Disparities in Globalization of the World Economies

This paper constructs composite indices of globalization of 131 countries spread over the five continents and classified into World-I, World-II and World-III countries. KOF, the Business Cycle Research Institute in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich is the source of data used in this study. The Composite Indices of Globalization have been computed by Pena’s method, which attributes the most desirable properties to the indices so constructed. On the basis of these indices, the paper investigates into the trends of globalization and disparities in globalization for a period of 11 years (1999-2009). Disparities have been obtained as the Gini’s coefficient as well as the coefficient of variation. The study finds that in all the three worlds, the trends in globalization are increasing while the trends in the disparities in globalization are decreasing, which suggest global integration and convergence of national economies to a global order. We also find that social indicators of globalization explain the variations in per capita income more potently than economic or political indicators of globalization do.