Globalization and Health

Class: IS403 Created Time: December 24, 2021 2:15 PM Database: Class Notes Database Last Edited Time: January 12, 2022 4:16 PM Type: Reading Notes

What are the negative impacts of globalization on human health and well-being?

Commodification makes products essential to health and wellbeing more available but not to all people equally
- medicine is harder to produce for developing countries and drugs are costlier
Unhealthy diets promoted by transnational commercial actors (fast food, sugar soft drinks, alcohol, infant food)
- tobacco, drugs
Workers’ physical health
- harmful exposure to chemicles
  - Toys, Christmas decorations have harmful chemicals during production
  - No protective equipments
- repetitive machine replaceable jobs
  - ‘repetitive strain’ & ‘musculoskeletal disorder’: repetitive physical movements
- child labor
Workers’ mental health suffers from stress
- high psychological work demands
- low level of task control, authority, and self-decisions
- perceived or/and real risk from job
- encouragement of overtime work stye, surveillance on efficiency and productivity to maximize output
Economy Sensitive to instability and failure → Increased risk of unemployment
- temporary job that’s bad for health and wellbeing
- Waged Workers have access to health care insurences
- How: accelerated movement of capital makes intense competition between places and workers, making unemployment in specific places
- illegal migrant workers, refugees less labor rights

Pandemic, spread of infectious diseases (because increasingly mobility of people)
Production of food is able to sustain the world’s population
- But distribution of global production isn’t good ¹
  - lots of export subsidies, less food domestically
  - There’s prevalence of food shortages
  - Competition conflict and wars over food and resources
- Isn’t environmentally sustainable
Urbanization: people clumping to population centers makes housing plans not work ⇒ shanty towns lacking sanitation, poor environmental condition, and disease.
Air, water, land pollution from globalizing processes affecting health

North countries ‘brain drain’ South countries in the form of neo-colonialism where skilled workers train in Southern countries and goes to work in North countries. ¹
The rich north off-shore their pollutant and unsafe work to the South with less safety regulatory measures than in a developed state. ¹
- Trade in wastes (North→South)
- Re procession of nuclear wastes between the North → concerns of radiation exposure to workers & local residents
- The best predictor of location of toxic waste dumps in the US are the concentration of people of low income and of color.
Inequality of gain
- Developing countries gets less benefits
- Political regulatory protect home state’s health and safety in powerfu states, but generate risk environment abroad (poorer states).
- Unfair trade practices: developed countries put ‘export subsidies’ so they have advantage over developing countries’ agriculture products
  - Some say agricultural liberalization or stop of subsidies will increase global welfare and allow developing countries to hold 45% of total gain
  - Others say most developing countries are ‘net importers’ and would suffer because the price increase from subsidy lift
- Transnational actors benefit more from liberalized trade
  - Large producers can invest in technology to increase output and lower costs

The wealth seeking capitalist incentive encouraged by globalization makes the problem sort of inevitable
- More and more transnational commercial actors, who aren’t bound by obligations like governments
  - Only want more output without consideration of workers conditions, consumer’s health, and food distribution
  - Food chains dump their left over foods all the time to disincentivize people waiting to get free food at the end of a day
    - As said, global food production is sufficient to sustain everyone on Earth if distributed properly