The Effects of Economic Globalization: Land Use and Land Values in Mumbai, India

Abstract

The “margins” of the global political economy may be defined as those areas that are relatively disconnected from the world economy. Of course, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, no world region is entirely detached from global developments. Some areas, however, are more integrated than others. I focus in this chapter on one important dimension of the globalization process: the diffusion of a transnational liberal ideology. The premise of this chapter is that the embrace of liberalization by governments in formerly more closed national economies leads into a highly critical phase of national economic development. This is due to potentially massive rescaling of the local/national market to global configurations. The term “transitional economy” has often been reserved for formerly communist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, or for a country such as South Africa since the end of apartheid. It has also applied to many other countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, whose governments have embarked on substantial economic reform policies.