Iglobalization And Its Impact On The Australian Agri-Food System
...mean? Carbaugh (2005) describes globalization as the
process of greater interdependence among countries and their citizens. It
consists of increased integration of product and resource markets across nations
via trade, immigration1, and foreign investment. It also includes non-economic
elements such as culture and the environment. According to Carbaugh,
globalisation has political, technological, cultural and economic dimensions.
Martin Wolf says that globalisation is about a movement towards greater
integration of countries, as both natural and man made barriers to international
economic exchange continue to fall. Wolf goes on the say that a necessary
consequence of such a process of integration is the increased impact of
economic change in one part of the world on what happens in other parts of the
world. Globalization is not new. The economic historian Angus Maddison has
calculated global and per person income for the last 2000 years, and his figures
show that global growth recorded its greatest increase in the middle part of the
nineteenth century (Table 1). This was a period when new inventions such as the
steam engine, steel hulled ships and the telegraph shrank distances between
countries, leading to a period of increased global integration – in other words,
globalization.
Table 1 Changes in the Global Economy
Year Population GDP GDP per person
(000) (mill.1990 US$) (1990 US$
1 230 820 102 619 445
1000 267 573 116 787 436
1500 438 428 248 308 566
1600 556 148 330 982 595
1700 603 490 371 269 615
1820 1 041 834 695 346 667
1 According to Carbaugh, the latest wave of globalization, which he says began about 1980, is characterized
by more limited labour flows than was the case 100 years ago.
1870 1 271 915 1 112 655 875
1913 1 791 091 2 732 131 1 525
1950 2 524 324 5 329 719 2 111
1973 3 916 489 16 023 529 4 091
2001 6 149...
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