Globalization: A Basic Text, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 13 GLOBAL INEQUALITIES ICLASS AND RURAL–URBAN INEQUALITIES

• Class Inequality
  • Inequality in the world system
  • The “bottom billion”
  • Growing global inequality in health and health care
  • Global digital divide
  • E-waste and inequality
  • Is global economic inequality increasing or decreasing?
• Rural–Urban Inequality
  • Rural
  • Urban
  • Cities: The main locus of global problems
• Chapter Summary

Given the great importance of inequality in the world today, we will devote two chapters to the issue of inequality and its relationship to globalization. In this chapter we will discuss class inequality among societies throughout the world (Galbraith 2012; Sernau 2014), as well as how that inequality relates to the rural–urban differentiation. In the following chapter, the focus will shift to the relationship between globalization and inequality based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

The first part of this chapter is based on the premise that one of the most pressing problems, if not the most pressing problem, in the world today is the great economic inequalities that exist among and between societies. These inequalities not only raise enormous moral and ethical concerns (for example, how can we live with the fact that so few are so rich and so many are so poor?), but they also represent a major source of instability and conflict in many areas of the world. Inequality among societies is not only a problem in itself, but there is also the issue of whether or not ...