This globalising world is one where the processes of political globalisation, cultural globalisation and especially economic globalisation determine the life of billions of people all over the world. These processes of globalisation also impact on our natural environment. We live in a time that we can describe as the time of glocalisation. The global impacts on the local. Cheaper clothe prices in China impact on the factories in the Cape Peninsula. Political, cultural and economic globalisation do have positive as well as negative effects.
The positive outcomes of globalisation
There are those who reckon that globalization as a product of modernity has fulfilled the expectations that modernity has raised, namely to bring political as well as economic liberation for all.
The North American theologian, Mark Amstutz (The churches and Third World poverty , in M Stackhouse et.al. (eds), On Moral business Classical and contemporary resources for ethics in economic life, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1995: 822), outlines the achievements of a market economy and specifically of the global market economy. He cites the statistics of the World Bank on the improvement of living conditions in the thirty seven poorest countries of the world between 1965 and 1985 as proof of the success of the market economy.
”1. The annual crude death rate per thousand declined from 17 to 10. 2. Owing largely to a decline in the fertility rate, the annual crude birth rate per thousand people declined from 43 to 29. 3. Average life expectancy increased between from 47 to 60 years for men and from 50 to 61 years for women. 4. Infant mortality for children under one year declined from 127 per thousand to 72 per thousand. 5. The child death rate for children aged 1 – 4 declined from 19 per thousand to 9 per thousand. 6. Average daily caloric supply per capita also increased – from 2,046 to 2,339.7. Finally, the average percentage of children in primary schools increased from 74 to 97 and in secondary schools from 21 to 32”.
Various authors reckon that economic life has become better for millions of South Africans as a result of macro-economic growth and the deepening of democracy.