The Pacific Islands and the Globalization Agenda

Abstract

Gi lobalization is now a central theme in the affairs of the Pacific Islands, and Pacific Islands governments are caught up in the rhetoric, the ideol ogy, and the economic policies of globalization. Policymakers in govern ments and regional organizations pepper their conversations with phrases drawn from that branch of politics called economics. These include achieving effective private-public sector partnerships, improving the attractiveness of the foreign investment regime, facilitating investment transparency, adopting free and open trade amongst our Island coun tries, reducing public sector subsidies, promoting integration into the world economy, enabling public enterprises to operate on commercial principles, providing a policy environment to encourage commercial activity, and encouraging the development of the private sector so that it assumes a leading role as the primary engine of growth. Where did this language and these ideas come from? To answer these questions, it is first necessary to define globalization, a term with many meanings in the fin-de-siecle conversation about the state of the world, signifying everything from the expansion of Europe since Columbus to the emergence of a global, Americanized consumer culture. These wider historical and cultural definitions are too broad to be useful for my argu ment, which focuses on the economic dimensions of globalization. So I follow two economists, Paul Bairoch and Richard Kozul-Wright, in call ing globalization a process in which the production and financial struc tures of countries are becoming interlinked by an increasing number of cross-border transactions to create an international division of labor in which national wealth comes, increasingly, to depend on economic agents