Economic Globalisation and the Tropical World in the New Millennium: An Introduction

Copyright 2000 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, and Blackwell Publishers Ltd Economic globalisation is a set of extremely complex processes, highly uneven in their geographical incidence and involving multiple, and sometimes contradictory, tendencies both across and within economic sectors. Current opposition to such processes – as articulated in the protests focused on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Seattle in December 1999, at the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Australia in 2000 – reflects a widespread anti-globalisation feeling among a remarkable diversity of special interest groups. In this regard, the two issues of greatest significance for many tropical countries are those relating to labour and to the environment. Without doubt, economic globalisation poses serious questions of equity in relation to the distribution of costs and benefits of globalising processes between different parts of the world and across different social groups. The interdependencies – some would call them dependencies – that are an inevitable concomitant of increased economic integration can create serious instability in tropical countries. Uncontrolled financial volatility and resource-exploiting activities, for example, are capable of destroying the political foundations on which economic prosperity has been built. Uneven development – an intrinsic component of market capitalism – remains a major global problem and there is no doubt that some parts of the tropical world – most notably, though not exclusively tropical Africa – suffer greatly from their relative exclusion from wealthenhancing processes. ECONOMIC GLOBALISATION AND THE TROPICAL WORLD IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM: AN INTRODUCTION