Publication: Strategies to Fight the Globalization Trap
Loading...
Published
2000-01-31
ISSN
Date
2017-02-24
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank Group, discussed the concept of a globalization trap that have gotten support from quite a few critical publications recently. His concern with regards to globalization centers on two aspects of the problem. The first aspect is an increasingly imbalanced development path in which globalization is the reason for winner taking it all while the losers are left behind. The second aspect is that public interest is becoming secondary to individual interest, or turn it the other way around, globalization drives development, whereas government is at a loss to control it. An offensive strategy to fight the globalization trap is needed: the first aspect being a closer cooperation between the public and private sector to improve education and infrastructure, the second being to use the markets to solve problems rather than rely on government regulations, and the third is to make global communication facilities a tool for global cooperation.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Wolfensohn, James D.. 2000. Strategies to Fight the Globalization Trap. Remarks at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 31, 2000;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26175 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Trade in Information and Communication Services : Opportunities for East and Southern Africa(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-11-01)This following report is divided into four chapters, with chapter one containing the introduction. Chapter two reviews the state of ICT-competitiveness in the case study countries, by looking at infrastructure, the legal and regulatory situation, the business environment, and human resources. Chapter three examines the benefits of ICT for the overall economy as well as for facilitating traditional trade and participating in emerging ICT-enabled services trade. It analyzes the case study countries' potential for becoming players in ICT-enabled services. Finally, chapter four identifies the case study countries existing WTO ICT-related commitments, pointing out what changes are necessary to make deeper commitments and hence strengthen credibility as reliable trading partners.Publication Telecommunications Regulation Handbook : Tenth Anniversary Edition(World Bank and the International Telecommunication Union, Washington, DC, 2011)Communications are an essential means for reaching the, bottom of the Pyramid, and enabling individuals to reduce poverty and improve the quality of their lives. We currently live in a world in which more Africans have access to a mobile phone than to any other utility or infrastructure service. This widespread technological dissemination creates new opportunities across all segments of society, but also presents new challenges requiring adaptable strategies. Today's communications landscape is vastly different from the environment in which we developed the first telecommunications regulation handbook ten years ago. Competitive and open communications markets have created opportunities in countries that previously lagged behind. Competitively priced and technologically varied service offerings have allowed businesses to compete and thrive globally. However, there are still serious market gaps (such as providing widespread high speed broadband services at affordable prices and connectivity to remote areas), that, when coupled with evolving and converging technologies, pose challenges to policymakers and regulators. This new edition of the telecommunications regulation handbook captures the new market and regulatory strategies to optimize investment in broadband networks and Information and Communication Technology, or ICT services. As the following chapters show, many of the evolutionary and revolutionary changes in regulation that made possible the mobile miracle of connecting 5 billion users worldwide with access to ICTs, as well as over a billion fixed and mobile broadband subscribers, are still valid today. But for markets to truly flourish, regulators also need new, inspired regulatory approaches that are as innovative as the technologies they regulate.Publication Information and Communication Technologies at the Service of the Rural Poor of Latin America and the Caribbean(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-11)This study reviews recent experience applying ICTs in the fight against rural poverty and identifies ways in which donor interventions can make effective use of ICTs to improve the living conditions of rural communities in Latin America and the Caribbean and help reduce poverty.Publication Building Broadband : Strategies and Policies for the Developing World(World Bank, 2010)This book suggests an ecosystem approach to broadband policy that could help in the design of strategies, policies, and programs that support network expansion, have the potential to transform economies, improve the quality and range of services, enable application development, and broaden adoption among users. To identify emerging best practices to nurture this ecosystem, this volume analyzes the Republic of Korea and other leading broadband markets. It identifies three building blocks to support the growth of the broadband ecosystem: defining visionary but flexible strategies, using competition to promote market growth, and facilitating demand. An important but often neglected building block is demand facilitation. This includes raising awareness about the benefits of broadband and improving affordability and accessibility for the largest number of users. Successful countries have often focused on creating a suite of useful applications