Background

The major impacts of globalization the will be address are economic inequality, immigration, trade, and human rights. Auer, in his book, Active Labor Market Policy, used the categories of developed, transitional, and undeveloped to describe the modernity of nations. I will use the same terms as Auer because I find the term transitional more compelling and descriptive than the term semi-periphery that Wallerstein used in his world-systems theory. Labor, for the purpose this essay, will remain a component of the state using the Marxian theory of capital mobility and labor immobility – labor movement is constrained by national borders and individual economic status (Stalker). Finally, capitalists or multinational corporations (MNC) will be address separately because where labor is generally limited to one national affiliation, MNCs are not. The final assumption of this essay is that the quest for modernity is a goal of nations. This is a controversial assumption and scholars using both theories of imperialism and dependency theory (Marx, Luxemburg, D. Brown, Cardoso, Polyani, and Frank to name a few) would question if modernity should be a (the?) goal, and if modernity via capitalistic means is advantageous for lesser developed countries (LDC) and people.