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• Thinking through Globalization
• Mapping the World’s Agricultural Land
• Climbing out of Poverty in South Africa
• The Road Half Traveled

As IFPRI begins a synthesis study on globalization, it is a good time to think about what this widely used term means. What is globalization and what are its effects?

The phenomenon of globalization has attracted enormous interest during the last decade. It is at the center of a heated worldwide debate about its possible benefits and costs, particularly for the more vulnerable populations. "Part of the problem in assessing the pros and cons is that globalization means different things to different people," says Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla, an IFPRI research fellow.

For some, globalization refers to the multiplication and intensification of economic, political, social, and cultural linkages among people, organizations, and countries at the global level. For others, it means a tendency toward universal application of economic, political, social, cultural, institutional, and legal practices. "Many of us applaud the spread of democracy at the political level, while, on a different dimension, we cannot ignore growing concerns about cultural homogenization," says Diaz-Bonilla.

A third notion is that globalization means the increasing importance of significant worldwide effects caused by the behavior of individuals and societies. These effects include global warming, financial crises, and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

One of the most obvious manifestations of globalization is that growth in world trade has outpaced growth in world output during the entire postwar period. This trend results from

• trade liberalization as a result of negotiations in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization
• an increase in the number of regional trade agreements
• economic reforms that have liberalized markets in both developed and developing countries.

But technology has been the key force behind globalization. Since World War Two, rapid technological change and increasing investment in transportation, communications, and information technologies have facilitated and partly driven the geographic dispersal of production processes across countries. Technological change has also led to the growing integration of world capital markets, greatly increasing the international flows of short- and long-term private financial capital. However, these flows have largely left the poorest countries untouched.

Other globalization trends during the last 20 years include

• greater integration of labor markets worldwide, with expanded migration of labor ranging from unskilled to highly skilled;
• environmental, natural resource, and climate changes that have worldwide implications in ways that were not so clear before;
• health problems that have taken on global dimensions, such as AIDS; and
• greater democratization and decentralization in the developing world.

Globalization has affected the poor and rich differently. But the quality of the analytical work on the effects of globalization is uneven. This is due partly to the prominent role ideology has played in the debate, to globalization's multi- faceted and hard-to-define nature, and to the need for a sustained research effort that draws on a number of economic, social, and political science approaches.

Even so, the body of literature on globalization has expanded. Over the years, researchers have studied the impact of different dimensions of globalization such as expanded international capital and trade flows, more integrated labor markets, growing foreign direct investment, and a larger presence of multinational corporations. Researchers have also focused on how globalization interacts with legal and regulatory frameworks, politics and governance, the environment, culture, society, conflict, war, and peace. But scholars have not necessarily focused on the links between those global changes and poverty and food security from the perspective of the developing countries. IFPRI's work on globalization is focusing on these links.

Some of the key questions driving the research include

• What is the best way to define and measure globalization from a poverty perspective?
• Is globalization increasing or decreasing the income gap between rich and poor countries?
• Is globalization increasing or decreasing poverty and inequality?
• Is globalization increasing or decreasing exposure to shocks and the ability of the poor to cope with them?
• How is globalization affecting food security and sustainable production?
• Can globalization be influenced by policy, regulatory, and institutional reform in order to reduce vulnerability to negative shocks, accelerate poverty reduction, and enhance food security in the developing world?

IFPRI will review the theoretical and empirical literature on the links between globalization and poverty, conduct quantitative analysis, draw implications for policy, and identify knowledge gaps that need to be filled.

For more information, contact Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla (e.diaz-bonilla@cgiar.org) at IFPRI.