Globalization and Human Development Challenges

Despite the amount of publications related to globalization and its implications in the social and economic development of countries, researchers have not yet reached consensus about the subject and multiple perspectives are presented for discussion. This paper analyzes the globalization process, emphasizing its relationship with human development; to do so, bibliographical and statistical information were reviewed in order to discuss the nature of both concepts and their current and future trends. As a result, the paper explains how trends in the globalization process could stimulate deeper inequalities in the level of human development in countries if it continues to be based on a neoliberal ideological support and a capitalistic, consumption-based, predatory, excluding and short-term development model. Conclusions are that as long as the current scheme of capitalist reproduction on a global scale persists, the globalization process will tend to favour a small group of highly developed countries to the detriment of most people in the planet, making it difficult to overcome human development challenges.