What are the factors that have led to globalization in the 21st century?

Question

hey ! i reely need help on this 1, just can't seem to find anything on it .it's for ma economics project

Answer 1

Let me give it a shot.

If you are talking about factors that led to globalization well first and most important factor was the improvement in communication. During the earlier days, things were done by mail, so you order from someone you know in some other country,hopefully your order gets to you in a year.

Then Telex came as well as telephony, telephone systems then were not globally interconnected so still there were communication barriers for an efficient trade. But with the advent of internet and its drastic improvement this pave the way to a "real" globalization.

Globalization in my opinion is not limited to trade. For globalization to prosper, East must meet West. There should be culture sharing, aside from trade. Why culture? If i don't know the culture of let us say Korea, why would i be interested to import their items, like spices or food?

Other factors that led to trade globalization was when countries joined together and formed afta, nafta then we have the WTO that supposedly mediates or arbitrates dispute within countries, relating to trade only. To add to the factors were summits that were organized by several countries, which USA was a willing partner, to mention one is Asian or Asean Summit (I think those 2 are different). All these have trade in their agenda as well as investments.

Investments - because of those mentioned above, A country interested in investing in another country became much easier, 3rd world and "underdeveloped" countries opened up their economy to developing, and developed countries, making trade faster and efficient.

Transportation / Trade Routes - because of new faster sea crafts that can load hundreds of container vans, and with more trade routes, this paved the way to globalization as well.

Members of certain trade orgs or those countries who joined certain trade agreements, willingly agreed to reduce tariffs, over number of years to the point of zero tariff. Others lifted thier restrictions on some products, these are not only effects of globalization but also a factor how globalization came about.

Many countries were really pushing for globalization, they want a share of the pie, they want the european and USA market to open up so they can supply their products increase the trade between those giant economies.

There are positive and negative effects because of this globalization. But I won't go there since you are only asking for the factors. ;-)

Answer 2

Global media reducing the mystique of foreign places cultures.

Global communication.

Speed of communication

Availability of communication

Increased costs of labor caused companies to seek cheaper resources.

Countries realizing they can expolit foreign markets by:
Improved Quality, Japan, 70's - 80's
Cheap Prices, China, 90's 21st Century

Answer 3

well, i'll try to answer it but note that the answer will be abstract.

first, there are increasing MNC (Multi National Company).

then, the tools that act as enabler is IT (internet).

then in business/economy theory, the developing country (as it developing) serve an opportunity as huge market.

then there are increasing in relation (trades) between countries, regions (bilateral, multiteral, like Asean, Nafta, etc)

and the current issue may be the cheap labor.

hope it help.. but you might want to find a more structured analysis from wikipedia or googling..

Answer 4

Overpopulation

Answer 5

In the eye of every individual, the definition of globalization and its effects on life takes a different meaning. Globalization is generally referred to as the increasing integration of world markets for capital, goods, and services. However, its definition is debatable and its impacts may be evaluated in different ways. For the purposes of our seminar, we focused on well-known corporations and their effects on global economies and environments. The products and corporations we concentrated our research on were Nike shoes, Starbucks coffee, and IBM computers.

Nike is the largest shoe corporation in the world, controlling 45% of the industry, more than its closest competitors, Adidas and Reebok, combined. While the majority of Nike’s sales occur in the US and Europe, it subcontracts its manufacturing to companies who set up and run factories primarily located in China, Indonesia, Vietnam. Over 660,000 workers, predominately women between 19-25, are employed in more than 900 factories throughout 50 countries. As the leader of its industry, Nike has faced criticism for the exploitation of factory workers, including being forced to work 12 hour work days for less than the minimum wage of their home country. In response, Nike re-wrote its Code of Conduct in 1998 and has allied itself with the Fair Labor Association, Human Rights Campaign, and Global Social Compliance.

Starbucks is the “leading retailer, roaster, and brand of specialty coffee in the world, with more than 8,700 retail locations” worldwide. Coffee production affects over 25 million farmers in 70 countries around the world. Starbucks claims they are committed to protecting farmers by supporting social, economic, and environmental issues crucial to their livelihood. In 2004, the World Environmental Center selected Starbucks to receive its 21st Annual Gold Medal recognizing Starbucks’ efforts and success in achieving these goals. In addition to selling 20% of the fair trade coffee in the U.S., Starbucks provides financial aid to farms and fosters waste reduction and environmental conservation programs.

