Globalization

Below are additional random excerpts from the paper... With the inflow of capital, jobs, and new technologies into developing countries globalphiles believes that global inequality and poverty will decline steadily. It can be argued that globalization hinders a government’s ability to utilize fiscal policies at their own discretion. What many of these globalphiles fail to recognize is that statistics may be deceiving or insufficient to justify their arguments. The increase in taxation and government expenditures do not necessarily indicate that governments are utilizing fiscal policies as they believe would be the most beneficial to the society. The two key policies being compromised a government’s ability to tax, and to spend money on what they see fit. In some cases increased globalization has made it less beneficial for governments to invest in social programs. This becomes evident when global investors do not invest in economies concentrating large amounts of expenditure on social services that do not necessarily increase profitability, such as welfare and pensions. Increased mobility of people and corporations has also increased the need for governments to spend money on socially and economically attractive ventures. Governments invest in projects to attract interest or to maintain support instead of where it would be most beneficial, because of the threat that its people and corporations might leave the country. Globalization has made taxation more difficult for governments because it provides firms and people more mobility, expands business over the Internet, and makes it tougher to tax corporations. “Modern tax systems were developed after the second world war when cross-border movements in goods, capital, and labour were relatively small. Now, firms and people are more mobile-and can exploit tax differences between countries.” Governments no longer tax people and corporations as freely because they do not want to give them reason to move production, jobs, and capital out of the country. Globalization has made it much easier for corporations to shift their production to cheaper countries. It is because of this fact that some governments have had to decrease corporate tax to appeal to business. “Before the second world war, America's federal corporation tax yielded one-third of total federal tax revenues, more than personal income tax. Now, corporation tax accounts for only 12 percent of the total and barely quarter as much as personal tax.” The increased globalization of production and markets has made it more challenging to determine how goods and services are taxed and which government is allowed to tax them. Multinational firms may locate their stages of production in a plethora of different countries making it harder to track the taxable resources. The rapid rise in the amount of business done over the Internet also adds to the taxation difficulties. On-line transactions can be instant, and are the massive number of records makes it difficult to scrutinize individual transactions. The deals that are made over the World Wide Web are difficult to account for because of their sheer volume and the quickly altering locations of business due to individual connections from a multitude of different places. To impose taxes on Internet business would also be difficult because uniform rate for tax would need to be established amongst many countries. If this trend continues governments may be forced to tax less mobile sources, such as unskilled workers, adding to the tax burden of this group. In the future, governments in search of new tax revenues may have to implement taxes that hinder technological growth such as, the “Bit Tax… which taxes not just on-line transactions but all digital communications. Hence it would stunt the growth of that industry.” In summary, it is clear that the integration of the It is given that not all of the labour force will reap the benefits associated with globalization; some of the recently