While during the past decades the North-South development gap has widened in several respects. the development gap between advanced economies and new industrial countries has narrowed, but the gap between these and the least developed countries has been widening. Since the late 1970s inequalities within and between societies have been growing steeply (Sutcliffe 2001. Nederveen Pieterse 2002b). Paraphrasing the earlier terminology of uneven development, the present situation may be referred to as combined and uneven globalization.