Since globalization is possibly not coming to an end in the foreseeable future, it is humans’ obligation to discuss the following question: is globalization sustainable in the sense of contributing to further human development and economy growth without, or with limited harm towards the ecology system?
Just as every coin has two sides, globalization has manifested itself through a large amount of seemingly contradictory effects due to its presence. Energy usage efficiency is improving, while demand for materials and energy is rising. More opportunities of development are revealed in front of developing countries, while the gaps between developing countries and developed ones is widening. When a company moves to a country with cheaper labor force, more job vacancies are present in this country, while some of another country’s individuals may have suffered job loss. Scholars hold different views when it comes to globalization sustainability. However, our group prefers to let the data talk.
According to the paper of “Is Globalization Sustainable?”[3] coauthored by Pim Martens and Mohsin Raza, despite of its bad influences, globalization is so far to some extent sustainable. First of all, the paper addresses to Maastricht Globalization Index (MGI), which is an evaluation of to what degree an area is globalized, and the degree is zero to one hundred from lowest to highest. MGI takes into account variables from political, economic, social and cultural, technological and ecological domains for it to be comprehensive. Secondly, the authors include various indexes describing sustainability. For example, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) is in accordance with ensuring environmental sustainability, and the Human Development Index (HDI) is to measure achievements in health, knowledge and living standards. Thirdly, the authors use Spearman correlation analysis to run regressions between MGI and sustainability indexes. The result of correlation between MGI and EPI is 0.628, and between MGI and HDI is 0.795, both with statistically significance. In the end, they conclude the results of high correlations between globalization index and sustainability indexes are due to globalization’s general sustainability.
We consider this paper to be mostly innovative and reasonable, but it is limited when it goes deeper. Most importantly, simple correlation relationship cannot jump to causality, which means that it does not hold that globalization can cause social, economic and environmental sustainability. However, with positive correlations instead of with negative ones, we can already conclude that globalization has exerted limited side effects to the world’s sustainability from a large angle.
“Globalization, like any process, can be operated either sustainably or not.”[4] Our group believes that government policies, the choices of organizations and companies, as well as actions taken by individuals may all affect globalization sustainability, and thus the answer explaining ”how sustainable globalization is” is changing all the time. But the latter two may be minor compared with government policies. Say globalization is now 70% sustainable, a big company depleting much fuels may make the number 69.9%; a government polity of strictly constraining global companies’ resources usage and encouraging new energy exploitation may make it 72%. The problem of gaps between nations may also be ameliorated. All in all, how sustainable globalization is? In principle, everyone can make a difference.