I’ve stolen the title from this Scientific American article, which surveys the effects of globalisation on poverty in developing countries. It concludes:
The expansion of international trade and investment is one of the dominant trends of our time, but policymakers and advocates tend to discuss it without carefully examining the evidence available in social science. Because the modern era of globalisation has coincided with a sustained reduction in the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, one may conclude that globalisation, on the whole, is not making the poor poorer Equally, however, it cannot take much credit for the decrease in poverty, which in many cases preceded trade liberalisation. Countries that get the economics basics right – improving infrastructure, ensuring political stability, carrying out land reform, providing social safety nets, addressing market failures such as impeded access to credit – tend to succeed at reducing poverty. Although globalisation can help, it is only one factor among many.
They say that the developing consensus among economists is that for successful poverty reduction you need capital controls to allow capital flight, reduced protectionism to give access to first world markets, trust busting to stamp out restrictive practices by international middlemen and corporations, social programmes to redistribute the gains from trade, research to improve agriculture and fight diseases of the poor and immigration reform. None of this means anything if there isn’t political stability of course.