization are more broadly shared across the population. To this effect, reforms to strengthen education and training would help ensure that workers have the appropriate skills for the evolving global economy. Policies that broaden the access of finance to the poor would also help, as would further trade liberalization that boosts agricultural exports from developing countries. Additional programs may include providing adequate income support to cushion, but not obstruct, the process of change, and also making health care less dependent on continued employment and increasing the portability of pension benefits in some countries.
Equally important, globalization should not be rejected because its impact has left some people unemployed. The dislocation may be a function of forces that have little to do with globalization and more to do with inevitable technological progress. And, the number of people who "lose" under globalization is likely to be outweighed by the number of people who "win."
Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist, highlights one of the fundamental contradictions inherent in those who bemoan inequality, pointing out that this charge amounts to arguing "that it would be better for everybody to be equally poor than for some to become significantly better off, even if, in the long run, this will almost certainly lead to advances for everybody." 6.
Indeed, globalization has helped to deliver extraordinary progress for people living in developing nations. One of the most authoritative studies of the subject has been carried out by World Bank economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay. 7 They concluded that since 1980, globalization has contributed to a reduction in poverty as well as a reduction in global income inequality. They found that in "globalizing" countries in the developing world, income per person grew three-and-a-half times faster than in "non-globalizing" countries, during the 1990s. In general, they noted, "higher growth rates in globalizing developing countries have translated into higher incomes for the poor." Dollar and Kraay also found that in virtually all events in which a country experienced growth at a rate of two percent or more, the income of the poor rose.
Critics point to those parts of the world that have achieved few gains during this period and highlight it as a failure of globalization. But that is to misdiagnose the problem. While serving as Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan pointed out that "the main losers in today's very unequal world are not those who are too much exposed to globalization. They are those who have been left out." 8 A recent BBC World Service poll found that on average 64 percent of those polled—in 27 out of 34 countries—held the view that the benefits and burdens of "the economic developments of the last few years" have not been shared fairly. In developed countries, those who have this view of unfairness are more likely to say that globalization is growing too quickly. In contrast, in some developing countries, those who perceive such unfairness are more likely to say globalization is proceeding too slowly .
As individuals and institutions work to raise living standards throughout the world, it will be critically important to create a climate that enables these countries to realize maximum benefits from globalization. That means focusing on macroeconomic stability, transparency in government, a sound legal system, modern infrastructure, quality education, and a deregulated economy.
Myths about globalization.
No discussion of globalization would be complete without dispelling some of the myths that have been built up around it.
Downward pressure on wages: Globalization is rarely the primary factor that fosters wage moderation in low-skilled work conducted in developed countries. As discussed in a recent issue of the World Economic Outlook , a more significant factor is technology. As more work can be mechanized, and as fewer people are needed to do a given job than in the past, the demand for that labor will fall, and as a result the prevailing wages for that labor will be affected as well.
The "race to the bottom": Globalization has not caused the world's multinational corporations to simply scour the globe in search of the lowest-paid laborers. There are numerous factors that enter into corporate decisions on where to source products, including the supply of skilled labor, economic and political stability, the local infrastructure, the quality of institutions, and the overall business climate. In an open global market, while jurisdictions do compete with each other to attract investment, this competition incorporates factors well beyond just the hourly wage rate. According to the UN Information Service, the developed world hosts two-thirds of the world's inward foreign direct investment. The 49 least developed countries—the poorest of the developing countries—account for around 2 per cent of the total inward FDI stock of developing countries.
Nor is it true that multinational corporations make a consistent practice of operating sweatshops in low-wage countries, with poor working conditions and substandard wages. While isolated examples of this can surely be uncovered, it is well established that multinationals, on average, pay higher wages than what is standard in developing nations, and offer higher labor standards. 9.
Globalization is irreversible: In the long run, globalization is likely to be an unrelenting phenomenon. But for significant periods of time, its momentum can be hindered by a variety of factors, ranging from political will to availability of infrastructure. Indeed, the world was thought to be on an irreversible path toward peace and prosperity early in the early 20th century, until the outbreak of Word War I. That war, coupled with the Great Depression, and then World War II, dramatically set back global economic integration. And in many ways, we are still trying to recover the momentum we lost over the past 90 years or so.
That fragility of nearly a century ago still exists today—as we saw in the aftermath of September 11th, when U. S. air travel came to a halt, financial markets shut down, and the economy weakened. The current turmoil in financial markets also poses great difficulty for the stability and reliability of those markets, as well as for the global economy. Credit market strains have intensified and spread across asset classes and banks, precipitating a financial shock that many have characterized as the most serious since the 1930s. These episodes are reminders that a breakdown in globalization—meaning a slowdown in the global flows of goods, services, capital, and  people—can have extremely adverse consequences.
