A Globalisation of the UK's Welfare Institutions - Term Paper Example

 «A Globalisation of the UK's Welfare Institutions» Globalization is the process through which the growth of local or regional goods and services are transferred into global ones. This phenomenon helps bring the buyers and sellers from different countries to interact with each other and exchange goods and services. A simple example would be Wal Mart buying goods from Chinese manufacturers. It has also helped in minimizing the physical and geographical barriers of trade and has made the world a single entity and a single international economy. A Good manufactured in a small factory in Seoul is sold in different markets across the world from Tokyo to New York and London to Sydney. Globalization has played a major role in eliminating some of the inefficiencies of the business system, provided them with more options to choose from, and granted access to a larger pool of customers and cheaper prices. A local manufacturer must produce good quality products at competitive price if he wishes to stay in business and compete with other local and international manufactures. The massive increase in sharing of information, international trade and social and culture norms especially through advanced technological methods means that the world is not as big as it used to be. The human resource outsourcing industry is a by-product of globalization. Besides affecting the functioning of the economy and the polity, global economic forces alter the organization of society at large. Global reliance on the market and functional integration of production engender concrete and ample transformations in social relations. Hence, economic integration produces and is the product of social, political, and cultural dynamics on a global scale. Welfare institutions are primarily organizations, which ensure people’s well-being. Or we can also say that a welfare institution provide benefits and services to help people meet basic needs. To better understand the idea of a welfare institutions functioning we can consider child welfare institution. This type of welfare is specific to children. The main task of this type of institution will be to protect the rights and interests of children with difficult family conditions. Such institutions ensure that children receive appropriate care and that they are not exposed to extreme physiological and physical stress factors in their environment. The bottom line to the purpose of such child welfare institutions is “devotion to the child’s best interests”. Similarly, another type of welfare institutions are Old Age homes which cater to the elderly population and looks after their living and well-being. The aim is to provide a place where the old population can spend the last years of their lives in the company of people of their age, and the children are relieved of taking care of them. With the growing concept of independent living among young people, this concept is increasing at a rapid pace. There are two ways of organizing welfare states: In the first model, the state seeks to provide to the people who are most in need. This requires the control by a central authority to only provide to people in need, and avoid cheating in the process. Thus there is the transfer of resources from the providers to the people in need and hence a gap. This gap puts a hurdle in the process since the producers do not want to give to the ones in need because they will not get anything in return. For instance, all employed people would not be willing to provide for unemployed people since the latter is not benefitting the former in any way. This model is common in the US. Another approach in the concept of providing social welfare is that of providing to the population on the basis of established criteria. This could include having children, receiving medical treatments etc. This process requires little bureaucratic interference but is achieved through high taxing. However, all the taxing is paid back to the taxpayers. Through this model, everyone gains and the payment is not from one group to another isolated group. This model was proposed in Scandinavia. Let us explore the structure and working of the welfare institutions and the associated network with the UK. United Kingdom is a unitary state in which the central government controls all the government activity. However, this differs in structure in Scotland, Wales and Ireland in certain ways. All these regions have a secretary of State and department of administration within the central government but has its own assembly which administers its own institutions. The framework, however, changes very frequently. The most significant changes in last years have been the creation of Social Security Department incorporated into Department of Work and Pensions which over looks the income maintenance to the Inland Revenue. Also, certain other welfare departments have now been relocated to communities and local governments. Globalization has had its impact on a huge scale. Almost every entity in one form or the other has been affected by the process of globalization. Before considering the impact of globalization on UK’s welfare institutes, let us explore the years of 1970s and 1980s where the international economy was going in slump and governments had to take certain measures in connection with their welfare institutes. Britain, Australia, Italy, Sweden, New Zealand and other countries tried to restore international competitiveness by devaluing their currencies. In an attempt to maintain full employment, a few countries promoted high tariff barriers and restrictions on imports. All countries sought to protect telecommunication, energy supply, transport etc against all kinds of competition. Austria, Germany, Switzerland and few other countries did layoff foreign workers to cut down open unemployment in the first oil-price crisis. The major impact globalization has is on the economy of a country. With the advent of globalization the economies of countries are interlinked. One way in which countries are dependant is that the currencies are pegged against one another. In other cases, they simply follow the other currency without any formal obligation. Both of these has a serious impact on the currency of a country when there is a change in exchange rate of the other country. For instance, most currencies of the world are pegged against US dollar. As soon as there is decrease in the dollar prices, the currency of these countries also falls. The impact is that the imports of the country become expensive. This results in an overall decline in the balance of payment system. Putting this fluctuation in context to the welfare institutions in UK, it becomes difficult to maintain funds to the welfare institutes. The reason is that the resulting decline in balance of payment makes the cost of providing to the welfare institutes very high. The welfare institutes such as child care institutes and old age homes provide goods and services to the public and require consumption of foreign items. UK hardly produces any consumer goods and the rest of it is imported. Items such as blankets, food, medicines increase a lot in price and become unaffordable given the budget allotted to welfare institutes. Hence the public suffer at the hands of globalization with increasing exchange rates. The most significant part of globalization’s impact on economy is the rise in international trade. The concept they follow is that of comparative and absolute advantage. According to it, the country should only produce the goods it specializes in producing and trade for the other goods with the countries that specialize in that. Thus both of them can enjoy a large variety of goods that were not previously possible. Also, since