Topic 3: EQ2 Flashcards
What is global shift?
Global shift describes the international relocation of different types of industrial activity, especially manufacturing industries. Since the 1960s, many industries have all but vanished from Europe and North America, instead they thrive in Asia, South America and now more increasingly Africa.
What causes global shift?
It stems from a combination of off-shoring, outsourcing and new business start-ups in emerging countries.
How are developed countries ‘exporting’ unethical economic practices?
This movement is accompanying global shift. Early-industrial practices which nations such as the UK abandoned long ago are now done elsewhere. These include dangerous working conditions, child labour, and highly unequal pay for men and women. All can currently be found in Bangladesh, Vietnam and India.
Why is global shift dangerous for the environment?
There are sometimes severe costs from the environment too, the global shift of polluting industries to lower-income countries has meant that TNCs are, in general, subject to fewer environmental rules and regulations.
What are the benefits of Asia emerging economically?
Average incomes have soared for successive waves of new Asian ‘tiger’ economies. Japan’s success came first in the 1950s. South Korea then followed soon after. Foreign investors began working with local firms called Chaebols. As national revenues soared, so too did South Korea’s spending on education and health. Today, the country is an OECD member with the worlds 11th largest economy. Between 2000 and 2010, most large Asian economies sustained exceptionally strong annual growth rates, in part due to global shift. Despite slowing in recent years, it has still remained higher than in developed countries.
How has poverty reduction and wage worked changed across Asia?
Worldwide, 1 billion people have escape $1.25 a day poverty since 1990, and the majority of these are Asian. In China alone, over 500 million have escaped poverty. The term ‘new global middle class’ is used to describe the growing mass of urban, working people who have escaped rural poverty. Some work in the manufacturing sector in Bangladesh and China. Others belong to service industries in India and the Philippines. Many earn between $10-100 per day. By 2030, it is predicted Asia will be home to 3 billion middle class people.
How has education and training improved across Asia?
High school achievement in Singapore and Hong Kong is envied by governments around the world, including the UK. Throughout Asia, education has improved in recent decades, even if that has been unevenly. Around 2500 unis in China, India and South Korea award millions of graduate degrees each year. China alone awarded 30,000 PhDs in 2012, and Asian countries now play a leading role in quaternary sector research in biotechnology and medical science.
How has the environment and resource pressure changed around Africa?
The flip side of global economic growth is the acceleration of environmental decline. Forested land has been sacrificed to urbanisation, logging and cash cropping. Since 1990, Togo has lost 60% of its forested area, and Nigeria’s forest has halved in size. Elsewhere, productive crop land has been ruined by over-exploitation, soil erosion or mining. From 1990 to 2008, globalisation helped drive a ‘commodities supercycle’. Demand for raw materials - from soy beans to iron ore - rose steeply each year. However, global resource pressure has recently slackened, due to reduced demand in China.
How has infrastructure, the built environment and unplanned settlements changed in Asia?
Alongside economic take-off, infrastructure development has taken place, brining modern motorways, high-speed railways and airports to major cities including Jakarta. There is a growing trend for extreme high-rise development in city centre ‘hotspots’ in many Asian cities, including Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai. Often these developments are accompanied by the loss of recreational spaces and older, unplanned neighbourhoods. Beijings traditional narrow lanes are now all but lost. Mumbai’s Dharavi slum is a cramped and chaotic place that is home to families who live on little more than £200 a month. It is also the location of a thriving recycling industry worth as much as £700 million a year and employing 250,000 people. However, city authorities are determined to replace the Dharavi slum with modern flats.
How are services being outsourced to India?
By 2040, India is expected to be the second largest economy in the world. Some of its recent economic success is thanks to the call centre services that Indian Workers provide. They are able to do this because:
-Many Indian citizens are fluent English speakers. This is a legacy of British rule, which ended in 1947. It gives India a comparative advantage when marketing call centre services to the English-speaking world.
-Broadband capacity is unusually high in Bangalore. This city is a long-established technology hub, thanks to early investment in the 1980s by domestic companies such as Infosys and foreign TNCs such as Texas Instruments.
What are the costs of India’s call centres?
-Some call centre workers complain that they’re exploited.
-Their work can be highly repetitive. Business is often conducted at night due to the difference in time zones between India and the areas they’re servicing.
