There has been plenty of discussion on how exactly to measure globalization; whether we are talking about political, economic or cultural aspects there has been a drive to quantify things so that we may compare them with previous eras and see just where this process is going.

One of the attempts to provide a comprehensive tool for measuring globalization comes from the Swiss KOF Foundation. The KOF Index of Globalization allows you to query a database for a variety of years and countries and generate graphs or maps presenting a variety of globalization data.

“Globalization” is a rather broad term and it means different things to different people. There is not only the consideration of what exactly is meant by globalization, but how to interpret data in order to show trends in the process. In the KOF project they look at things like levels of foreign direct investment, outgoing telephone traffic and membership in international organizations to measure economic, social and political globalization, respectively. They look at a set of about 30 factors, and as Dani Rodrik points out: “they lump together things that are conceptually distinct and which represent answers to different questions”.

Indeed. Sometimes I wonder what the attempts to measure globalization are trying to do. Again, as a broad term globalization does not define any discrete ideas which could easily be applied to policy choices. Not to say that there is no value in the pursuit, I just think that it is important to consider why we are measuring globalization. Is it for the sake of measurement, or is there a specific problem that we are trying to solve.

As I will probably expound upon later, we might be able to get somewhere by considering more the network effects and the position of nodes as they relate to globalization. Again, we would have to properly define the question, but we might be able to do things like find similarities in roles between two nations in separate parts of the world in order to better predict what their future might look like.

My point is: what does it really mean if a nation is more or less globalized? How can we respond to that? Also, we might be taking the nation-state for granted as a unit of measurement to the exclusion of other actors such as multinational corporations or migrant groups.

[KOF link via Dani Rodrik]

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Globalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.