School Essays

Geography(The development gap)

Anthony Delgado

TV3B

To what extent is globalisation responsible for the widening or narrowing of the development gap?

This essay is about a question we received during class: "To what extent is globalisation responsible for the widening or narrowing the development gap?". The goal of this essay is to explain how much we think globalisation is responsible for the development gap.

Before I can explain the globalisation's responsibility for the development gap, I need to make clear what both of those terms actually mean.

Globalisation is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies and governments of different nations. The term is also frequently used to reference creating an integrated global economy marked by free trade, the free flow of capital and use of foreign labor markets to maximize returns.

The development gap is the space between nations demographically, economically and developmentally. This gap is measured based on the industrial progress and capabilities of the infrastructure of a country, which ranks it in comparison to global standards. Because of this ranking system, it's easy to measure how well a country is doing.

Personally, I believe that globalization has diminished the development gap. And it should, but it is a secondary effect of globalization, and by itself cannot overcome countries facing problems like corruption, lack of rule of law, bad economic policies and the likes.

Take South Korea as an example, where access to a global market has dramatically increased their market. Their starting point was Japanese occupation: Their neighbours were two communist countries and their former occupier, not exactly a great situation for regional trade. Almost all the progress they made was because of globalisation.

But the narrowing of the development gap is not something that is only limited to South Korea. Globalisation has narrowed poverty between rich and poor globally. For example, the GDP(Gross Domestic Product) per capita of China and India have risen much faster, and many hundreds of millions have been raised from poverty in these two countries since economic reforms. Entering the global economy, including the WTO(World Trade Organization), have allowed these two countries to grow and thus improve the average income of their population. In Vietnam, there is a story of rice farmers who have benefited from exporting rice as export controls were lifted.

Globalisation has caused the development gap to narrow through poorer countries being able to trade with other countries, resulting in that country to have an increased inflow of wealth. Therefore, I can conclude that globalisation has played a vital role in bridging the development gap.