Why does globalisation generate winners and losers - Essay Example

Against this background, this essay seeks to critically analyse the extent to which globalisation can be said to be causing more harm than good to the other countries. The essay starts by defining the concept and goes on to analyse the factors that make globalisation unfavorable to the other countries. Basically, globalisation can be defined as the economic activity taking place across the national boundaries (Buckman 2004). Globalisation is a result of internationalisation of financial markets which aims to promote free trade as well as direct investment among member states across the world.

 The advent of globalisation has resulted in the liberalisation of trade where the geographical barriers that used to block this kind of trade have been removed. This has resulted in people from different geographical regions becoming more connected. There are key players that drive globalisation and these include the multinational corporations, World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Rodrick 2001). Governments in different countries also play a pivotal role with regards to the concept of globalisation as they are the overall authority which would be responsible for regulation of the operations of the multinational companies.

The WTO also plays a pivotal role in that it facilitates the platform through which international trade agreements are negotiated and enforced among member states. On the other hand, the World Bank and the IMF are major actors in that they provide with the needed financial assistance in the form of loans as well as technical assistance to the governments or multinational corporations that wish to invest in other different countries. However, whilst the concept of globalisation is noble in that it liberalised trade among nations, it can be noted that it is not the case the rich and powerful nations are in most cases on top of the situation where they are the ones who are seen carrying investment to lesser developed countries.

This emanates from the view that the large financial institutions that should sponsor the activities of globalisation such as World Bank and IMF are controlled by the powerful and developed western nations. These developed nations have all the financial assistance they need at their disposal and they are the ones seen investing in poor and less developed countries whereas the less developed countries are not able to invest in developed countries. Thus, the flow of the wealth is often seen as one sided and there is no equality in terms of sharing of the wealth (Bond 2002).

The wealth is seen flowing from poor countries back to the developed countries hence these nations will be winners while the poor countries will be losers. The developed countries aim at extracting wealth especially in rich mineral resources areas while the local people of the host country will have little to show for the investment carried out at their door step by the foreigners. The investors often get a huge chunk of the revenue generated from the investment carried in other countries. The local people are losers in this case as they suffer the fate of being used as cheap labour whereby they will be given very little pay that does not correspond with the amount of work they will be doing.

Globalisation has often been criticized for the unfair redistribution of wealth that has been obtained in poor countries. The less developed countries in most cases do not have equal powers compared to their counterparts from the developed nations. For example, many African countries are very rich in terms of the natural resources they possess but unfortunately, most of these countries are very poor and are dependent on aid from the rich nations. Instead of