You walk down your high street. What do you prefer to see there? The economist will say: Walmart, Best Buy, the Gap. Scale economies — cheaper prices — better for “consumers”! But the human being will say: an independent cafe, a good bookshop, a boutique clothing store. Why? Because they offer many things that mega scale organizations don’t.

Decline of communities and local economies : globalization leads to the fragmentation and hollowing out of local economies, and the urban and rural communities they support, as multinational corporations move operations around the planet in order to increase profit margins and as they make it increasingly difficult for locally owned business to... See more