The globalization of the computer industry is unique from the others we studied in that not only are the manufacturing jobs moving overseas but many of the service and

programming jobs are following. The newest trend in the industry is the outsourcing of the computer programming and technical support jobs that historically were based in the US. Due to its large educated labor force, India receives the majority of the technical jobs leaving the United States. Another alarming impact of the globalization is the rising environmental and health dangers caused by the disposal of technical waste (e-waste) in third-world countries. Though no computer company is excluded from these trends, one of the largest outsourcers is IBM.

Overall, the effects of these corporations on the world shed a small light on globalization, but are hardly definitive of the full spectrum of its effects. While globalization is inevitable, its effects are determined by the individual choices of consumers, governments, and corporations worldwide.
How if at all, is the 21st century going to be different and why? The seeds of the future have, as ever, been sown yesterday. The most important recent development in world history is the move towards liberalised, market-based economics in all countries, regardless of their earlier political ideology. If there is one thing that unites countries today, it is this almost unanimous vote in favour of freedom, deregulation and opening-up of markets.

Fundamentally, the crux of the term "globalisation" is the closer integration of any country's economy and, therefore, its markets for goods, services as well as financial assets, with the international economy. The globalised economy is nothing new to many countries in the developing world. A country such as Sri Lanka, for example, had become a model of deregulation, free enterprise and, above all, export-led growth, even way back in the late 1970s.

The Complexity Model


Today's world has seen industry boundaries being redefined or merging. Technology convergence as, for instance, across telecommunications, computing and entertainment media, is the order of the day. Economic boundaries are collapsing or are being redrawn by common markets and by trading blocks such as Asean and Nafta, and common currencies, such as the euro. The internal factors governing the resources and capabilities of companies are also becoming increasingly similar, imitable or even shared.

Large systemic effects caused by small changes in initial conditions are noted in fields as far apart as weather forecasting and macroeconomics. We are all aware that the world economy goes through cataclysmic changes due to extraneous factors, including natural disasters (due to the El Nino effect, for instance) that have little apparent reason or logic.

The future is now


Given the complexity and the bewildering nature of the reality, do we have no signposts or road maps at all? Is there no way we can look at the future in a structured way? The prospect is not so bleak after all. For a start, let us see: What in brief terms are the significant landmarks of the 21st Century? In some sense, we do not need to be great astrologers or philosophers to be able to detect these trends because most of the trends we are going to be hit with are there for all to see, if we but cared to look and listen to what is happening elsewhere on the planet.

They are what some refer to as "weak signals" that need to be amplified. What often prevents us from seeing them is the belief in our own uniqueness and the "It won't happen here" syndrome. Let me list a few of them: One is the ending of the notion of a lifelong career with the same organisation.

People are nowadays prepared to treat each job for, say, a period of three years almost as if it were an assignment in personal development and preparation. Organisations have to come to terms with this and are prepared to make very flexible career-planning decisions and make last minute changes to them.

Second, part-time working could become the norm as in many European countries, as also working in a portfolio of jobs. Workers, of course, expect a safety net of welfare measures in an atmosphere of hire-and-fire policies, yet being 40 plus and unemployed has no longer a stigma attached to it.

Third, we all will face the need for continuous learning on the job to keep ourselves current. The simple reason for this is that knowledge is expanding exponentially. The sum total of human knowledge added in the last fifty years is greater than all the published works of the previous human history. And the rate of change is accelerating.

This leads to a fourth point, a paradox that companies are still unwilling to come to grips with, namely that they will have to invest in training and updating a fickle workforce (including managers) who might well leave them, even by virtue of the same process! Yet not doing on-the-job-training is a non-option.

Fifth, and very significant, is the changing role of women in the work-force. It is no longer enough to be able to say we offer the same salaries to women or give them special maternity benefits.

Sixth, the rate of obsolescence is so high that all organisations must invest in some form of continuous learning and "multi-skilling" their workforce. Other factors are the global mobility of human resources and global standards of compensation. When such foreign accounting firms as E&Y and management consultancies such as McKinsey came to India they at once enabled all domestic businesses in those sectors to raise salaries by a factor of two or three and, therefore, the professional fees charged!

All of the above are already happening somewhere or other already, and it is only a matter of estimating the extent to which it will happen and when, as far as other countries are concerned.

What is the impact on corporate strategy?


Now, let us turn to the arena of greater interest to us, namely, managerial actionIt used to be thought that the mandarins in the ivory towers devised strategy, be it in the public sector or in corporations.

