Globalisation: questions and answers
In the Edexcel style....
[I seem to have done a lot of talking about globalisation in recent days with AQA students, so I thought I would table a couple of exam questions in the style of the Edexcel exam papers. For students of other exam Boards, please note that these questions are assessed over 12 marks, are expected to be answered in about 15/18 minutes, and consequently I restrict myself to a maximum of 400 words. You might find them useful to improve if you have more marks available, with time for more words.
Please also note that the process of globalisation is changing. I have pointed to this briefly in a previous post here . ]
Assess the importance of developments in transport and communications in contributing to a ‘shrinking world’.
The shrinking world is the idea of space-time compression, meaning that the world has become smaller because transport and communication technology have reduced the friction of distance and made places closer in terms of travel time. Many people can now communicate instantly with others all around the world. However, other factors have also helped the world to ‘shrink’ and globalise.
Communications technology has been making the world ‘shrink’ since the telephone became common around 1900. This technology allowed places far apart to communicate in real-time. However, it was expensive and exclusive until the 1950s. More recently, mobile phones have brought communication to a mass market, even in developing and emerging countries. However, the internet and especially the high bandwidth sub-sea fibre optic cable network between continents is the most important technology in a ‘shrinking’ world. This allows TNCs to transfer huge volumes of banking, business and financial data around the world and so makes physical location unimportant.
The transport technology that has contributed the most to the shrinking world is the jet aircraft because since the 1960s it has dramatically reduced travel times between continents, whereas earlier technologies such as trains and cars only reduced times within continents. Also, air travel has become relatively cheap allowing large numbers of people to experience the shrinking world effect (going on holiday, for instance), not just an elite. Containers are often said to be very important to globalisation, but they have really reduced the cost of transporting goods, rather than made the world feel smaller. Some other factors are also important.
The rise of global branded products from TNCs like McDonalds, KFC, Coca-Cola, and Nike that are available everywhere, and media that is now everywhere like Facebook and Disney, mean that even very distant places feel less exotic than in the past. Some issues like climate change are now common to almost everyone in the world making the world feel more like a single place with shared problems.
In conclusion, modern communications technology has been more important than transport technology because it is now ubiquitous and cheap. Very fast transport is still not available to all. In addition, the actions, and brands of TNCs have shrunk the world culturally and economically. (368)
Assess the extent to which global shift has caused more social costs than social benefits.
The global shift is the movement of secondary and tertiary industry to Asian countries like China, India, and Vietnam in the last 30 years. It has been made possible by globalisation and technologies like the internet and shipping containers allowing production to shift to lower cost locations from developed countries. It has social costs and benefits to both people in places that have gained jobs and ones that have lost them.
A very significant social impact has happened in places that have lost secondary sector jobs to Asian emerging countries. These include the USA Rustbelt, northern England, and the Ruhr Valley in Germany. These deindustrialised areas have suffered a spiral of social decline with rising deprivation, and poor industry-related health issues as jobs have been lost. In many cases, skilled younger people have left these regions leaving behind a core of ‘hard to employ’ male workers with unwanted industrial skills. Regeneration has been slow here because the regions have a weak tax base to pay for it. While there might be environmental benefits of heavy industry and its pollution moving aboard, the social benefits are few.
In Asia, many new employment opportunities have opened in China’s Pearl River Delta and Maharashtra State in India as manufacturing and service jobs have moved in. These jobs usually pay up to $10,000 per year, allowing people to enter the global middle-class. However, hours worked are long, conditions are harsh, and unions are usually banned. The drive for low costs can lead to tragedy such as the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka in 2013 in which over 1,100 died. The factory supplied Primark, Walmart, and Gucci.
Most factory and office workers are aged under 30 and are rural–urban migrants. This means families have been split up and workers are housed in small houses in increasingly congested and cramped megacities. Rapid urban growth, new factories and roads have led to very poor air quality in many Asian cities, and this has a cost on people’s health.
Overall, the global shift has had major social consequences, with the benefits of higher incomes and steady jobs offset by dramatic lifestyle changes, health impacts and rising inequality. However, most Asian workers would argue they are better off than their parents, meaning the social benefits outweigh the costs. Deindustrialised developed world regions have in some cases been regenerated but often not very successfully. (398)