
The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through.
While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.
After all, global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations…
wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people.
Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move.
More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing–and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates–has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise.
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