And until the mid-1980's it was the fashion to think that this was best achieved by having a central think-tank of planners, engaged purely in crystal ball gazing, who drew up detailed five and ten year perspective plans. In the early 1980's for example General Electric US had once a famous Long Range Planning department of 200 people, until dismantled later by the CEO Jack Welch.

The upheavals of the past decade and a half have put paid to all that. Today, strategy is seen not necessarily as a deliberate process but a heuristic one, emergent, often different from the original intention.

Going with the flow, developing alternative scenarios rather than forecasts, adapting oneself opportunistically to whatever situation arises, keeping one's options open, including that of collaborating with the so called competition, all are fair game in today's world. The traditional model of comparing the industry attractiveness and one's ability to compete alone are no longer considered sufficient for strategy development.





Today the trend in business and in government is towards globalization. It is the justification and often the goal for many of the trends we see in the world today. Globalization is bringing various industries, from Defense, Telecommunications, Automotive and Technology together into one global marketplace. Technology is doing away with the traditional way people, businesses and governments conduct their day to day affairs. This is especially true in Europe and North America. These two regions are increasingly finding globalization as a solution to some problems with existing business models which, while successful, could become even more so with either trans-Atlantic mergers or alliances. From AT&T to Mercedes-Benz, Bofors, to MCI, Huge Conglomerates are staking out ever larger claims on the global landscape. This mad dash to globalize is leaving much of the world (the 3rd world and developing world) behind in the dust, not to mention encroaching on the sovereignty of the Nation-State. There are many factors contributing to this trend: Some of which are:

1.The loosening of controls of the movements of international capital

2.Reduction of trade barriers and tariffs on goods and services between nations

3.The Rise of the European 'Super- State' Model/Experiment

a. Including the introduction of the Euro

b. The Dollarization of Certain Latin American Nations currency and the proposal for a new North American currency, the Amero

4.The Ascendancy of the WTO

5.The rapid advancement of technology

6.The dissemination of business and economic knowledge globally

7.The Infancy of a Global Police/Enforcement Mechanism, and the trend towards 'globalizing' local and regional problems.

The trend is one which is moving along at a steadily quickening pace and the need for an overarching legal and enforcement mechanism is becoming increasingly apparent. Indeed, many are openly calling for such a regime with a viable World Court. This has met with some consternation on the part of some, yet the need for some sort of legal framework to settle and arbitrate disputes and crimes internationally is becoming apparent to many.

Yet these calls are being increasingly resisted by a variety of groups both on the political left and right. Calls for the dismantling or radical restructuring of the WTO, World Bank, IMF and even the UN are being advocated in the streets, at times violently, as the trouble in Seattle demonstrated. This is a natural, expected and politically healthy train of events. Problems linked with the trend towards rapid globalization are clear and are being identified, and clearly articulated by its detractors. In addition, the UN and NATO's self declared role of savior of humanity is viewed by many in and outside of the US for what it is, an excellent excuse for expanding the economic, political and military spheres of influence of both institutions. Sending troops under UN or NATO helmets is meant to be a signal to the rest of the world that the West 'cares' and will not let atrocities go unpunished. Yet atrocities are loudly proclaimed in the press when justification for military action is needed, but when hard evidence is sought after, they are either, 1) killings which are on the scale which afflict many American municipalities, or 2) non-existent. Giving rise the obvious conclusion that using doctored photo's and poorly, researched news stories, NATO and the UN can manipulate public opinion with carefully disseminated propaganda into supporting its actions. NATO's penchant for agitating Russia by holding huge exercises in the Ukraine, which borders the strategically important Black sea, and is not coincidentally in close enough proximity to the Caucuses to rankle Russia, shows the intentions of The US and NATO are more about securing spheres of influence than with maintain that elusive, yet oft talked about concept of 'World Peace'.

The UN and the US have been heavily criticized for their treatment of Iraq. It's Oil for food program feeds the Iraqi elite, but little reached the masses, This program drove the price of oil down and made gasoline cheap in the US, these sanctions are part of an overall UN program and supported by several UN resolutions.

