Related Issues

World Trade and Western Supremacy

• Developing-country and nongovernmental- organization activism may have sparked the beginning of an end to Western supremacy over world trade negotiations

The Changing Geography of Cheap Labor

• Westerners long enjoying global economic superiority rationally accept the advantages of outsourcing jobs. But now the trend appears to have made life more worrisome for white-collar workers at home

“Going global” typically means corporations expanding their business activities across national borders. Consequently, globalization has for a long time been regarded primarily in economic terms. But are serious concerns about the social dimensions of globalization becoming more and more critical? The slow pace of economic growth in Latin America and Africa, the poverty in the Middle East and former Soviet Union, and the neoconservative economic failure in Iraq suggest that free-market transformations—and macroeconomic solutions—are by no means guaranteed, either overnight or over the long term. In a world continuing to harden socially because of rapid and unsettling modernizations, could prevailing thinking about globalization shift toward the social?

Children eat their lunch at the daycare center at the Lonmin Platinum mine 65 miles northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. Many South African mining companies are working to replace crowded, all-male hostels with low-cost family housing. A new report on the social dimension of globalization is available at www.ilo.org. AP Photo

Report Better globalization through the eyes of the people A new ILO commission stresses the social dimension above macroeconomics. Letter South Africa’s Mbeki rebukes a mining chief Anglo-American CEO is invited to explain himself. Op-Ed Amid scarcity, emerging global society requires justice Fairness is more than a nation-level standard. Frank Garcia comments from Boston Interview Balancing global competition with a needs agenda As Ghana receives its first credit rating, President John Agyekum Kufuor pushes forward.

Special Feature: The Global Compact Should the UN’s corporate initiative spin off? Hazel Henderson comments from St. Augustine, FL