that increase the relevance of broadband to the widest base of users. Programs to mainstream information and communication technology (ICT) use in education, health, or government have been common.Publication ICT Indicators and Implications for Methods for Assessing Socioeconomic Impact of ICT(Washington, DC, 2012)This report is being delivered pursuant to the agreement (Agreement) between the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of the Arab Republic of Egypt (MCIT) and the World Bank (Bank) for the provision by the Bank of technical assistance (RTA) to MCIT and certain of its affiliates. One of those affiliates is the Information Technology Industry Development Authority (ITIDA). When it comes to designing and implementing ICT policies, the availability of proper indicators is key to efficiency and effectiveness. However, the indicators should go further, and should help policymakers also to measure how well the sector or projects are performing, provide an assessment over time on the status of a project, program, or policy, promote credibility and public confidence by reporting on the results of programs, provide in-depth information about public sector performance, help formulate and justify budget requests, and identify potentially promising programs or practices for duplication or scalability. Thus, this report is composed of the following sections: (i) a discussion of indicator types, in particular impact indicators and their constraints; (ii) an overview of the institutional setup of ICT data in Egypt; (iii) ICT data categories and methodologies used by major international indices and reports, including an analysis of Egypt's strong and weak results in the indices; (iv) a mapping and gap analysis between the indices' indicators and those currently collected by Egypt; (v) a set of recommendations for Egypt and (vi) implications of this work with respect to analyzing the socioeconomic impact of ICTs on investment, trade, growth and education in Egypt.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Falling Long-Term Growth Prospects(World Bank : Washington, DC, 2024-02-01)A structural growth slowdown is underway across the world: at current trends, the global potential growth rate is expected to fall to a three-decade low over the remainder of the 2020s. Nearly all the forces that have powered growth and prosperity since the early 1990s have weakened, not only because of a series of shocks to the global economy over the past three years. A persistent and broad-based decline in long-term growth prospects imperils the ability of emerging market and developing economies to combat poverty, tackle climate change, and meet other key development objectives. These challenges call for an ambitious policy response at the national and global levels. This book presents the first detailed analysis of the growth slowdown and a rich menu of policy options to deliver better growth outcomes.Publication Population Aging : Is Latin America Ready?(World Bank, 2011)The past half-century has seen enormous changes in the demographic makeup of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In the 1950s, LAC had a small population of about 160 million people, less than today's population of Brazil. Two-thirds of Latin Americans lived in rural areas. Families were large and women had one of the highest fertility rates in the world, low levels of education, and few opportunities for work outside the household. Investments in health and education reached only a small fraction of the children, many of whom died before reaching age five. Since then, the size of the LAC population has tripled and the mostly rural population has been transformed into a largely urban population. There have been steep reductions in child mortality, and investments in health and education have increased, today reaching a majority of children. Fertility has been more than halved and the opportunities for women in education and for work outside the household have improved significantly. Life expectancy has grown by 22 years. Less obvious to the casual observer, but of significance for policy makers, a population with a large fraction of dependent children has evolved into a population with fewer dependents and a very large proportion of working-age adults. This overview seeks to introduce the reader to three groups of issues related to population aging in LAC. First is a group of issues related to the support of the aging and poverty in the life cycle. Second is the question of the health transition. Third is an understanding of the fiscal pressures that are likely to accompany population aging and to disentangle the role of demography from the role of policy in that process.Publication Collateral Registries for Movable Assets : Does Their Introduction Spur Firms' Access to Bank Finance?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-06)Using firm-level surveys for up to 73 countries, this paper explores the impact of introducing collateral registries for movable assets on firms' access to bank finance. It compares firms' access to bank finance in seven countries that introduced collateral registries for movable assets against three control groups: firms in all countries that did not introduce a registry, firms in a sample of countries matched by location and income per capita to the countries that introduced registries for movable assets, and firms in countries that undertook other types of collateral reforms but did not set up registries for movable assets. Overall, the analysis finds that introducing collateral registries for movable assets increases firms' access to bank finance. There is also some evidence that this effect is larger among smaller firms.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.