ABSTRACT
In the past twenty years the world has seen an unprecedented movement, generally known as globalization, toward greater connectivity between countries, characterized by rapid and intense communications, by denser and easier flows of goods and people across national boundaries, and by an increased imitation in the South of economic and cultural models operating in the North. While the tendency is to see globalization mostly in economic and technological terms, contemporary processes of globalization have been associated with peculiar views about the role of the market in public policy; hence globalization, although not inherently so, has emerged under conditions of strong linkage with reduced functions for the state in both general and compensatory social interventions. Among the countries that suffer the negative effects of the perceived virtues of the market, the phenomenon is known as “neoliberalism”; among the countries that have benefited from it, the paradigm is referred to simply as marketled policies.