Yet while NATO's, the UN's and the US's military and political policies are very much an important issue in modern globalization, the issue that had received the most response from ordinary citizens is the economic policies pursued by these un-elected and undemocratic institutions. Human rights groups citizens action committees environmental groups religious institutions are given no real power in any of these organizations. Indeed the detractors of the WTO are now speaking more loudly and these voices are no longer confined to the 'conspiracy theorists' of the so-called extreme right. Many on the so-called left are now beginning to see the true nature of the global beast now arising. They see an WTO (derisively dubbed the Wicked Trade Organization by some) which has neutralized with the stroke of a pen national level trade and labor organizations and even some international trade and labor organizations. The policies of the WTO allow many practices that in most countries are illegal. Its use extensive use of secrecy is at variance with the democratic principles globablist proponents constantly extoll when seeking passage treaties which support and strengthen these organizations.

These global trends have accelerated since the end of the Cold War and the changes have left many large segments of the worlds population in abject poverty and want. For most of the world, this economic catastrophe has been worse than the great depression. The sweatshop has returned; it is in Asia, Eastern Europe and increasingly in America. Conditions in America, while widely touted on television and being the 'best ever' is less that rosy for a significant portion of the population which must work two jobs to make ends meet and has great difficulty in finding affordable health care. These are issues that will resonate with the rest of Americans when the economy takes its inevitable turn for the worse. This has led many, especially on the right wonder what the agenda is for the future. What sort of resistance will be tolerated by world's leaders? How will people be able to be adequately represented in a system that refuses to allow peaceful protests, and democratic representation in global institutions? Much of the worlds population have seen the true effects of globalization first hand and know that all that glitters in not gold. When the unemployed become such a burden in some societies that they are executed for not having work, as in China, serious questions need to be asked. Yet these issues are never mentioned on mainstream media sources, especially when MFN or Permanent Normalized Trading Status (PNTR) is discussed. Debate is stifled and the majority of Americans continue to be deliberately un or misinformed on these issues which will have enormous impact on their livelihoods in the coming years. America's citizens should deal with these issues honestly before the most effective means for defending democratic ideals, clearly provided for in the Constitution, is effectively done away with, such as the ballot and the right to bear arms. Globally the world is changing rapidly, and will change more. The question is who will drive the agenda and who will benefit from these changes? Will it be, as it has been over the past 10 years, global corporations and Western political and economic interests, or the General population of the globe as a whole?

Today, the world's religions are soon to converge to help usher in religious 'harmony' and ultimately support the coming world 'system of governance'. The United Religions Initiative (URI) is an strong advocate of global governance. Those of you who know their bible know that the trend towards Globalization is real has enormous significance to Christians. A harlot religious system will help it (the 'global system of governance') gain and maintain power. It seems that things are shaping up exactly as the Bible predicted. Indeed,you will find that this year we will have the UN's millennium summit of to help it define its role in the 21st century. Slowly, methodically the UN is gaining power. It is truly transforming itself, slowly, into a Global system of governance, not so much by the use of raw autonomous power, but through the consensus of its most powerful members, and key players, increasingly multinational Corporations and International financial institutions, both formal and informal. This trend will continue, slowly almost imperceptibly to most Americans, though not to the world at large. Christians are to be watchful, aware obedient to Christ and his word. These are not the times to shrug one's shoulders and mutter 'oh well...'. There are commands to us who live in these times to do certain things.


Summary of ‘Learning and Decent Work for All: New Directions in Training and Education for Poverty Reduction’ 2004 forthcoming paper written for ILO InFocus Programme

The accelerating rate of globalisation in the 21st century presents increasingly complex and demanding challenges. These challenges are not only economic, but also social and political if benefits of global growth are to be equitable between and within countries, and hence truly sustainable. It is now widely recognised that although globalisation has the potential to deliver benefits for all, it may also significantly increase global poverty and inequality. The degree to which globalisation will benefit the poor will depend crucially on the types of policies introduced in order to complement and build on market growth, and to address underlying inequalities in power and resources which significantly distort the ways in which markets operate.

Since the end of the 1990s international agreements and policy debates have increasingly focused on the concept and imperatives for ‘pro-poor growth’. In these debates Human Resources Development is seen as playing a key role. Education and training are explicitly part of the pro-poor growth framework in many multilateral development agencies, including ILO, UNDP, World Bank and bilateral agencies like DFID, SDC and CIDA. Skills development and training for the informal and formal sectors are an essential component of ILO’s Decent Work policy framework. This includes explicit attention to the needs of particularly excluded and disadvantaged people including women, the extremely poor, the disabled and ethnic minorities.


