In the words of Nelson Mandela, late South African president, "Globalization often means that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal well being." In agreement with this great man we negate the following resolution: On balance, economic globalization helps reduce world poverty. Now we would like to define some key terms of this resolution. All of them have been extracted from the Merriam Webster's Dictionary. .
-Economic Globalization: the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.
-Poverty: the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money, material possessions, or a high standard of living.
Contention 1: Economic globalization leads to increased income inequality and decreased wages. .
Income gaps have widened in a number of developing countries as well as in the advanced economies, and evidence suggests that labor demand in developing countries has also shifted toward workers with high skill levels relative to the average. According to a Human Development Report by the United Nations in 1999, there are statistics to prove that income inequality has increased. The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997, up from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 30 to 1 in 1960. In the nineteenth century, too, inequality grew rapidly during the last three decades, in an era of rapid global integration: the income gap between the top and bottom countries increased from 3 to 1 in 1820 to 7 to 1 in 1870 and 11 to 1 in 1913. Now moving onto decreased wages. According to Matthew J. Slaughter of the International Monetary Fund, the Philippines has been experiencing steep wage decrements for the less skilled since the late 1970's, a time of higher trade rates between countries, relative to those of the more skilled.
