Global environmental changes slow down the pace of globalization highlighted by a new composite indicator

Abstract

To better benchmark the trend of globalization in consideration of global environmental changes, this paper proposes a comprehensive composite indicator (CI) by dimension comparing with economic, social & culture, and political dimensions granting equal emphasis on environmental. Different mathematical methods were implemented to selected the most robust method in each step following the OECD handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators. It was found that the CI consists of Mean value miss data imputation, Max-Min Normalization, Equal Weights of indicators and Linear additive Aggregation was the optimal scenario. Consequently, the globalization trends of 135 countries and regions from 2004 to 2016 were evaluated by using the optimal scenario. Results showed that the overall globalization level remained stable from 2004 to 2016. The percentage of globalization contributed by the Social & Culture dimensions keep up warding from 2004 to 2016, while the percentage of globalization explained by the Economic dimension and the Environmental dimension keeps decreasing over the years. The political dimension keeps stable during this period. The decrease in the Environmental dimension is the main cause for the stagnation of globalization over the years. EU is the most globalization region, followed by APEC countries and LAC countries, Africa countries are the least globalization region of all. This study showed the global environmental changes can slow down the pace of globalization.