In the context of changing production systems there is increasing recognition of the pivotal role of both education and training for both economic and social goals. No society can succeed in a globalised environment unless people have adequate knowledge and skills. These are vital not just for maintaining competitiveness and ensuring adaptable and productive enterprises but also for achieving personal and social development. In particular, a well functioning system of education and training enhances both economic and social integration by offering opportunities to many groups who would otherwise be excluded from the labour market. This is especially important for promoting gender equality and overcoming many forms of discrimination

(ILO 1999. Decent Work: International Labour Conference 87th Session 1999: Report of the Director-general, Geneva.)


Moreover education and training are not only instrumental to economic growth, but also a basic human right, explicitly mentioned in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many international and regional agreements and national constitutions. Training and skills development are included in the standard definition of ‘basic education for all ‘agreed at the Jomtien Conference in 1990 which covered ‘all the skills and knowledge that people need if they are to lead a decent life‘. These ‘basic learning needs‘ include not only early childhood education and primary schooling, but non formal literacy and vocational and other training for youth and adults to provide basic life and employment skills.

However throughout the 1990s, despite official commitments in many development agencies to Human Resource Development and poverty reduction, funding for training and skills development decreased. Public expenditure on basic education, skills development and training was seriously squeezed in the context of structural adjustment policies and liberalisation. Poverty-targeted assistance was focused on provision of minimalist microfinance. Funding for integrated or complementary non-financial services, including training, substantially decreased. Human Development budgets in major donor agencies focused largely on primary education programmes rather than skills for work. Although a few programmes have been introduced for ‘lifelong learning’ and ICT these do not reach the very poor.

Towards the end of the 1990s and increasingly in recent years, there began to be some renewed interest in the need for training and skills development. This was partly because of increasing evidence of the shortcomings of minimalist microfinance for poverty reduction and particularly for enterprise development. A combination of shrinking aid budgets and documented evidence of limited impact and effectiveness of much publicly funded skills development and training led to a focus on market solutions and (following debates in micro-finance) on financial sustainability. This has taken a number of specific forms: training focusing on entrepreneurship rather than technical skills; apprenticeship schemes through private enterprises for technical training; market-led financially sustainable Business Development Services targeted at small and medium entrepreneurs in which training is one element; voucher schemes to combine some degree of poverty targeting with trainee choice.

Systematic poverty assessments of these training programmes remain to be done. The market focus on demand-led services, partnership with the private sector and cost-recovery have been important advances on many earlier subsidised programmes in terms of meeting the needs of certain groups of entrepreneurs and employees in a more sustainable and cost-effective manner. However evidence indicates that they fail to address the training challenge faced by very low income women and men. Enterprise training is designed mainly for small and medium-scale entrepreneurs and the methods and models of management promoted do not meet the needs of very poor entrepreneurs. Apprenticeship schemes generally fail to address the training needs of employees for a time-efficient and thorough grounding in production skills. In some cases they amount to little more than a means for employers to get subsidised and very cheap labour. Market-led BDS does not meet the needs of very poor entrepreneurs or employees and often excludes them. There has been no empirical examination of the underlying assumptions of trickle-down of benefits at the small enterprise level to employees and micro-enterprises down the value chain.

Crucially, although women are the majority of very poor ‘people’, training interventions continue to see them as a marginal and special case. For poor women gender inequality compounds the constraints of poverty. Women have much more difficulty controlling household resources to invest in their own skills for enterprise or career development. Women are generally excluded from private apprenticeship in more lucrative ‘male’ industries. ‘Mainstream’ enterprise training and interventions rarely discuss gender issues and gender discrimination within value chains and households. This is despite the serious constraints these pose for industrial upgrading, household poverty reduction and livelihood development.

Parallel to these ‘mainstream’ debates about the best mix of subsidised and market approaches, there have been many small-scale project-level innovations in poverty-targeted training methods and content, particularly in female-targeted projects. These have included:

· Integration of life skills, gender awareness and empowerment into livelihood and entrepreneurship training.

· Participatory methods which focus on participant bottom-up learning rather than top-down ‘expert’ training and which are accessible to illiterate people.

· Integrated programmes of livelihood development training for very poor and illiterate people with literacy training and programme impact assessment.

· Training as part of a set of poverty-targeted programme strategies including micro-finance, marketing support, organizational strategies and macrolevel advocacy.

· Training targeting different levels of particular economic sectors: employees, outworkers and upstream enterprises as part of an integrated pro-poor sectoral approach in these sectors.

In many cases two or more of these elements have been combined. However these innovations have so far been marginal in donor-level debates and also funding.