-Despite overall growth, the gap between the rich and poor has widened sharply. India has more billionaires than the UK, yet it also has more people living in absolute poverty than all of Africa. In 2015, half a billion Indians lived in homes lacking a toilet.
What are the benefits of India’s call centres?
-India’s call centre workers earn good middle class wages by Indian standards. Nightclubs and 24 shopping malls in Bangalore testify to the relatively high purchasing power of a new Indian ‘techno-elite’ typically earning 3500 rupees a week.
—Indian outsourcing companies have become extremely profitable. Founded in 1981, Infosys had revenues of US$9 billion in 2015. It is one of the top twenty global companies for innovation, according to the US business analyst Steve Forbes.
How is manufacturing being outsourced to China?
This global shift in manufacturing has played an important role in extreme poverty in China falling from 60% in 1990 to 16% in 2005.
-China first gained its reputation as the ‘workshop of the world’ in the 1990s. Cities like Shenzhen and Dongguan offered foreign investors a massive pool of low cost labour. It was common to hear stories of Chinese workers suffering in factory conditions similar to those of Victorian England.
How have conditions improved in manufacturing jobs in China?
-Between 2000 and 2010, conditions improved markedly for many workers. The disposable income of urban citizens rose threefold following a series of protests. In 2010, workers walked off production lines for Honda, Toyota, Carlsberg and many other global brands. Actions such as these led to wage increases of between 35 and 60%.
-Furthermore, since 2010, strategic planning by China’s government has helped some companies move further up the manufacturing value chain. The country’s economy is maturing rapidly. ‘Hi-tech’ manufacturing is booming, bringing improved pay for skilled workers. Increasingly, high-value products such as iPhones are made in China, not just ‘throwaway’ cheap goods. Many less desirable sweat shop jobs have migrated to Bangladesh where labour costs remain much lower.
What are the costs of China’s role as a manufacturer?
-In the early years, many workers were exploited in sweatshops. Around 2500 metal-workers in Yongkang lost a limb or finger each year due to dangerous factory conditions.
-The environmental also continues to suffer greatly. Dubbed ‘airpocalypse’ by the western media, air pollution in cities reduces Chinese life expectancy by 5 years. The WHO is concerned with very high average levels of small particulate matter known as PM2.5. These deadly particles settle deep in the lungs, causing cancer and strokes.
What are the benefits of Chinas role as a manufacturer?
As conditions improve, people are now enjoying large income gains. More people can now afford smartphones and fridges. Car ownership has grown from 1 in 100 to 1 in 5 families since 2000. It growth is also beginning to be driven by this domestic consumption, and not entirely on exports.
-A transfer of technology has taken place since the early days of manufacturing-led industrialisation. Local companies have adopted technologies and management techniques brought to China by TNCs. Increasingly, Chinese companies are developing their own products. A leading example is smartphone maker Xiaomi. Chinese banks are now some the worlds largest TNCs.
What environmental challenges are there for communities in developing countries?
Communities within many developing economies have experienced major environmental problems as a result of global shift. Adverse impacts on the health and well-being of people have resulted from pollution, over-exploitation of resources and dumping of industrial waste.
Global shift has partly been driven by TNCs seeking low cost locations for their manufacturing and refining operations. Weak environmental governance has sometimes been an attractive location factor. In high-income nations, bodies such as the UK Environmental Agency have a well-funded remit to monitor industrial operations and fine polluters.
What are examples of countries having weak environmental regulation?
China- Workers for Wintek ( a firm that makes touchscreens for IPhones) were poisoned by chemicals that were used to treat the glass. In Hunan province, many people were poisoned by a lead-emitting manganese smelter.
Ivory Coast- Tens of thousands of Ivorians suffered I’ll health after toxic waste alleged to produce hydrogen sulphide was dumped by a ship in the employ of Trafigura, a European TNC. A £28 million cash settlement followed.
Indonesia - Land degradation and biodiversity loss are widespread in Indonesia, where an area of rainforest as big as 100,000 football pitches is lost each year. Room is being created for oil-palm plantations and mining operations. The scale of forest burning has created transboundary smoke pollution affecting neighbouring states. More mammal species are threatened in Indonesia than any other country. The government has been very slow to act and corruption remains widespread.
What is deindustrialisation?
