Summary Of Global Pillage

Written and published in 1994, the 'Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up’ is a book ahead of its time. It highlights the increasing threats of globalisation that is affecting people as consumers, workers, citizens and members of the family; and it offers solutions to how people can protect themselves and reassert control over their future. Globalisation, defined as the globalisation of capital by the Brecher and Costello, has granted corporations and international institutions with greater freedom and power in influencing the global world. The authors critically challenged the common belief that globalisation aids in the uplifting of the world population through putting forth their main argument of the ‘Race to the Bottom’, a catastrophic downward levelling process that arose from an unintended consequence of millions of unconnected decisions made by individuals and businesses pursuing their private interests, coupled with the deliberate policy objective of global corporations. Corporation sought to impose a “Corporate Agenda” on local and national governments and international institutions. This Corporate Agenda aims to minimize all barriers to downward levelling of environmental, labour and social costs and has been incorporated discretely in trade agreements like North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), in World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies of ‘shock therapy’ and ‘structural adjustment’, and also in government policies that lower conditions in pursuit of ‘competitiveness’. The authors proposed alternatives to the Corporate Agenda, which aims to raise the standard of those at the bottom through upward levelling, ...

... middle of paper ...

...ver the state of economies and lives of people. While I understand that this book serves to highlight the pressing issues of globalisation, the arguments made were often too one-sided in my opinion. For example, the authors argue that success stories of the Newly Industrialised Countries (NICs) like the East Asian Tigers came about largely based on the exploitation of labour and the unsustainable destruction of the environment. In this statement, the authors insinuate that economic growth can only be achieved via destructive means. However, being a 21st century citizen of one of the East Asian Tiger countries, Singapore, I could not disagree more. Embracing free trade policy and maintaining an export-led regime had given Singapore immense employment opportunity and foreign directed investments that spurred economic prosperity that allowed her to achieve her economic