Openness to globalization will, on its own, deliver economic growth: Integrating with the global economy is, as economists like to say, a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for economic growth. For globalization to be able to work, a country cannot be saddled with problems endemic to many developing countries, from a corrupt political class, to poor infrastructure, and macroeconomic instability.
The shrinking state: Technologies that facilitate communication and commerce have curbed the power of some despots throughout the world, but in a globalized world governments take on new importance in one critical respect, namely, setting, and enforcing, rules with respect to contracts and property rights. The potential of globalization can never be realized unless there are rules and regulations in place, and individuals to enforce them. This gives economic actors confidence to engage in business transactions.
Further undermining the idea of globalization shrinking states is that states are not, in fact, shrinking. Public expenditures are, on average, as high or higher today as they have been at any point in recent memory. And among OECD countries, government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP increased from 25.5 percent in 1965 to 36.6 percent in 2006.
The future of globalization.
Like a snowball rolling down a steep mountain, globalization seems to be gathering more and more momentum. And the question frequently asked about globalization is not whether it will continue, but at what pace.
A disparate set of factors will dictate the future direction of globalization, but one important entity—sovereign governments—should not be overlooked. They still have the power to erect significant obstacles to globalization, ranging from tariffs to immigration restrictions to military hostilities. Nearly a century ago, the global economy operated in a very open environment, with goods, services, and people able to move across borders with little if any difficulty. That openness began to wither away with the onset of World War I in 1914, and recovering what was lost is a process that is still underway. Along the process, governments recognized the importance of international cooperation and coordination, which led to the emergence of numerous international organizations and financial institutions (among which the IMF and the World Bank, in 1944).
Indeed, the lessons included avoiding fragmentation and the breakdown of cooperation among nations. The world is still made up of nation states and a global marketplace. We need to get the right rules in place so the global system is more resilient, more beneficial, and more legitimate. International institutions have a difficult but indispensable role in helping to bring more of globalization's benefits to more people throughout the world. By helping to break down barriers—ranging from the regulatory to the cultural—more countries can be integrated into the global economy, and more people can seize more of the benefits of globalization.
1 BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements (December 2006), p. 29.
2 IMF and International Telecommunications Union data.
3 Joseph Stiglitz (2003), Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton & Company), p. 4.
4 Remarks by former President of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo at the plenary session of the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 28, 2000.
6 Martin Wolf (2005), Why Globalization Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 157.
7 "Growth is Good for the Poor," Journal of Economic Growth (2002), and "Trade, Growth, and Poverty," The Economic Journal (2004).
8 From remarks at an UNCTAD conference in February 2000, in Johan Norberg (2003), In Defense of Global Capitalism (Washington: Cato Institute), p. 155.
9 Linda Lim (2001) The Globalization Debate: Issues and Challenges (Geneva: International Labor Organization).

The Impact of Globalization on Business.
I have traveled to more than 22 countries and have had the opportunity to transact business in various parts of Asia, the Middle East, Canada, Central and Latin America, Russia and former Eastern Block countries, India, and the European Community. Conducting business on a global basis has always been of great personal interest to me, and it has also been both a pleasurable and financially rewarding experience. However the days of doing business abroad are no longer a luxury. The ability to conduct business internationally is an absolute necessity if you hope to remain competitive in today’s marketplace. In today’s post I’ll look at the impact of globalization on business…
Expanding the geographic footprint of your business has always been an expensive and risky proposition – the risks have not gone away, they’ve just shifted. I believe we’re in an environment where we have a short window (3 – 5 years) before the landscape changes again. Currently, globalization is a developing and stabilizing force, but I’m fearful that the interdependencies now shoring up some of the risk, may at some point down the road turn against us in the form of financial ripple turns Tsunami. Here’s the caution – times change and markets are fluid. Short term opportunity abroad abounds, but with that opportunity comes the potential for unforeseen future risk. That said, and with eyes wide open, if you are not taking aggressive steps to expatriate your business then you may be making a big mistake.
In today’s marketplace conducting business internationally is as much of a defensive play as an offensive play. In examining the upside of going global, consider the sheer size of international markets as contrasted with the size of the domestic market and you will likely find that the majority of your potential customers live abroad. So if you could double, triple or quadruple your revenue why wouldn’t you aggressively pursue that goal? Now consider the downside of not going global – if your company is not pursuing those customers your competition will be. They will not only take a first mover’s advantage of securing customer loyalty and brand recognition, but they will also tie-up key partners and distribution agreements. As consumers continue to become more demanding and the world economy continues to flatten there will soon be an expectation that you be able to serve multiple markets in a seamless fashion. Being a slow adopter in today’s world could eventually damage your business.
