ABSTRACT
There is increasing concern that globalization, which supports the emergence of a global market discipline as distinct from the existence of a mere global market place (Hoogvelt 1997), has worsened poverty and accentuated both national and international inequalities. In many parts of the ‘Third World’, burgeoning in unemployment (particularly urban unemployment), declining real wages, a growing debt burden, rising income disparities, urbanization and the feminization of poverty are some of the well-known features of the socio-economic crisis since the mid-1970s. This list could be expanded by adding new problems of drug abuse, AIDS, intensification of novel forms of violence, which seriously erode social capital – that is, the informal norms and established relationships that enable people to pursue objectives and act in concert for common benefits. Hence, despite rapid market expansion in some regions of the world, and for some segments of the workforce, the world is at the same time witnessing widening socio-economic disparities between and within countries.
