The April 16, 2007, edition of Forbes magazine carries a timely article with facts confuting the left-wing assertion that globalization and free trade make people poorer and more oppressed.
Why Globalization is Good reminds us of an obvious point: how can India and China have made such tremendous economic strides, with a large middle class existing for the first time, if globalization and free trade are as oppressive as organizations like Food Not Bombs assert?
Some excerpts:
Cut to 2007, and the numbers are in: The protesters and do-gooders are just plain wrong. It turns out globalization is good--and not just for the rich, but especially for the poor. The booming economies of India and China--the Elephant and the Dragon--have lifted 200 million people out of abject poverty in the 1990s as globalization took off, the International Monetary Fund says. Tens of millions more have catapulted themselves far ahead into the middle class....
As the Chindia revolution spreads, the ranks of the poor get smaller, not larger. In the 1990s, as Vietnam’s economy grew 6% a year, the number of people living in poverty (42 million) fell 7% annually; in Uganda, when GDP growth passed 3%, the number fell 6% per year, says the World Bank....
Foreign direct investment, the very force so virulently opposed by the do-gooders, has helped drive China’s gross domestic product to a more than tenfold increase since 1978. Since the reforms started, $600 billion has flooded into the country, $70 billion of it in the past year. Foreigners built hundreds of thousands of new factories as the Chinese government built the coal mines, power grid, airports and highways to supply them....
Per-person income in China has climbed from $16 a year in 1978 to $2,000 now. Wages in factory boomtowns in southern China can run $4 a day--scandalously low in the eyes of the protesters, yet up from pennies a day a generation ago and far ahead of increases in living costs.
Middle-class Chinese families now own TVs, live in new apartments and send their children to private schools. Millions of Chinese have traded in their bicycles for motorcycles or cars....
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