House Oversight — Estate records
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A14 Saturday, March 18, 2017 Agree or disagree with the opinions on this page? Write to us at letters@scmp.com. If you have an idea for an opinion article, email it to oped@scmp.com Loved or loathed, globalisation is here to stay Andrew Sheng says the danger for the world is that its detractors – chief among them the US president – will make the system less fair by ignoring their responsibilities Depending on who you talk to, globalisation happened either in 1492, when Christopher Columbus discovered America in search of the Orient, or in the 19th century, when America decided to look outwards for trade after its civil war. By 2000, the movement of trade, technology, finance and investments across the globe seemed unstoppable. Globalisation had lifted billions from poverty and the logic of free trade and capital flows was accepted from Beijing to Zanzibar. But in 2007, when the North Atlantic financial crisis revealed the flaws of excessive financialisation, doubts about globalisation began to creep in. Globalisation, in the form of the spread of trade, money, people and information, is inevitable, essentially because of expanding demographics and technology. Human beings migrate all over the world, and it was technology – the invention of railways, ships, planes and now information communications – that accelerated the spread of global ideas and genes. As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, author of Globalisation and Its Discontents, aptly put it, globalisation is either positive or negative, depending on how it is managed. Like any national system, the system works well with someone providing public goods. The internet is such a public good. It gave even the most remote people and places access to global knowledge, thus making the world more inclusive. But if and when the masses cannot benefit from such access, technology and globalisation can widen inequalities, giving rise to anger, frustration and the rise of populist sentiments. The reality is that globalisation […]