Is the globalization of the economy helping or hurting the poorest countries?
Many third-world countries are being forced by the pressures of economic globalization and the international institutions, which are forcing them down this road to adopt very free-market development paths where they open up their markets to imports, where they liberalize so that they allow private companies usually from overseas, to come in. Unfortunately while some countries can benefit from this approach, many I think will find that it leads to increase in poverty for many of their citizens. And I do think that over the next few years, many of them will say, we need to protect our economies so that we can grow our indigenous economies under some kind of protection. This is, after all, how western countries develop. We did not develop, we did not industrialize by opening up our markets to everybody else; we developed them by protecting them and by giving the poor a stake in that process. And I think many developing countries are increasingly finding they need to do that now.
