The World is not Flat: Implications for the Construction of Globalisation Indicators

This paper reviews different proposals for the measurement of globalisation, arguing that available composite indicators, although going beyond a purely economic definition of international integration, fail to perform their task adequately for a variety of conceptual and methodological reasons. The most important problem is that globalisation indicators often do not take the spatial aspects of international interactions adequately into account. The scope of international integration is not necessarily global, as cross-border interactions among human societies are often limited in their geographical reach. The author explores a number of ways through which space and distance affect the construction of globalisation indicators.