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Globalization: World
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Globalization is the process by which the economies of countries around the world become increasingly integrated over time. This integration occurs as technological advances expedite the trade of goods and services, the flow of capital, and the migration of people across international borders. The term has been used in this context since the 1980s, when computer technology first began making it easier and faster to conduct business internationally. Globalization can ... refer to the efforts of businesses to expand their operations to new countries and markets.
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Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world.
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Globalization engenders complexity. Throughout the world it is generating more intricate demographic profiles (see C. Suárez-Orozco, this volume), economic realities (see Bloom, this volume; Coatsworth, this volume), political processes, technology and media (see Jenkins, this volume; Battro, this volume), cultural facts and artifacts (see Watson, this volume; Jenkins, this volume), and identities (see Maira, this volume; C. Suárez-Orozco, this volume). Many countries are indeed undergoing intense demographic transformations. Sweden, a country of nine million people today, has a million immigrants, roughly half of them from the Muslim world (for other examples, see C. Suárez-Orozco, this volume). Economies likewise must adapt to the new, complex forces brought about by global capital. Local politics, too, are stretched in new waysfor example, when "absentee citizens" in the diaspora exercise political power in the communities they left behind.
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Globalization is not new, though. For thousands of years, people—and, later, corporations—have been buying from and selling to each other in lands at great distances, such as through the famed Silk Road across Central Asia that connected China and Europe during the Middle Ages. Likewise, for centuries, people and corporations have invested in enterprises in other countries. In fact, many of the features of the current wave of globalization are similar to those prevailing before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
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Globalization is often viewed as "coca-colonization" or "McDonaldization" – a homogeneous process with homogeneous outcomes. But this paper has shown that the dynamic, competitive forces unleashed as a result of global market integration produce both convergent and divergent dietary outcomes. All three case studies show how market integration increases the incentive for TFCs to sell cheap and/or standardized food around the world, while simultaneously increasing the incentive to create market niches. The creation of similarity and difference is ... part and parcel of the same process – the logical functioning of the global marketplace. In dietary terms, to follow the examples given here, this means that more people eat more soybean oil and processed foods, but different types of people eat different types of these foods bought from different types of stores and (possibly) influenced by different types of marketing techniques. This convergence-divergence model unites the apparently contradictory observations that, on the one hand, global market integration homogenises diets and, on the other, brings greater food variety (since it does both).
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Globalization is often viewed as a threat to the authority and sovereignty of the state. The Asian financial crisis demonstrates that governments are increasingly hard-pressed to insulate their populations from the pressures of the world economy. Nevertheless, the state remains the central actor in Asia, and its centrality is unlikely to change in a fundamental way even with the rise of globalization.
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