Globalization is the growing interdependence of the world’s economics, cultures, populations…But how can this affect us? Have you ever wondered about all the drawbacks this brings to us?

Of course, globalization has done a lot of good things to us, such as better and cheaper products, which also makes the transport of products easier and faster. That ends with the increase of the purchasing power of the cheaper products. And it doesn’t stop there! Globalization increases the improvement of new technologies. Also, with globalization it is easier to travel around the world and easier to communicate throughout the boundaries. In addition, this improves international trade, which can be translated into a cultural interchange. This sounds right, doesn’t it?

However, to talk about globalization, we should go deeper and see all the consequences of it. We firstly talked about the cheaper products, but what about workers losing their jobs to countries with low cost labor? What about being replaced by machines? Is globalization protecting the labor environment or human rights? The de-colocalization creates unemployment in developed countries. What turns into exploitation of the workers in developing countries. So, the gap between the poor and the rich increases. Because globalization empowers multinational corporations. And, as always, big companies are the only winners. Because the man-controlled circulation of money just means no ethics. Does this sound as cool as before? We also saw that globalization improves cultural interchange, but, is this as good as it sounds? Well, you could see it as a way of learning about other countries and their cultures, but this can be transformed into the loss of national identity. Globalization can contribute to cultural homogeneity. Could you imagine a world where no matter where you travel, they will eat the same, all are wearing the same clothes… There won’t be anything unique or different among nations.

In conclusion, globalization brings us a lot of great things, such as the improvement of new technologies and it makes it easier to interchange ideas, opinions and values among people and cultures. However, we should have in mind this means the lack of personal identity and the unemployment of a lot of workers. If we just think about the fact of money-saving, we forget about what really matters, which is labor and human rights.

Alba Gonzalo, 4ESO A.