Global inequality and the impact of globalization as a social change is a complex topic that hosts many points of view. This chapter has introduced some of the main tools and concepts to support you in making connections on your own. The ways that sociologists discuss and study globalization and inequality carry heavy consequences. The measures they use to study inequality and the frameworks they use to classify countries all matter to how we view and understand the world. For example, economic measures, which have been the standard for decades, can only provide a limited picture of the forces that shape global experiences, while including measures that put people at the center provide a more whole understanding.

Another example is how we study inequity and social location. The inequities we introduced in Chapter 3 based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation repeat at the global scale. To analyze them we need to add the impacts of power, privilege, and disadvantage at the global level. Trends in inequality at the global scale can give insights to the direction of the world when it comes to inequality and inequity. But as this chapter illustrated, there are many divergent views on the current state of inequality, and just as many that attempt to discern where we are headed.

Review of Learning Outcomes

This chapter has offered you the opportunity to:

• Compare views about the relationship between global stratification and globalization.
• Identify the measures that social scientists use to study economic global stratification.
• Summarize, with a critical lens, how countries are categorized.
• Discuss theories that explain why inequality exists between countries.
• Explain how social inequality within countries is evaluated based on social locations.
• Illustrate how quality of life is identified and measured globally.
• Discuss how globalization affects inequality between and within countries.
• Summarize trends related to global inequality.

Key Terms

1 percent: the people at the top of the income and wealth distributions in the world.

90/10 income inequality ratio: the wage or salary income earned by individuals earning more than 90 percent of other workers compared to the earnings of workers earning higher than the bottom 10 percent.

apartheid: a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race.

fair trade: a movement and alternative way of trading goods that emerged to respond to the negative economic effects of globalization on people in poorer countries; it means buying goods at a fair price from people who produce them.

feminization of poverty: the longstanding trend in almost all societies, for women to have higher rates of poverty than men.

Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI): a tool that holistically measures our collective, socioeconomic welfare by including overlooked social and environmental costs and benefits to economic activity.

global stratification: the unequal distribution of economic and social resources among the world’s countries.

globalization: the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations due to cross-national exchanges of goods and services, technology, investments, people, ideas, and information.

gross domestic product (GDP): the total value of all goods and services produced by a nation’s citizens.

gross national income (GNI): the total amount of money earned by a nation’s people and businesses; it is used to measure and track a nation’s wealth from year to year.

human capital flight: emigration of highly trained or intelligent people from a particular country.

Human Development Index (HDI): a measure that combines a nation’s GDP with many other important quality of life considerations such as life expectancy, security, literacy, and the effects of environmental degradation people experience.

International Poverty Line: refers to the amount of money a person needs to consume or earn per day to avoid living in extreme poverty.

land grabs: “land acquisitions that are in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of the social and environmental impacts” (International Land Coalition 2011).

life expectancy: a statistical estimate, based on averages, of the number of years a person can expect to live in a certain region.

measures: figures, extents, or amounts of phenomena that we are investigating.

Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI): an indicator that measures severe poverty across low-income countries with three dimensions: health, education, and standard of living.

wealth: the financial assets or physical possessions that can be converted into a form that can be used for transactions.

Comprehension Check

Licenses and Attributions for Conclusion

Open Content, Original

“Conclusion” by Aimee Samara Krouskop is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

“Comprehension Check” was created by Veronica Vold and Michelle Culley for Open Oregon Educational Resources and is licensed CC BY 4.0.