CHAPTER ONE
1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Globalization has benefited the advanced countries at the expense of the less developed countries. To the Marxists, this is not surprising as they hold that globalization is a product of the capitalist. They argued that the capitalist system epitomizes exploitation, it involved class conflict and it is a system of unequal relation marked by an unequal exchange. It is a system where one group must benefit at the expense of the other. Thus globalization being of such a system is bound to be exploitative. Several scholars has traced the origins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history long before the European age of discovery to the new world. Some even trace the origins to the third millennium BCE. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the pace of globalization has intensified at a rapid rate, especially during the post cold war era. The term globalization has being in use since the mid-1980’s and since the mid 1990’s.However, the main originators of globalization can be traced to the classical economists that showed that trade can be beneficial to their nation. Globalization developed through the
Pre-capitalist era to the period of industrial revolution in England and evolved into what we are seeing today. The above quote underscores the government especially in developing countries to know the manner they pursue domestic economic policies. They should gear all the effort towards restructuring their economy to global economic changes in such a way that they will benefit from globalization.
In 2000, the international monetary fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people and the dissemination of knowledge. Further, environmental challenges such as climate change, cross-boundary water and air pollution and over fishing of the ocean are linked with globalization. Globalization processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources and the natural environment. The most Drastic evidence of globalization is the increase in trade and the movement of capital stocks, bonds, currencies and other investment from the period of 1950-2001. The volume of world’s export rose by 20 times and by 2001, world trade amounted to a quarter of all the goods and services produced in the world. In the early 1970’s only $10 billion to $20 billion in national currencies was exchange daily, by the early part of the 21st century, more than $1.5 billion worth of yen, Euros, dollars, pounds and other currencies were traded daily to support the expanded levels of trade investment which is as a result of globalization.