It remains to be seen, for example whether China can continue to develop as a market economy while still retaining an authoritarian communist politic… - Peter Dicken

Without the parallel development of systems of monetary - and credit-based exchange there could have been no development of economies beyond the most primitive organizational forms and the most geographically restricted sales.

It serves to remind us that, in trying to explain the globalization of economic activity, we are dealing with the workings of a dynamic capitalist market system, and not just individual agents within it.

This is not an argument for levelling down but for raising up. The means for doing this are there. What matters is the will to do it. We all have a responsibility to ensure that the contours of the global economic map in the 21st century are not as steep and uneven as those of the 20th century.