ABSTRACT
While there are many different facets to globalization, this article focuses on economic globa-
lization, i.e. the imposition of neo-liberal economic reforms and structural adjustment programs
(SAPs) on the ‘Third World’ and the entry of multi-national corporations (MNCs) into hitherto
unopened markets. Recent studies suggest a decrease in the overall income disparity in the world
in the previous decade, attributable to economic globalization (Firebaugh and Goesling 2004;
Conference Board of Canada document 2013). However, it needs to be clarified that this is
due to an increase in the economic growth rate, engineered largely by the middle classes of
India and China. But Africa, Latin America, former Communist countries as well as the rural
poor of India and China, who comprise the majority of their population, have been largely
untouched by the visible benefits of globalization (Milanovic 2012). Not only have the promised
‘trickle-down’ benefits of redistribution in the Third World not materialized, but free trade has
meant greater material disparity between the rural and the urban sectors and greater polarization
of classes within countries cutting across the North and the South (Wade 2004). The fact remains
that the single most important factor determining the income of an individual, even in this
globalized world, is still ‘location’ or citizenship. What it means literally is that the income
of a citizen of the bottom-most rung of the developed world is still more than the income of
even a middle-class citizen of most developing countries (Milanovic 2012).
