By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Jul 12 1999 (IPS)

Globalisation is a double edged sword, cutting people in on international communication and co-operation, but increasingly cutting people out of the benefits, according to a United Nations (UN) report.

The UN Human Development Report 1999, released Monday, shows that globalisation’s advances over the last 10 to 15 years have been accompanied by growing inequality – as much on the world scale as within both rich and poor countries.

The most recent edition of the report, which the UN Development Programme (UNDP) publishes annually, focuses on the relationship between globalisation and human development.

Economist Richard Jolly, project co-ordinator, stated that the report takes a broad view of globalisation, not the narrow view which focuses only on trade and finance.

The UNDP document is concerned with culture and crime, takes on questions of biotechnology and of the Internet (the global computer network), and concludes with a proposal for reinventing the system of global governance for the next century.

Jolly indicated that the combination of all these elements, “including new rules and regulations, is what’s new about globalisation,” because it is not really a new phenomenon. “It can be seen in the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas or in the period 1870 to 1930,” he explained.

The new wave of globalisation, that began between 1970 and 1980, includes new dimensions: shrinking time, shrinking space, and disappearing borders – linking people more closely than ever before, and enabling multinational corporations to make decisions that have an immediate impact on people around the world.

The UNDP observed, however, that this linking is only partial. Even if the processes mentioned can create a “global village,” not everyone is a citizen. Even in industrialised countries, for example, only a minority have Internet access.

According to the document’s statistics, of those who have Internet access, the overwhelming majority are male, white, young and educated. In Great Britain, 50 percent of the people connected to the Internet have at least one university degree.

The globalisation process has two edges: on one side, it includes many people, but on the other, it excludes many more, affirmed Jolly at the Geneva press conference when he presented the UNDP report.

Of the 200 wealthiest people in the world, 65 live in North America, 55 in Europe, 13 in other industrialised nations, three in Eastern Europe and the Community of Independent States, 30 in the Asian-Pacific, 16 in the Arab nations, 17 in Latin America and the Caribbean, and one in sub-Saharan Africa.

The wealth of this group is greater than the total income of 41 percent of the world population. The total fortune of the three wealthiest people is more than the sum gross national product (GNP) of the least developed nations, which have a total of 600 million people.

Jolly clarified that the UNDP view of the globalisation process is not always negative, saying that the phenomenon has been beneficial for several countries.

Positive examples of globalisation arise from a diverse group of countries, and not just from the so-called “Asian miracle,” before – and during the recovery from – the region’s financial crisis, said Jolly.

Among the globalisation elements the report highlights are: Internet and Interpol, popular culture and international crime, advances in immunisation and the expansion of acquired immuno- deficiency syndrome (AIDS) – contradictions that are “part and parcel of this world,” Jolly said.

Money laundering and the profits of those who use globalisation for criminal ends inject 1.5 trillion dollars every year into “the economy of ‘bads,’ that goes along with the global economy of goods,” punned Jolly.

The report mentions the challenges faced by the globalisation process and maintains that it must be broadened.

The current debate on world governance is too limited, excessively concentrated on issues of economy and finance, and too aligned with the objectives of the Group of Seven (G-7) richest countries, which “at times, is just the G-1,” commented Jolly.

The UNDP affirmed that “the most important need is to bring human concerns into the core of global governance.” Once that point is reached, questions of ethics will be included in economic questions, stated Jolly.

The document recommends, said Jolly, that developing countries join forces to create “a coherent set of policies and actions to obtain the benefits of globalisation and to protect their people against its costs and risks,” as well as strengthening regional bargaining.

The UNDP report also formulates a call to face problems of human insecurity, such as those created by “financial volatility,” which was a determining factor in the Asian crisis that began in July 1998.

An estimate of the costs of the crisis for the period 1998 to 2000 reached two trillion dollars in economic losses for the countries that are still recovering, such as South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and to a lesser extent, Indonesia, said Jolly.

But human recovery has been slower than economic recovery. Jolly quoted two Korean economists who analysed several crises and established that, once the economy has recovered, it takes another two or three years for human recovery in terms of nutrition and education.

Among the different factors of human insecurity, the UNDP indicated AIDS and the lethal Ebola virus, as well as financial volatility and economic instability.

One of the report’s chapters is dedicated to the inequality in culture – especially in areas of music, cinema and television programmes.

Jolly mentioned the case of Latin America, where two-thirds of television programming is produced outside of the continent, according to a study by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Jolly stressed that, given such inequalities, the UNDP takes the side of those, like the French government, who maintain that there are reasons for a “cultural exception” – keeping the culture issue separate from general trade liberalisation.

The UNDP document proposes the creation of a high-level council to co-ordinate globalisation-related policies and to manage their implementation so the process has a more positive impact on human development.

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