ABSTRACT
Late capitalism, characterised by flexible and dispersed production, has dramatically changed and increased global exchanges of all sorts. Global economic integration has proceeded along two main lines: trade liberalisation (the increased circulation of goods) and financial liberalisation (the expanded circulation of capital). Increasing world economic integration has helped shape the phenomenon generally dubbed as ‘globalisation’. In fact, in specifically economic contexts, globalisation is often understood to refer almost exclusively to the effects of trade, particularly economic liberalisation or free trade. For Krempel and Pluemper (1997), for instance, ‘globalisation . . . describes an economic process which results from the changes of the investment, production and distribution decisions made by individual firms’. For the World Bank (2005), globalisation is ‘the growing integration of economies and societies around the world’. For the International Monetary Fund (IMF 2000), it refers to ‘the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial flows’. The IMF concedes that ‘the term sometimes also refers to the movement of people (labour) and knowledge (technology) across international borders’ and that ‘there are also broader cultural, political and environmental dimensions of globalisation that are not covered here’.
