Economic Globalization and China

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Globalization has, for better or worse, altered the economic arena for every country in the world. For many less developed countries, globalization has leveled the playing field so that their economies can compete with the larger, more developed ones such as the United States and other large western economies. For instance, technical engineers in India and China are now just as qualified as engineers in America, but at half the cost. The once large and prosperous service sector in the United States as well as telemarketing services have largely been sourced to India as a large exodus of American multinational corporations find cheaper workers who deliver comparable quality. This then seems to be the essence of globalization - businesses will go wherever it’s cheaper and more cost effective to do business, but without sacrificing the quality of the product, service, or experience. It follows that developed nations would stand at a considerable disadvantage against developing nations because most business, in terms of the cost of labor, is too expensive to conduct in developed nations as opposed to developing ones. However, Dani Rodrick, a specialist in international political economy, contradictorily asserts that globalization has brought little but good news to those with the products, skills, and resources in developing nations to market worldwide. He points out that for most of the world's developing countries, “the 1990s were a decade of frustration and disappointment. … Most of the former socialist economies ended the decade at lower levels of per-capita income than they started it—and even in the rare successes, such as Poland, poverty rates remained higher than under communism. East Asian economies such as South Korea, Thail...

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...ted in the world. Chinese currency markets were not unified until 1994. China resolutely refused to open its financial markets to foreigners, again until very recently. Most striking of all, China achieved its transformation without adopting private-property rights, let alone privatizing its state enterprises” (Rodrick). China's central government and its leaders were practical enough to understand the role that private incentives and market liberalization could play in producing results. However, “they were also smart enough to realize that the solution to their problems lay in institutional innovations suited to the local conditions—the household responsibility system, township and village enterprises, special economic zones, partial liberalization in agriculture and industry—rather than in off-the-shelf blueprints and Western rules of good behavior” (Rodrick).

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