Globalisation offers poorer countries a way in

1. For a less developed country globalisation mainly means access to markets far larger than its own and access to investment its own savers could not provide.
2. Both can raise incomes quickly, and selling to the rest of the world has moved more people out of poverty than any other route has, but the argument is over who keeps the gains and what they cost the country earning them.

Producers reach buyers the home market lacks

1. Producers can sell to customers abroad instead of to a small home market with little spending power, and export orders bring in foreign currency to buy machinery, fuel and medicines.
2. Foreign buyers arrive with standards, techniques and equipment attached, so producing to an export standard raises what local firms can make for everybody else.
3. Countries often end up depending on a narrow range of exports - sometimes a single crop or mineral - so a fall in that one world price hits the whole economy at once.
4. The stage done locally often adds least value, because design, branding and marketing stay abroad, so much of the final price never reaches the producing country.

Workers earn more than local alternatives offer

1. Work producing for export usually pays more than farming or informal work available nearby, and it pays regularly, which lets a household plan, save and keep children in school.
2. The same job is paid far less than it would be in a richer country, which is why the work moved there, so a wage can be an improvement locally and still be very low, but hours are long and safety and building standards are weakly enforced, putting workers at risk.
3. The work is there only while the country stays the cheapest place to do it, so employment that arrived quickly can leave the same way, and a worker compares that job with local alternatives rather than with what the same work pays elsewhere, which is why so many take it - but pay and safety are set by the firms and governments involved and could be raised without the work going.

Consumers face world prices and foreign competition

1. Imports bring in what the country cannot yet make, including medicines, machinery and mobile technology, and a mobile connection can carry payments and market prices where no fixed network was built.
2. Local producers can be undercut by imports made far more cheaply elsewhere, so a home industry can be lost before it grows large enough to compete.
3. Staple food and fuel prices are set on world markets, and a rise hurts most where food and fuel already take a large share of household spending.

Sustainability weighed in a poorer country

1. Economic sustainability: growth built on being the cheapest place to carry out one stage of production lasts only while that stays true, so the test is whether export earnings go into schools, power and roads that keep incomes rising.
2. Social sustainability: regular wages and services funded out of rising income pull one way, while long hours, unsafe workplaces and people moving away from home pull the other.
3. Environmental sustainability: production tends to move towards countries whose environmental rules are weaker or less enforced, so pollution, water use and extraction concentrate there while goods are consumed elsewhere, leaving the country least able to afford clean-up paying for it.

These are the same three kinds of sustainability used in 4.4.3, and an effect has to be sorted into one of them before it can be judged.

Whether the gains stay in the country

1. Some of what is earned leaves again, because firms based abroad take their profits home and imported machinery is paid for out of the same earnings.
2. What stays depends on how much exporters buy locally and how much is collected in tax, which is the difference between a country used for one cheap stage of production and a country building an economy.

Whether a poorer country gains depends on four things

1. It depends on whether the work moves up over time, because a country that starts by assembling and goes on to make and then design components keeps far more of the final price than one that never leaves the cheapest stage.
2. It depends on how much of the earnings stay, because export income spent on power, ports and schooling raises what the country can do next, while income that flows straight out changes nothing permanently.
3. It depends on how narrow the country's exports are, because an economy resting on one crop or mineral is exposed to a price it cannot influence, while one with a range of exports absorbs the same fall.
4. It depends on whether pay, safety and environmental rules are enforced, because the gains and the costs come from the same investment, and enforcement decides how they are divided.