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Celerity

(42,652 posts)
Fri Feb 28, 2020, 12:38 AM Feb 2020

The Economist : Countries that have benefited most from globalisation are the most fearful of change



People in slower-growing rich countries are most at ease with it

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/02/27/countries-that-have-benefited-most-from-globalisation-are-the-most-fearful-of-change





THE PAST decade has been an uncomfortable one for economic liberals. The global financial crisis of 2007-09, and the Great Recession that followed, caused many to question the merits of trade and immigration. Such doubts have given rise to a wave of populist movements across the West, many of which cut across the traditional left-right political divide. In 2016, shortly before Donald Trump was elected America’s 45th president, this newspaper observed that the world appeared to be separating into two distinct groups of people: those who are “open” to change and those who are not. Drawbridge down, or up?

A sweeping new survey by Ipsos MORI, a pollster, sheds some light on precisely where support for pulling up the drawbridge is strongest. In August 2019 Ipsos asked 22,000 adults across 33 countries (a representative sample covering some two-thirds of the world’s population) more than 300 questions about their attitudes towards the world, their country, their community and their own lives. The results suggest that on average, people view globalisation more favourably than they did in the depths of the financial crisis. In the 20 countries surveyed by Ipsos over the past six years, 56% of respondents, on average, think that globalisation is good for their country, up from 49% in 2013.









Yet discontent with globalisation is still common in rich and poor countries alike. Curiously, the very places that have gained most from globalisation in recent years, measured by economic growth, are also among the most sceptical about the changes it brings. Fully 85% of respondents in four of the large emerging countries surveyed—Brazil, China, India and Turkey—thought that the world was changing too quickly. A similar share agreed that people in their country lived happier lives in the past.

To test this further, The Economist constructed an index using eight of Ipsos’s questions about openness to societal change and progress*. For this, we employed principal component analysis (PCA), a statistical technique for simplifying data sets, in order to compress eight variables of interest into just one element. The resulting “drawbridge” index captures nearly 50% of the variation across our eight questions concerning attitudes to openness. We find that for the 34 countries surveyed by Ipsos, the correlation between growth in GDP per person between 2008 and 2018 and our drawbridge index is 60%. In other words, countries that have grown faster over the past decade tend to be more resistant to change. This may seem puzzling. Economic growth has the power to pull millions out of poverty. But it can also be disruptive. This may be particularly true in emerging countries. Liberals may have further uncomfortable years ahead.

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