The good side of globalization movement

By David Walker

LONDON: You would not normally call Saudi Arabia or even the United Arab Emirates "global" countries, especially in the boo- word sense used by Tuesday's protesters. But they are in fact remarkably open to the world; they emit a lot more telecoms traffic than they receive. Contrast those Islamic countries with Pakistan, where incoming calls hugely outnumber messages out.

Some of the imbalances in international telecoms have to do with diaspora. Poland, Egypt and Vietnam are "deficit" countries in the telecoms stakes probably because large numbers of people emigrated from those countries but call home a lot. These figures are surely an indicator of globalization. It is often painted as an anonymous process, to do with capital flows, but is also about intensely personal contact. Add to telephony remittances sent home and tourists and the picture starts to round out. It is not necessarily more positive but it is certainly more human.

Globalization has been much blamed but little measured, the latter perhaps explaining the former. What you cannot put dimensions to is easy to fear as an unstoppable juggernaut. When you put numbers in it immediately looks less oppressive and -- this is the gist of a recent essay in Foreign Policy -- may even diminish. The magazine recently broke new ground by publishing an index of globalization. It claims the rate at which globalization has been growing has started to fall in recent years.

A word of caution, especially for those who equate globalization with American cultural imperialism. Foreign Policy is published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is a not-for-profit foundation with good internationalist credentials. But the index has been compiled in collaboration with AT Kearney (a global consultant) which is owned by EDS. This is the company that bid to run UK air traffic control and, at some considerable cost, supplies IT services to the UK government. It is a company with a vested interest in... globalization.

Which of course needs to be measured in terms of the flow of goods, services and capital. Obvious indicators include investment, capital flows and foreign income as a proportion of national income and convergence between domestic and international prices. Information technology is a proxy for "openness" so the population online and the number of internet hosts or secure servers per capita become significant. Foreign Policy's list is not exhaustive or unexceptionable. The point is, not all the indicators move in the same direction or at anything like the same speed. And the American way is not, it turns out, the global way.

The winner of the "most globalized" country prize goes to Singapore. Anti-capitalist protests would not be welcome in Lee Kuan Yew's Asian paradise but they would have to respect how he managed to insulate the country while pursuing an aggressively open policy in trade and finance. And it is open. Singapore's outgoing telephone traffic is nearly 390 minutes per year per head, four times as much as from the United States.

In a different way, the countries ranked second to eighth on Foreign Policy's list of most globalized show that cultural differences or indeed versions of socialism need not be casualties of economic liberalism. For top dogs after Singapore are the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, the Irish Republic and Austria. With the exception of the Republic of Ireland, they are notoriously collectivist. The Dutch and Swedes seem to have found a way to combine trade, technological advance and tourism with high tax and public spending. Dutch foreign investment is worth 19 percent of GDP.

Some 44 percent of Swedish households are online, while Finland and Norway have more than 70 web-connected servers (internet hosts) per 1,000 people. And generous welfare benefits. Someone should tell Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that they too can have free trade and investment and social security. Foreign Policy comments "the fact that Sweden, Finland and the rest of Scandinavia have been able to nurture fast moving technological developments with lumbering regulatory and tax regimes offers an unexpected contradiction". But only to Americans and Blair's advisers.

The UK comes next in the list followed by -- Scandinavians again -- Norway and Denmark. Then the United States, not as open as all that. Proportionately, the United States receives one sixth of Singapore's tourists and travelers. And Swiss citizens spend 400 percent more time on international phone calls than Americans. The United States "posted relatively low scores in measures of economic integration and personal contact with the rest of the world" -- which may be one reason for George Bush and national missile defense.

Israel and Malaysia feature in the top 20, signaling once again that globalization tells you very little about domestic policy. There is no Fukuyama-esque logic here. Meanwhile many countries remain "stalled at much lower levels of integration with little indication of change". Coca-colonization, as it used to be called, does not have much effect on underlying values and the arrival of McDonald's does not rule out progressive taxation.

On this index moreover globalization is positively correlated with fairness. The most open countries have more equitable income distribution and score well on measures of honesty in public and commercial affairs and political pluralism.

-- Guardian News Service