Social Globalization

The KOF index classifies social globalization in three categories. The first covers personal contacts, the second includes data on information flows and the third measures cultural proximity.

Personal Contacts: This index is meant to capture direct interaction among people living in different countries. It includes international telecom traffic (traffic in minutes per person) and the degree of tourism (incoming and outgoing) a country’s population is exposed to.

Government and workers’ transfers received and paid (in percent of GDP) measure whether and to what extent countries interact, while the stock of foreign population is included to capture existing interactions with people from other countries. The number of international letters sent and received also measure direct interaction among people living in different countries. Telecom traffic is provided by the International Telecommunication Union (2011), while the number of letters is taken from the Universal Postal Union’s Postal Statistics

Database. The remaining three variables are from the World Bank (2011).

Information flows: While personal contact data are meant to capture measurable interactions among people from different countries, the sub-index on information flows is meant to measure the potential flow of ideas and images. It includes the number of internet users (per 100 people), the share of households with a television set, and international newspapers traded (in percent of GDP). All these variables to some extent proxy people’s potential for receiving news from other countries – they thus contribute to the global spread of ideas. The variables in this sub-index derive from the World Bank (2011), International Telecommunication Union

(2011), the UNESCO (various years), and the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (2011).

Cultural Proximity: Cultural proximity is arguably the dimension of globalization most difficult to grasp. Dreher (2006) suggests the number of English songs in national hit lists or movies shown in national cinemas that originated in Hollywood. However, these data lack for the majority of countries in our sample. Instead, we thus use imported and exported books (relative to GDP), as suggested in Kluver and Fu (2004). Traded books proxy the extent to which beliefs and values move across national borders, taken from the UNESCO (various years), and the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (2011).

According to Saich (2000, p.209) moreover, cultural globalization mostly refers to the domination of U.S. cultural products. Arguably, the United States is the trend-setter in much of the global socio-cultural realm (see Rosendorf, 2000, p.111). As an additional proxy for cultural proximity we thus include the number of McDonald’s restaurants located in a country. For many people, the global spread of McDonald’s became a synonym for globalization itself. In a similar vein, we also use the number of Ikea per country.