This is the decline of regionally important manufacturing industries. The decline can be charted either in terms of workforce numbers or output and production measures,
What social problems come for deindustrialised regions?
During the 1970s, many European and American factory workers lost their jobs. Western factories closed in large numbers once Asia became the focus of global manufacturing. As inner-city unemployment soared in places like Sheffield and Baltimore (USA), local communities abruptly ceased to be significant producers or consumers of wealth. The worst affected neighbourhoods were now home to switched off communities who had become structurally irrelevant to the global economy.
What specific challenges are felt with deindustrialised areas?
-High unemployment: Detroit has yet to replace the large number of jobs lost when global shift led to the disappearance of many of the city’s automobile industries.
-Crime: Rising gun crime reminds us that ‘losers’ of globalisation can be found in all nations not just poorer ones. In some low-income US urban districts, life expectancy is 30 years lower than in affluent districts. Drug related crime is now the basis of an informal economy in some poor neighbourhoods of failing cities. When areas are switched off to legitimate global flows, they often instead become switched on to illegal global flows of drugs and people trafficking.
How is depopulation an issues for deindustrialised areas?
Middle class Americans have migrated out of failing neighbourhood in large numbers. Detroit has lost 1 million residents since 1950. One result of the depopulation has been a catastrophic collapse in the housing crisis. There are 20,000 abandoned properties in Baltimore, which lost 1/3 of its population. Homes in some districts have even been sold for just 1 dollar. Those who stay become trapped as their house is now worth much less than they originally paid for it. Increasingly, depopulation in US cities has become linked with race, known as ‘white flight’ in the media. The process of our migration has led some districts mainly populated by African Americans. The economic problems triggered by global shift have, over time, reignited racial tensions in cities such as Baltimore and Jackson.
How is dereliction an issue in deindustrialised areas?
The combination of manufacturing industry closures, falling house prices, and rising crime results, and widespread environmental dereliction. A ‘broken windows’ scenario then develops, where at first small acts of vandalism are tolerated and then this leads to more serious issues like arson becoming a common occurrence.
How is movement of internal and international migrants changing?
In 2013, 750 million internal migrants were residing in cities across the world. Global urbanisation passed the threshold of 50% in 2008, meaning that the majority of people now live in urban areas. Additionally, nearly 250 million international migrants now live in countries they were born outside. The overwhelming majority of movers, both at internet and internal scales, are economic migrants. However, 2014 also saw the largest displacement of forced migrants since WW2. Around 14 million new refugees were driven from their homes by natural disasters and conflict in countries such as Syria, brining the global total to 60 million displaced people.
What is an internal migrant?
Someone who moves from place to place inside the borders of a country. Globally, most internal migrants move from rural to urban areas. In the developed world, however, people also move from urban to rural areas too. (A process known a counter-urbanisation).
What is urbanisation?
An increase in the proportion of people living in urban areas.
What is an economic migrant?
This is a migrant whose primary motivation is to seek employment. Migrants who already had a job may have to set off in search of better pay, more regular pay, promotion or a change of career.
What is a refugee?
People who are forced to flee their homes due to persecution, whether on an individual basis or as part of a mass exodus due to political, religious or other problems.
What are intervening obstacles?
These are barriers to a migrant such as a political border or physical feature.
What is natural increase?
This is the difference between a society’s crude birth rate and crude death rate. A migrant population, such as that found in developing world mega cities, usually has a high rate of natural increase due to the presence of a large proportion of fertile young adults and relatively few older people reaching the ends of their lives.
What are the 3 main causes of rural-urban migration?
-Urban pull factors
-Rural push factors
-‘Shrinking world’ technology
What are urban pull factors?
The main factor almost everywhere is employment. FDI by TNCs in urban parts of poorer countries provides a range of work opportunities with the companies and their supply chains. We can distinguish between formal sector employment and informal sector. Urban areas offer the hope of promotion as well as advancement into professional roles that are non-existent in rural areas. Additionally, schooling and health care may be better in urban areas, making cities a good choice for young migrants with aspirations for their children.
What are rural push factors?
The main factor is usually poverty, aggravated by population growth and land reforms. Agricultural modernisation reduced the need for rural labour further. Resource scarcity in rural areas with population growth, such as the Darfur region of Sudan, may trigger conflict and migration.
