*{Geneva Business Dialogue Conference Report 23 - 24 September 1998 Beware the globalization backlash [http://www.iccwbo.org/home/conferences/reports/geneva_business_dialogue/beware_the_globalization_backlash.asp]} Rubens Ricupero, Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), told participants that the key to overcoming fears of globalization was to enable individuals to become competitive, and the key to maintaining competitivity was learning. Speaking during the session "Making globalization a success for all", he said his experience as Brazilian finance minister had taught him there was no alternative to open markets. Brazil had operated a closed system which forced citizens to pay 50% more for many goods than on the world market, and it was unable to control hyperinflation. He brought the inflation rate down to standard industrial levels by opening up markets and lifting controls. Roy MacLaren, Canada’s High Commissioner in London and a candidate to succeed Mr Ruggiero at the head of the WTO, said current attacks against trade liberalization were dangerous because they ignored the enormous benefits that have flowed from recent economic opening and integration. He said the spread of contagion in international financial markets had driven home the precariousness of past economic achievements. "The growing ‘globalization backlash’ is increasing the temptation for governments to revert to capital controls, market intervention and protectionist measures. "We now face an extremely dangerous international environment, a situation where panic and faulty diagnoses could push governments toward economic remedies more harmful than the current afflictions," Mr MacLaren said. Jürgen Strube, Chairman of BASF, Germany, cautioned doomsayers against asserting that globalization would mean the loss of jobs in the North because wages were lower in the South. In every case where a large international company had moved some of its operations to the developing world or away from a highwage country, the reason turned out to be that the company wanted to get closer access to the regional market or to local skills and culture rather than to seek to reduce labour costs. The session’s moderator, ICC President Maucher, said that globalization had already been a success. Employment had increased on an unprecedented scale worldwide in services and manufacturing industries. The number of jobs in the two sectors in the developing world and the OECD doubled from 660 million to almost l1.3 billion between 1965 and the early 1990s, Mr Maucher said. Within the last 10 years between 500 and 600 million additional men and women had succeeded in raising themselves above the poverty line. *{Back to Geneva Business Dialogue report menu}