INTRODUCTION

“Globalization” has become an increasingly fashionable concept in the social sciences. It is widely supposed that the process of economic “globalization” has taken place or is taking place, leading to a situation in which most economic activities have been internationalized and the nation-state has lost its capacity as a locus of economic governance. A truly “global” economy would thus be a new stage in economic relationships, qualitatively different from previous structures of the international economy. This paper asks whether there is such a thing as a globalized economy. It further asks, if not, then how are we to characterize the present state of the world economy?

In the first place, we set out to examine whether such a process of globalization can be specified with some degree of rigor and assessed against the available evidence of international economic trends, thus enabling us to determine whether this phenomenon is taking place or not. To do this we have constructed two contrasting economic types: a fully globalized economy and an open international economy that is still fundamentally determined by processes occurring at the level of national economies. These types enable us to clarify the issues, and conceptually to specify the difference between a potentially new global economy and merely extensive and intensive international economic relations. Too often evidence of the latter is used to substantiate the former.

Second, having specified the ideal types, we go on to consider the main trends in the international economy and how they fit with the ideal type of globalization.