Irrigation Management and Globalisation

Globalisation has become today’s buzzword. It has also become a battle ground for two radically opposed groups. There are the anti-globalists, who fear globalisation and stress only its downside, seeking therefore powerful interventions aimed at taming, if not (unwittingly) crippling it. Then there are the "globalists" (a class to which I belong) who celebrate globalisation instead, emphasize its upside, while seeking only to ensure that its few rough edges be handled through appropriate policies that serve to make globalisation yet more attractive. Many anti-globalists consider the central problem of globalisation to be its amorality, or even its immorality. But these critics have too blanket an approach to globalisation. The word covers a variety of phenomena that characterize an integrating world economy: trade, short-term capital flows, direct foreign investment, immigration, cultural convergence et al. The sins of one of the above cannot be visited upon the virtues of another. Some are being even when largely unregulated whereas others can be fatal if left wholly to the marketplace. It would require a wild imagination, and a deranged mind, to think that such freeing of trade leads to debilitating economic crises. Equally, it is illogical to believe, as non-economists who fear globalisation do, that freeing of trade is bad because the freeing of short-term capital flows led to a debilitating financial and economic crises and could do so again. In fact, while there are some obvious simulates between free trade and free capital flows, e.g. that segmentation of markets creates efficiency losses, the economic and political dissimilarities are even more compelling and policy makers cannot ignore them.