This paper argues that the recent small-scale innovations deserve much greater consideration and funding in any serious and coherent strategy for pro-poor growth. The paper builds on current debates and evidence from a number of donor agencies including ILO, World Bank, DFID and GTZ and also secondary source material from NGOs and the author’s own research:

· Part 1 provides an overview of current debates and evidence in relation to training and skills development for pro-poor growth and proposes a framework for examining training needs.

· Part 2 discusses in detail the poverty impacts and broader implications of the experience of a number of innovative training and skills development programmes.

· Part 3 summarises the main conclusions in relation to potential ways forward to improve the content, targeting and institutional framework for training and skills development for poor and very poor women and men.

The Case Studies selected are not the only important examples of innovation, only those for which sufficient impact information was available to the author in the short timeframe of the paper. Poverty assessments have not been systematically done for all the Case Studies and the studies cited were often commissioned for other purposes. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that such programmes are an effective and potentially significant contribution to pro-poor growth and the Decent Work Agenda. Although undoubtedly in all cases further improvements and refinements can be made they point to the possibility of developing effective:

· Content of training to equip poor women and men to take advantage of the opportunities in the rapidly changing economic and social environment. It means training which addresses basic numeracy, literacy and analytical skills to enable very poor people to take advantage of emerging opportunities and decrease their vulnerability within the market. It means not only technical or enterprise skills training, but ensuring that skills are relevant to markets and can be adapted to market changes over time. It also requires integration of negotiation and organizational skills to address underlying forms of inequality and discrimination because of gender, ethnicity, age and disability.

· Methodologies for training to make them more accessible to the poorest women and men in the informal as well as formal sectors. This means accessible to women and men with very low levels of numeracy and literacy. It means rethinking methodologies so that the training process itself develops skills for participatory organization and analytical thought. It entails adapting delivery of training to the time and resource availability of the target groups. Crucially it entails a change in the power and status relationship between trainer and trainee whereby trainers facilitate the building of trainee confidence and questioning and see themselves as ‘learners about poverty and the strategies of poor people’ rather than top-down imposition of ‘solutions for the ignorant.’

· Integration of training into other dimensions of programme delivery, in particular micro-finance and impact assessment. The recent shift to minimalist micro-finance is not necessarily the most developmentally effective or cost-efficient means of poverty reduction and misses a very important potential means for cost-effective delivery of training. The large amounts of money currently spent on monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment could be used to develop effective information systems for ongoing participant action learning and programme innovation. These innovations in poverty-targeting in small-scale projects also have valuable lessons for some ways of integrating poverty targeting into larger-scale ‘mainstream’ programmes.

This will however require a shift in funding priorities and real commitment to investment in training and skills development for the poor as an integral part of the pro-poor growth agenda. The content of ‘market-led’ services needs to be redefined to incorporate not only the technical and managerial skills directly required by enterprises for their market competititveness and survival, but also the basic and life skills needed by the poor in order to negotiate and manage livelihoods in response to market opportunities and constraints. It requires a serious commitment to target and design innovative training for the very poor, including paths for upward mobility to other types of training. It requires a rethinking of ways in which poverty-targeted training can be integrated into other types of pro-poor intervention like literacy, micro-finance and sub-sector development and how these themselves can be more effectively poverty-targeted. It also requires integration of equity concerns: poverty, gender, ethnicity and disability into mainstream training and interventions for enterprises upstream in value chains and into mainstream education and training at all levels.

Crucially it requires a political shift from rhetoric of pro-poor growth which sees the poor as needing to be integrated at the margins into ‘growth as usual’ to a real commitment to developing the skills and potential of the vast majority of the world’s women and men as part of a Human Rights agenda for growth itself. Unless the rights of the very poor to skills development and training are prioritised, they will become even more marginalised not only by economic growth but even by ‘Human Resource Development’. The primary focus on Basic Education for children excludes the majority of adult women and men on whose income their children’s access to education depends, thus perpetuating inequalities to the next generation. The focus on small enterprises and cost recovery in poverty-targeted interventions risks leading to further marginalisation and disadvantage of micro-enterprises further down the value chain. The failure to seriously address the training needs of employees and workers undermines both enterprise efficiency and employee incomes. In all cases the impacts on women in terms of increased exploitation, unmanageable workloads and ill-health are likely to be particularly damaging. In all cases this is in contravention of Human Rights Agreements and undermines not only ‘pro-poor growth’ and social cohesion but the economic and political sustainability of global growth in general.