Globalisation

🎯 How This Word Works in UPSC Writing

The growing integration of economies and societies across borders through trade, capital, technology and the movement of people. The examinable content is its ambivalence, and a strong answer holds both sides rather than choosing one. Integration into global value chains raised growth, widened consumer choice and made capital and technology available, and India's services exports in particular grew on the strength of it. Against that, openness transmits external shocks directly, as in 2008; the gains accrue unevenly across regions, sectors and skill levels, since those able to participate in tradable sectors benefit most; and policy autonomy narrows where trade agreements and capital mobility constrain what a government may do. The concept is not purely economic, since cultural and informational flows are part of it, and the recent turn towards supply chain resilience and industrial policy suggests a partial retreat from the assumption that integration is unambiguously good.