Some measurements of Globalization

6 November 2003

Does Globalization Affect Growth? by Dreher, Axel [cached here]

...presents an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions: economic integration, social integration, and political integration. To measure these dimensions, 23 variables have been combined to three sub-indexes and one overall index of globalization with principal components analysis.

Measuring Globalization

Everyone talks about globalization, but no one has tried to measure its extent. . . at least not until now. The A.T. Kearney/FOREIGN POLICY Magazine Globalization Index dissects the complex forces driving the integration of ideas, people, and economies worldwide. Which countries have become the most global? Are they more unequal? Or more corrupt? (see more, and Second Annual report, and data and methods)

Kaminsky and Rinehard google search

The Center and the Periphery: The Globalization of Financial Turmoil
Graziela Kaminsky (George Washington University) and Carmen Reinhart (IMF)
This paper examines what is the essential ingredient for emerging market turbulence to spread around the world. It constructs indices of globalization and evaluates the effects of turmoil in three crisis-prone emerging markets: Brazil, Russia, and Thailand. The findings indicate that turbulence in those countries only spread globally when it affects asset markets in financial centers. Otherwise, it just affects countries in the same region. We also find that fragility in financial institutions is at the core of high world globalization, while economic and monetary policy news contributes to create regional turmoil.

from globalpolicy.org

It is impossible to measure a nebulous concept like globalization precisely, but increasing interconnectedness is readily apparent in a host of economic, demographic, technological, and cultural changes. The data below track concrete global linkages that, in sum, begin to trace the more general phenomenon

Measuring Globalization (Andersen, Torben M. (tandersen@econ.au.dk) (University of Aarhus, CEPR, EPRU and IZA Bonn) and Herbertsson, Tryggvi Thor (University of Iceland) )

Measuring Globalization: The Experience of the United States of America by Obie G. Whichard
Presented at the 22nd seminar of the European Advisory Committee on Statistical Information in the Economic and Social Spheres, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 2-3, 2003

This paper outlines BEA's program of data collection on the operations of U.S. parent companies, their foreign affiliates, and U.S. affiliates of foreign companies. It also describes a number of related activities that organize the data in ways useful for analysis, derive additional, analytically useful measures from the collected data, conduct and facilitate research using the data, and explain and disseminate the data to users. The sponsoring organization is an advisory committee to Eurostat.

...and how about 'Cyberspace Capital'?

====

A comment or two: Just how useful it is to assign a 'globalization' score to a national unit/polity is ...well... arguable. The really interesting measurements might be within those national units, and would index the degree to which subnational regions (and maybe cities/rural areas) are affected by the trappings of 'globalization', both positively and negatively, but the challenge of finding measurements and then applying them consistently is pretty daunting. What one really wants to get at, for my money, is the degree to which 'globalization' affects inequality within a society/nation. Tough to measure (sure, there's a customary measure of inequality, the Gini index... see also Galbraith et al. 1999, and World Bank site on Inequality, Poverty, and Socio-economic Performance, UNDP World Income Inequality Database, and Has the increase in world-wide openness to trade worsened global income inequality? [Saurav Dev Bhatta, Papers in Regional Science 2002])