How Has Globalization Benefited the Poor?
Nina Pavcnik, Associate Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College The lives of people in distant countries are increasingly being linked, through commerce, communications technology, or culture. Researchers are trying to parse out how the gains from globalization are touching the lives of the poorest citizens in developing countries. Q: Is there a way to describe, in a broad sense, what impact globalization has had on the poorest people in underdeveloped countries? I first want to clarify what I mean by “globalization.” It’s an all-encompassing concept, and the aspect of globalization that I focus on in my work is international trade. If you look back over the past 30 years, developing countries had very high levels of trade protection — so they had high barriers on imports in terms of taxes, and they restricted imports quantitatively, by quotas or licenses. During the 1980s and 1990s, many countries decided to abandon these protectionist policies and implemented large-scale trade refo
