This paper is to show good understanding and research methods and answer the following question:
Critically discuss the view that globalisation is nothing more than the rich nations getting richer and the poor poorer?
The first question is to have the understanding of what globalisation actually means? Globalisation is the process of international matters arising from the change of world views, products, ideas and other areas of culture.
‘Globalization is not a unified phenomenon, but is constituted by several different kinds of processes: global flows of capital trade and people; global institutions, networks, and hegemons; and global waves of civil societal projects.’
(Walby, S. 2009)
Globalisation can also be impacted with matters regarding to religion, politics and economics. Climate change has also been a major contributor in the way that the nation’s trade. With countries have a global economy meltdown and with the population struggling to pay bills, many products have been priced driven. The costs of living are rising and inflation is at steady increase meaning that companies are required to look for cheaper products.
‘The rate of UK consumer price inflation remained unchanged at 2.7% for the fourth consecutive month in January, official data has shown’ (BBC Business News 2013)
The large manufacturing companies of this world spend a lot of money on innovation and production but to keep prices at the maximum possible profit. The main contributor of producing a large profit on products is to have a low production cost with a maximum high selling cost to the consumer.
Large companies are having many production factories in countries that seem to allow cheap labour and poor working conditions, in the way that production can be produced in mass but at a low operating cost. Child labour has been on the news in the last few years with young children working within unsafe and unhygienic working conditions to produce luxuries that they possible cannot afford. Apple the second largest company worldwide according to Forbes from last year’s accounting figures have been in the news with a matter arising to Apple having child labourers.
‘Apple's annual supplier report – which monitors nearly 400 suppliers – found that children were employed at 11 factories involved in making its products. A number of them had been recruited using forged identity papers’ (Garside, J. 2013)
The report had shown how a series of worker suicides over working conditions at Foxconn. The factory is based in Taiwan and is the assembly facility that assembles the top selling products for Apple such as the iPhone and iPad. Also in this report they also discovered this happening in China. This is a surprise as China has one of the fastest growing economy and with Taiwan being in the top 20 for 2012 for economic growth this shows that moving some of its production to poorer countries is not the case. Wal-Mart are also using China as one of their main suppliers.
‘Wal-Mart gets many of its products from low-cost Chinese suppliers. The pressure group China Labour Watch estimates that if it were a country, Wal-Mart would rank as China's seventh largest trading partner with a spend of over $18 Million’
(Clarke, A. 2010)
Apple however are the second largest company in the world and are a US based company with headquarters based in Nevada.
The U.S has one of the largest economies but due to Globalization, Apple is moving their sales around to other countries meaning that the U.S. will lose out even though that they are based in this country. . Apple has set up many offices worldwide in which they use to account for some of their global sales with the U.S. not receiving tax on these profits.
These figure equated to $2.4 Billion for last year meaning that this would be a big loss for a large economy. In this case this we can prove that the rule of the rich becoming richer and the poor poorer does not affect with this evidence. Apple’s production is mainly
