ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the types of flows and connections that constitute contemporary globalization. Economic life, has been ‘world-wide’ since long before the notion of globalization was coined. Globalization was barely used as a concept prior to the 1990s – tap the word into any library catalogue or database and thousands of items will show up, but nearly all of them published since 1990. Economic globalization is, at its core, a spatial concept – it implies a stretching of economic relations to ‘fill out’ the planetary space occupied by human societies. It is important to note at the outset, then, that economic globalization is a multistranded set of flows. In the trading of commodities, the lowering of tariff and other barriers within regional groupings such as the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement, has been supplemented through global institutions. Since 1995, the World Trade Organization has provided a framework for the free movement of commodities between member states.