each country specializes in producing only a selected range of goods, the cost of providing these falls significantly. Hence the consumers enjoy goods at lower prices. As far as welfare institutions are concerned, they also benefit significantly from this. In the first place, people in welfare institutes get to consume a large variety of goods. For instance, child care institutions provide with better variety of milks and baby foods. Similarly, the old people enjoy better medicine for themselves. Thus with specialization and comparative advantage, welfare institutions in UK have benefitted a lot. Another aspect of economic changes with reference to globalization is the increase in the investment within a country. The world economy becomes one economy with huge opportunities for investors to channel out their funds. Even in UK, the foreign investors seek to invest in different projects. These investment results in two major benefits: providing employment opportunities and increase in the net income of the country. As far as providing employment opportunities is concerned, this has a major impact on UK’s welfare institutions. The reason is that the people which were previously part of the funds received through welfare institutions are now employed and are earning their own livelihood. Further, they become producing members of the society and thus start paying taxes. These taxes help in benefitting other members of the society. Thus this results in not only the reduction in the funds released by welfare institutions, but also results in inflow of more funds. So globalization and the resulting investment with it have positive impacts on the welfare institutions. Besides, the investment opportunities generate income in the country and hence result in more taxes being paid to the government. These taxes enable the state to provide more funds to welfare institutions and hence more funds to the public in need. Thus more people are taken care of and in a better way. After the economic impact, the next impact globalization has had in general is communication. Communication means have increased tremendously and at the same time, the cost of communication has fallen significantly. Cross border communication has become cheaper than it ever was and new means of communication such as internet and cell phones are available to mass population. Overall, the people are able to better communicate among themselves and feel closer to each other. Looking at this advancement in communication from UK’s welfare institutions’ point of view, communication has enabled the state to have better check on these institutes. The state can now better manage the activities of the institutes under its control. It can get to know the information in each institute such as the number of people it is serving currently and so on. Besides, it can also have a check on the financial operations of these institutions. The taxation network is also made automated and intelligent and this more transparent which prevents tax evasions and thus more funds are available. This all has a lot of benefits to the public in general since they are being provided with better and more efficient service. Another impact of improvement in communication is on the people being served by welfare institutes. Take an example of the old people living in state controlled Old homes. These people can now enjoy better means of communication such as internet and cell phone. They lead a better life since now they can communicate with people of similar interests over the internet. They can read articles online and even shop online from international sellers. They can also talk more frequently to their children and relatives all over the world. All this has improved the quality of life for all the people under state care. The better life these people live, the less is the expenditure on their medical and other related items. So, the institutions benefit a lot from improvement in communication through globalization. Looking at the downside of globalization, a lot of factors can be seen. Since all benefits come with certain costs, so does globalization. It is difficult to ascertain how serious these costs are since they are dependant on value judgment and cannot be dealt in a neutral way. The first downside of globalization is the cultural aspect. Experts see the world as heading towards a global culture with monotony and little diversity. People all over are consuming similar brands in food, clothing and technology. All this might be said to be beneficial, but essentially this formula is more suited towards the younger population. In the case of UK, this might be seen as increasing the generation gap and more importantly isolating the older generation from the newer one. With reference to the welfare institutions, a large number of adults are catered by the Old homes. These people are used to older culture and traditions and cannot cope up with the changing world of today. Globalization has created a variety of standard goods and services which they are not at ease in consuming. As a result they are isolated from their children and are faced with the problem of depression and anxiety. As a result, most of these elderly people resort to Old homes and thus in some way add to the cost of welfare by the state institutions. Globalization and the impact on culture is thus a cost in this way. A major impact of globalization is on the environment. The outcome of globalization has been the increase in industrialization all across. This massive industrialization results in discharge of smoke and other industrial wastage into the environment. This pollutes the environment and imposes a cost on the people. Not only do smoke and other discharges harm the people directly, there are other harmful effects too. The wastages can sometimes become part of soil and thus get into the crops. These crops later become food items, so all the wastage becomes part of the overall food chain. This has many serious consequences. Also globalization seeks to maximize agricultural productivity by using fertilizers and other chemicals in the soil. Although these fertilizers increase the crop output, the food itself is not healthy and thus harmful to consume. Considering the damage on environment and the associated harmful impact on people’s health, this increases the cost of medical facilities by significant amount. The welfare institutions now have to spend more in providing medical facilities to the people under their care. Sometimes this might exceed the total budget they are allocated and therefore this means that less has to be provided to the people. Globalization is thus a process where by economies of the world come together and become part of one global village. They impact each other economically, technologically and culturally. Welfare institutes are organizations which provide welfare service the public such as child care, unemployment benefits and medical care. Some of the impacts of globalization can be beneficial for welfare institutions such as better higher employment and more tax revenue, whereas other might be harmful for them such as degradation of environment which leads to the need to provide more medical benefits. References: Norway. Child Welfare Services. (online) Avalible at: http://www.norway.org.pk/policy/children/welfare/services.htm. Social Policy in the UK. An introduction to Social Policy. (online). Avalible at: http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/publicpolicy/introduction/uk.htm Carrying Capacity. Environmental Costs of Globalization. 2008. (online) Available at: http://home.alltel.net/bsundquist1/gl7.html Bo Rothstein: Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State (Theories of Institutional Design), Cambridge 1998 Read More