Looking at this graphic from a recent BBC poll asking whether or not people think economic globalization is moving too fast or not fast enough, I noticed that traditionally wealthy nations like Canada, USA in many cases seem to think that it is moving too fast, while newly industrializing economies such as Turkey, Mexico and the Philippines feel that globalization is not moving fast enough.

There may or may no be a solid correlation, but that is what jumped out at me on casual inspection(and it is actually addressed in the report, as well). Can we infer then that these countries have bought into globalization because they feel that they have more to gain from economic interconnectedness? That would be a pretty stark contrast to the prevailing wisdom that these countries oppose globalization as being exploitative and against their interests.

Data security is a hot topic in privacy circles. We have already accepted that corporations and other big institutions collect data about us. But do they keep it safe? Not always. Brad Edelman, a privacy researcher at the Harvard Business School shows a glaring vulnerability in Sears’ data protection scheme:

Sears offers no security whatsoever to prevent a ManageMyHome user from retrieving another person’s purchase history by entering that person’s name, phone number, and address.

Which is not OK. They have since fixed it, but the incident does highlight issues regarding the ways that companies do protect the large amounts of data that they collect from you. Granted, Sears has been scrimping on IT, but what is to say that this is not the case elsewhere? Last June, Privacy International rated Google as bottom-ranked in terms of data protection and privacy, which myself and others found surprising. And some found outrageous.

So is this really a big deal?
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Not that rethinking free trade is anything new - economists and social scientists have always found a variety of different angles from which to examine the issues linked to free trade.

What will be different now is that we will be hearing more about this rethinking in the news, Businessweek’s article “Economists Rethink Free Trade” marking a sort of turning point in current thought:

But something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We’re not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. Economists are, however, noting that their ideas can’t explain the disturbing stagnation in income that much of the middle class is experiencing. They also fear a protectionist backlash unless more is done to help those who are losing out. “Previously, you just had extremists making extravagant claims against trade,” says Gary C. Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Now there are broader questions being raised that would not have been asked 10 or 15 years ago.”

While I do understand how free trade does provide benefits in the aggregate by leveraging the power of comparative advantage, the economic models we use do not necessarily capture the nuance of the real world.
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So the other day I referred briefly to the new idea of decoupling. It never really gained any traction with me, and to be truthful I am not really sure how it gained traction with anybody.

How would it be possible to have a global, integrated economy and trading network where effects do not propagate. One might say that if there are multiple strong economies the failure of one might be mitigated by the others. As it is, the Asian and European markets are suffering from the changing fortunes of their American partners. This should not at all be unexpected. In fact, it is a classic social contagion problem.
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Troubling news from the world financial markets(US markets are closed today in observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday) as stock prices decline on fears of United States recession. The New York Times points out that:

The angst about the United States belies the popular theory that Europe and Asia are not as dependent on the American economy as they once were, in part because they trade more with each other. The theory, known as decoupling, has been used to explain why economies like China and Germany have kept growing robustly, even as the United States has slowed.

Emphasizing the fact that despite the strong growth of Asian economies in the past decade, United States can still exert a powerful economic pull on those nations. The global market seems to persist as officials from the European Central Bank have also questioned the idea that the world’s major markets have “decoupled”, making them less subject to the recent downturn in American fortunes.
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One of the hottest debates in globalization discussions is the changing nature of the nation-state. While I won’t go into all of the arguments and views here, I will just say that the perspectives are many. As time goes on I will explore more of them, but for now I want to focus on an article by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, “What People Will Die For”. In it, Zakaria asserts that because of globalization, subnationalist identities are asserting themselves and are coming to the forefront in global politics:

Globalization and democratization are the broad trends of the day, and both have the effect of empowering small groups within countries and weakening the nation-state. Gujarat can prosper without much reference to or help from New Delhi. The Sindhis can maintain their sense of identity far better today—with the proliferation of regional television, Web-based communities and cheap communication—than ever before.

As Zakaria points out, these are very old and very firm identities. It is not always a religious conflict within nations, but rather a clash of subnational ideologies. I would not go so far as to say that this is all leading to the collapse of the nation-state(to be replaced with smaller nation-states, perhaps), but it does bring up the issue of legitimacy.
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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.
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