Social-economic Dimension of Globalisation and Income Inequality

Abstract

Globalization is a broad concept casually used to describe a variety of phenomena of countries. However, there is no universally accepted definition and neither standard measurement for globalization nor social dimension of globalization. Many attempts have been made to measure globalization. Authors introduce single indices – economic and social globalization index and index for progress in reducing income inequality as fuzzy membership functions. Authors analyse the dependence of the new indices. Authors create clusters of similar EU countries in the view of these two indices with the help of fuzzy c‑cluster analysis. The result is two clusters of states – original EU countries, newly associated and four states – Greece, Portugal, Slovenia a Malta turned out as not decided.

Keywords

• globalization
• income inequality
• fuzzy c-cluster analysis
• cohesion policy
• EU