Global Culture

Every year, Foreign Policy and A.T.Kearney partner to produce the Globalization Index. Collecting data for the most populated countries in areas such as Foreign Investment, International Travel, Internet Users and Servers, Remittances, Involvement in International Organizations and Missions the analysis tries to provide a measure of how well countries are playing the globalization game. According to them, these are the most globalized:
Singapore Switzerland United States Ireland Denmark Canada Netherlands Australia Austria Sweden New Zealand United Kingdom Finland Norway Israel Czech Republic Slovenia Germany Malaysia Hungary

The editorial in the report is not anything radically new (at least for the usual readers of this blog), but it’s still worth reviewing:

• The imminent awakening of Brazil, Russia, India & China that so far were lagging in terms of the metrics used by this ranking
• The growth of the billionares club and their influence in the economy and politics of their countries
• The direct relationship between ‘being globalized’ and ‘being a polluter’
• The inverse relationship between informal economies and the level of globalizations of the countries that host them, and more

Using my very own heuristic method based on personal observation, I can argue that to transform a measure of globalization into a Global Culture Index, we would need to take into consideration dimensions such as migration, diversity of the population and their level of integration into the productive life. Furthermore, some would say that metrics such as Foreign Investment are indicators of the “plastic” culture that influences negatively such index(McDonaldization). Maybe it wouldn’t be too hard to take this data and come up with our own.