Postscript: a Note on Globalization, Information Technology and World Inequality

Most of the previous chapters have been concerned with the mechanisms through which information technologies have influenced the pattern of globalization between — and to a lesser extent within — developing countries. In this brief note we try to ‘complete’ the picture, by considering how those same mechanisms influence the extent to which the benefits of the globalization thus induced, accrue to developed rather than developing countries. For, whereas our basic conceptual framework rests heavily on the technological relationship between developed and developing countries, we have thus far made no attempt to analyse this relationship or to determine whether in practice it conforms to what we would expect. In particular, the essence of that framework is that the distributional effects of information technology need to be understood in relation to the fact that such technology is generated in and for the circumstances prevailing in the developed rather than the developing countries.