Globalisation and Equity in Latin America

What is the impact of economic globalisation on social, cultural, political and environmental equity? This paper first deals with the central role played by international financial institutions in spreading an optimistic view of the impact of globalisation, which identified international integration with economic and cultural modernization, an increase in State efficiency and social equity, and an improvement in environmental conditions. An analyses of the line of arguments of other academic papers that challenge this optimistic viewpoint is then given, stating that globalisation did not prevent the growth of inequality in the distribution of economic and political power among countries.

The paper finds this had diverse consequences for Latin America, including:

• inequality in the access to new technologies and cultural products, which may encourage ethnic or religious nationalisms and fundamentalisms
• loss of capacity to define macro-economic, social and cultural policies, favouring a deeper subordination to the centres of power
• a turning point in the representative power of traditional political organisms and the resulting participation crisis
• erosion of the capacity to generate or maintain the social capital of impoverished sectors
• unequal distribution of social and human rights

Conclusions include:

• safety nets were not sufficient to secure the "social cost" entailed by economic reforms
• the social reform of the 90's, with targeting geared to differentiate between deserving and undeserving beneficiaries contributed to the creation of divisions and competence within the vulnerable groups
• social policies were not able to revert inequalities, therefore the challenge for the next decades, is to start working on a new design of policies aiming at better distribution of opportunities, breaking "vicious circle of inequity", requiring work on every social area, in the construction of alternative policies, aiming at a reasonable distribution of opportunities
• the nineties represented a step backwards in the path towards the construction of a democratic and equal society as the reform model spread by globalisation, implicitly or explicitly conceived inequality as the "natural" price that had to be payed in order to achieve economic growth