Excerpt from the Introduction: The adverse impacts of globalization and the new global economy on people in both developed and developing countries have generated analysis across a spectrum of activists and academics. Theorists and activists are engaged in a process of understanding the wide range of social and economic insecurities and how they affect diverse groups of individuals. These include the insecurity of employment; the rise of both rural and urban poverty; increasing gaps between the rich and the poor; erosion of quality of life due to accelerating environmental degradation; government cutbacks on spending for social services; the privatization of public goods and services; setbacks to gender equality; and the increasingly vulnerability of children. Other adverse effects of economic globalization stem from structural and institutional factors that create problematic relationships between developed and developing nations and affect citizens in both types of countries. These effects include the growing deficits in the balance of trade; economic and political insecurities created by volatile capital mobility; imbalances of economic and political autonomy and functional sovereignty between developed and developing countries; and problematic increases in the power of corporations and of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.