The phenomenon of “Globalization” is not new. In fact, it has been creeping up on us since the dawn of time; it just hasn’t been so visibly impactful until recent years. The broad macro-economic effects of globalization being experienced today arguably became most identifiable with the end of the cold war, and have only continued their rapid advancement with the development of third world countries and other emerging markets, establishment of free trade agreements, the creation of the Internet and other technology/communications improvements, the growing multi-national footprint of business, the emergence of the European Community, the stabilizing impact of the Euro on global currency markets, as well as the increased liquidity of more sophisticated and efficient capital markets.
The above referenced worldwide macroeconomic maturation, more commonly referred to today as “Globalization,” has served to stabilize business and financial markets in such a dramatic fashion that many industry pundits have yet to reach an understanding of the depth and breadth of the impact it has had on lowering political, financial, and economic volatility. Here’s the trick – markets don’t go up for ever, and when you tie your fortunes to a broader set of variables and unknowns you expose your business to the potential for a domino impact that will work against you. I mentioned a 3 -5 year window above, but like anyone who looks forward, this is just my best guess. At some point in the near to mid term, I believe we’ll see a shift in markets that unwind much of the current stability driving our current frothy capital markets and business expansion.
Let’s examine the stabilizing factor globalization has had on the world economy. Today’s trade deficit, petroleum pricing, down equity markets, housing crisis, constricted flow of funds, and overall cost of living should be challenging us more than it is. Conventional economic theory would suggest that with many of the negative economic metrics in play today, our interest rate environment should more closely resemble that of 1980 than the low interest rates we are experiencing today. The difference between today’s financial landscape as contrasted with that of 1980 is the emergence of a truly global economy which is acting as a stabilizing factor. In fact, when the US went through the Great Depression it was largely a result of having an isolated economy. If (more likely when) the US economy does falter again, the inter-dependant nature of the global economy will likely stave off a collapse. In the event of severe financial turmoil in the US, you would see foreign investment from the G7, and countries like China, Japan, and Dubai would see it as an opportunity to affordably acquire interests in US companies.
The theory espoused above, while working for us presently, can only hold true for so long…The stability we are experiencing now, could turn against us if the economic downturn continues for an extended period. You see, the interdependancy that is presently shielding the US could in fact turn into a global domino effect causing a worldwide recession if the right combination of things fall into place. I guess what I’m trying to point out here is that the current hedge could turn into an adverse accelarant in a worse case scenario…
Also keep in mind that emerging markets in Eastern Europe, India, Latin America, China and the rest of Asia present scenarios for higher growth, even on a risk adjusted basis. On an aggregate basis the statistics are impressive. For example, currently 80 percent of the world’s population accounts for 20 percent of world GDP. By 2018, 50 percent of world GDP will be accounted for by emerging markets. Consider the following:
1. Rising Economies : Over the past decade, China has routinely experienced 8 percent to 9 percent annualized growth and India has followed closely with 7 percent annualized growth.
2. Demographics : For the most part, these markets represent younger populations, growing numbers of well-educated professionals, an expanding middle class, growing consumer bases, urbanization, and rising incomes. In addition, the structure of family life for these modern middle class populations is assuming the “western” nuclear form and moving away from the more traditional extended cohabitating family unit.
3. Commercial Demand : The economic expansion, as well as the presence of global companies that bring employment oriented around intellectual capital, is creating demand for modern, western style commercial real estate infrastructure. Core assets such as office, industrial, retail, multi-family, and hospitality are all experiencing rising demand.
4. Infrastructure Improvement : While communications, utilities, and efficient transportation can still be spotty in areas, it is much improved over what one would have experienced even a decade ago. In most metropolitan areas you will have most of the creature comforts that you experience in the United States.
5. Closed market systems opening up : Most successful emerging markets have been engaged in systematic reform of basic societal values we take for granted in the developed world. These include property rights, legal process, and published regulations and statues. In addition, specific reforms such as privatization of state owned industry, relaxation of capital controls, and liberalization of rules regarding foreign direct investment are all encouraging growth and investment.
In order to meet increased consumer demand many businesses are attempting to expand their geographic footprint and extend their value chain to an international level. The impact of globalization on business is best evidenced by the huge proliferation in cross-border transactions. In order to protect yields and maintain competitiveness, businesses are continuing to diversify their footprint as it lowers the beta factor on their investments by spreading risk across a broader market.
