Globalization is the process of global economic and political integration which connects countries with the facilitation of global communications. As technology rapidly developed in the past centuries, trade globalization accelerated. Global trade becomes economically and politically important to all countries. As more and more developing and low-income countries enter into the global integration, there is always an ongoing debate on the relationship between globalization and inequality - whether globalization reduces or increases inequality. In this essay, I’m going to discuss this matter in details with my own understanding and some researches. First of all, globalization does boost the economic activities and development, which …show more content…
The residents from coastal regions or the more traffic-developed areas would have a relatively higher income level as they might gain more benefit from the globalization. Those rural areas with less traffic and transportation, the economic environment is not heavily influenced by the openness of market. In this context, the income level of rural areas fixes but the income level rapidly increase in the coastal regions, inequality problem worsens within countries. China would be an obvious case, where the average GDP per capital in the coastal regions is 2 times the same figure in the inland regions (RMB 5204 compared with RMB 2497, measured using constant prices) in 1999 ( Jian Chen, & Shujie Yao 2006). Although China has become the new economic engine, the regional inequality could still be observed even with the fascinating economic boom. Many economists have developed a term called “race-to-the-bottom”, which is used to describe that with the international market pressures, the less-developed (developing) countries would find it much more difficult to provide welfare protections to the poor. As Rudra (2008) argues that, unlike in the advanced industrialized countries, globalization does indeed trigger a race-to-the-bottom in developing countries. She also suggested that globalization creates social pressures as well as opportunities - the government need to develop regulations to protect the unskilled workers and the local industries without building up barriers towards international