The political globalization indicator looks for aspects of a country that would make it more international and diplomatic such as the diffusion of government policies. It also looks at the number of embassies and high commissions a country has as well as the number of international organizations to which a country is a member of. Furthermore, this indicator takes the number of UN peace missions a country has participated in and the number of signed treaties between two or more states into account. However, it can be argued that the number of UN peace missions a country has participated in does not provide evidence of a more globalized country since reasons for participating in such events tend to be more complex.
The social globalization indicator generally expressed as the spread of ideas, information, images and people through 3 different components: personal contacts, information flows and cultural proximity. Within the personal contact component, this looks at the direct interaction among people living in different countries perhaps through social media and telephone calls. It also looks at the international telecom traffic and the degree of tourism within a given country. The second component of this indicator looks at the measure of potential flow of ideas and images, number of internet users and the share of household with a television set. With an ever changing means of how we receive media, televisions are becoming a thing of the past as more people rely on online television and streaming services such as Netflix therefore, this aspect of the component are becoming less relevant as time passes. The final component of this indicator is the cultural proximity which takes into account the number of imported and exported books as well as the number of McDonald’s restaurants and IKEA Stores. The problem with looking solely at the number of McDonald’s and IKEA stores is that countries may not have McDonalds due to economic reasons such as in Iceland where there was a collapse of the Icelandic Krona or the fact that there may not be a demand for fast food in that area such as in Seychelles.
Other issues that could be addressed is the frequency of data and timing that the data was collected since there can be massive influences on some of the components very rapidly providing a skewed representation of what the globalization within a country is actually like. Also, the components are not weighted equally where 37% is social, 39% is economic and 25% is political. This begs the question, why is the indicators not 1/3 or 33.3% each and why is the largest percentile placed on the most subjective and inherently the least accurate component?
Using this index, it does produces 3 geographical tiers of the global economy – the core, semi periphery and the periphery. The 'core' consists of Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Israel. Within this region is where most of the positive characteristics of globalization typically occur: transnational links, modern development (i.e. higher wages, access to healthcare, adequate food/water/shelter), scientific innovation, and increasing economic prosperity. These countries also tend to be highly industrialized and have a rapidly-growing service (tertiary) sector. The top twenty countries ranked by the United Nations Human Development Index are all in the core. The semi periphery consists HIC’s and MIC’s such as Malaysia, Mexico, and South Africa. These tend to be resource exporting countries, newly industrialized countries and poorer European countries. Some of these countries could now be seen as part of the CORE (South Korea) others are characterized by regional disparities and social polarisation (Brazil) others with very rapid economic growth (Slovakia, China). The periphery tends to be LIC’s which are mainly Africa. This is due to small domestic markets, a lack of infrastructure, population increase, low economic output, low levels of economic diversification and a high agricultural population.
by
kalainh (student)
