Globalization: Contents and discontents

  • April 2024

    IZA/OECD Workshop: Applications with Linked Employer-Employee Data

    Paris

    The workshop seeks to bring together researchers who share an interest in using linked employer-employee data for innovative and policy-relevant research. The workshop will take place on April 10 and be preceded by a policy seminar with a keynote speaker on April 9. The workshop is organized in the context of the OECDs LinkEED v 2.0 project that seeks to enhance our understanding of the role of policies in inclusive growth through cross-country analytical work based on linked employer-employee data from different OECD countries. We welcome submissions of applied papers using linked employer-employee data in all areas.

    G²LM|LIC Policy Meeting: Boosting Women’s Labour Force Participation – Evidence from Western and Sub-Saharan Africa

    Online

    This online workshop assembles recent empirical evidence on possibilities to improve the position of women in the labour market and their access to it in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa and discusses policy solutions.

    2nd IZA/OECD Workshop: Climate Change and the Labor Market

    Online

    The IZA/OECD workshops aim to increase synergies between researchers and OECD experts to promote the societal impact of academic research and the relevance of expertise. These workshops are organized twice a year and focus on topics of particular importance to the economy and society. They bring together researchers from the IZA network, OECD experts and policymakers. They take place by videoconference, over half a day, with presentations by experts, researchers and discussions with policymakers.

Globalization: Contents and discontents
January 15, 2019 - January 16, 2019

The World Bank Development Research Group based in Kuala Lumpur is organizing its third international conference, with the theme Globalization: Contents and Discontents. The conference aims to bring together policymakers and academics to discuss the consequences of various aspects of globalization including trade, migration, financial flows, cultural exchanges and the diffusion of ideas. 

For at least twenty years, scholars have debated the pros and cons of globalization.  Jagdish Bhagwati, Anne Krueger, and others have made compelling arguments in favor of reducing trade and migration barriers to improve economic growth, and to have it more equitably distributed.  The sociologist Saskia Sassen in her 1998 collection of essays Globalization and Its Discontents raised doubts, saying that it resulted in “hyper” mobile capital which has changed the nature of sovereignty and heightened the salience of inequality.  Joseph Stiglitz, in his 2002 book with the same title, critiqued how globalization was managed by international financial institutions and argued for policies that gave greater importance to the interests of individual countries.  The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has influentially theorized that globalization is a multi-dimensional process that is not just about financial flows and trade but also about cultural flows and the exchange of ideas.  The historian C.A. Bayly borrowed from this perspective to understand how previous waves of globalization led to the Birth of the Modern World.  David Autor and Pinelopi Goldberg are some of the leading representatives of research that employs careful econometric analysis to examine the effects of globalization on macroeconomic conditions, labor markets, and inequality. More recently, Dani Rodrik has reframed the debate as being about “smart globalization” versus “maximum globalization,” an approach that is cognizant of the winners and losers from the powerful forces unleashed by globalization.  

The goal of this conference is to revisit these and other issues to understand the processes underlying globalization and how they may, or may not, shape a better world.  The conference will be anchored by keynote presentations by noted experts: Shanta Devarajan (Senior Director for Development Economics at the World Bank), William Easterly (Professor of Economics at New York University) and JP Singh (Director of the Center of Cultural Relations at the University of Edinburgh). The organizing committee is headed by Norman Loayza and Vijayendra Rao, Lead Economists with the Development Research Group.

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