There is nary a week that passes where I don’t speak with offshore entities looking for inbound opportunities or domestic businesses seeking outbound plays. The bottom line on globalization is that it creates an opportunity for businesses to expand revenue streams, diversify risk and increase brand equity. My suggestion is to get a toe hold in the global market before the ship leaves the harbor and your window of opportunity has closed. I would also suggest you pick your markets well, and that you realize a few years down the road, the landscape will look differently than it does today – this could work for you or against you. Use caution.
Mike Myatt.
Mike Myatt is a leadership advisor to Fortune 500 CEOs and their Boards of Directors. Widely regarded as America’s Top CEO Coach, he is recognized by Thinkers50 as a global authority on leadership. He is the bestselling author of Hacking Leadership (Wiley) and Leadership Matters… (OP), a Forbes leadership columnist, and is the Founder and Chairman at N2Growth.
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Impact of globalization on modern trade system

A Very Long-Term View.
The many meanings of the word "globalization" have accumulated very rapidly, and recently, and the verb, "globalize" is first attested by the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1944. In considering the history of globalization, some authors focus on events since 1492, but most scholars and theorists concentrate on the much more recent past.
But long before 1492, people began to link together disparate locations on the globe into extensive systems of communication, migration, and interconnections. This formation of systems of interaction between the global and the local has been a central driving force in world history. [for very, very long-term world system history, see Andre Gunder Frank and especially "the five thousand year world system: an interdisciplinary introduction," by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills.]
1. c.325 BCE: Chandragupta Maurya becomes a Buddhist and combines the expansive powers of a world religion, trade economy, and imperial armies for the first time. Alexander the Great sues for peace with Chandragupta in 325 at Gerosia, marking the eastward link among overland routes between the Mediterranean, Persia, India, and Central Asia.
2. c.1st centuries CE: the expansion of Buddhism in Asia -- makes its first major appearance in China under the Han dynasty, and consolidates cultural links across the Eurasian Steppe into India -- the foundation of the silk road.
3. 650-850: the expansion of Islam from the western Mediterranean to India.
4. 960-1279: the Song Dynasty in China (and contemporary regimes in India) which produced the economic output, instruments (financial), technologies, and impetus for the medieval world economy that linked Europe and China by land and sea across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean.
5. 1100: The Rise of Genghis Khan and the integration of overland routes across Eurasia -- producing also a military revolution in technologies of war on horseback and of fighting from military fortifications.
6. 1300: the creation of the Ottoman Empire spanning Europe, North Africa, and Middle East, and connected politically overland with Safavids and dynasties in Central Asia and India -- creating the great imperial arch of integration that spawned a huge expansion of trade with Europe but ALSO raised the cost for trade in Asia for Europeans ---
a side effect of this was the movement of Genoese merchant wealth to Spain to search for a Western Sea route to the Indies.
7. 1492 and 1498: Columbus and da Gama travel west and east to the Indies, inaugurating an age of European seaborne empires.
8. 1650: the expansion of the slave trade expanded was dramatic during the seventeenth century -- and it sustained the expansion of Atlantic Economy, giving birth to integrated economic/industrial systems across the Ocean -- with profits accumulating in Europe during the hey day of mercantalism and rise of the Englightenment. (estimates of slave trade population)
9. 1776/1789: US and French Revolutions mark the creation of modern state form based on alliances between military and business interests and on popular representation in aggressively nationalist governments -- which leads quickly to new imperial expansion under Napolean and in the Americas -- the economic interests of "the people" and the drive to acquire and consolidate assets for economic growth also lead to more militarized British, Dutch, and French imperial growth in Asia. These national empires expand during the industrial revolution, which also provokes class struggles and new ideas and movements of revolution within the national states and subsequently in their empires as well. The historical chronology of modernity coincides with the chronology of globalization from the eighteenth century.
10. 1885: Treaties of Berlin mark a diplomatic watershed in the age modern imperial expansion by European and American overseas empires, beginning the age of "high imperialism" with the legalization of the Partition of Africa, which also marks a foundation-point for the creation of international law. In the last decades of the 19th century, the global "white man's burden" became a subject of discussion. (Here is an old syllabus for an undergraduate course on "US Empire" with some useful links.)
11. 1929: the great depression hits all parts of the world at the same time -- in contrast to depression of late 19th century, but following rapid, simultaneous price rise in most of the world during the 1920s. Preceded by first event called World War and followed by first really global war across Atlantic and Pacific.
12. 1950: decolonization of European empires in Asia and Africa produces world of national states for the first time and world of legal-representative-economic institutions in the UN system and Bretton Woods.
--- perhaps 1989 and the end of the cold war and globalization of post-industrial capitalism which appears to be eroding the power of the national states is on a par with the watershed of the 1950s -- we'll see , Part II.
Part II: globalization since the fourteenth century.
1. The Segmented Trading World of Eurasia, circa 1350.