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Globalization Generates Poverty Essay

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What can two dollars buy you? A small coffee at Starbucks, a candy bar, bag of chips, and a soda, a slice of pizza. For nearly three billion people, approximately half of the world’s population, two dollars a day is all the money that the person has to live on. Moreover, of the 2.8 billion children in the world, 1 billion grow up in poverty; 640 million without adequate shelter, 400 millions with no access to safe water, and 270 million with no access to health services (UNICEF 2014). One proposed reason for this harsh reality of high poverty rates is globalization - the growing integration of economies and societies around the world. The claim that globalization generates poverty has been the focus of many debates for the last twenty …show more content…

This point is also endorsed by Stiglitz who stated:

One possible consequence of increases in economic globalization might be decreases in the danger of war. The argument in favor of this proposition begins with the point that as economic interconnections between two countries increase, each achieves greater welfare, and therefore each country develops a progressively a greater stake in the continuation and intensification of interconnections with its partner. The second step in the argument is that because war would lead to a breakage of their mutually profitable and beneficial economic contacts, partners have a progressively stronger incentive not to permit any particular political or diplomatic disagreement to escalate to military conflict. In general, then, as economic interdependence between two countries goes up, each nation's incentives to manage and resolve disputes short of war also go up, with the result being a lower overall danger of war as the world experiences intensified economic globalization (2000).

Grossman and Wong as elaborated on the fact that globalization will lead to new resources which “allows a country to capitalize on resources that would otherwise not be valuable… [and] as a results countries can grow their economies… in ways that were not possible before” (2014). Grossman, Wong, and many others who advocate

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