Like much else these days, exaggerated fears of international market forces have become a truly global phenomenon. The finishing touches to this article were applied during a public meeting in Cuiaba, in Brazil's Mato Grosso: the subject was "Globalisation and Neoliberalism". Interest was such that the organiser, the Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics, had to switch to a bigger auditorium—some 200 people crowded in to sweat the matter, literally and metaphorically, with a group of Brazilian and American academics. In Cuiaba the worry is that capitalist development will ruin the environment and drive people off the land into overcrowded cities; in the United States it is that global market forces will export jobs and prosperity to places like Cuiaba.
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