Income distribution at the international and national levels is closely bound up with the processes of exclusion, poverty and discrimination. Exclusion is a concept that according to many authors would appear to accompany the new stage of globalization.
A territorial exclusion occurs in the first place. Although there are parts of the world that are integrating into the new globalized situation, there are also many other regions and parts of the world that are excluded, that is, whose level of integration is decreasing in this new phase of world capitalist development. Secondly, the same process is occurring within each country, where regions that were formerly adequately integrated with the rest of society are being subjected by these new processes to a downward spiral towards exclusion. Thirdly, exclusion is occurring at the level of social groups discriminated against, especially for reasons of gender, ethnic origin or race. Within societies there are social groups that find themselves excluded and in which income differentiation implies a gradual disintegration of the ties by which they were bound to the rest of society. There are minority groups and indigenous peoples for whom the processes of globalization have led to severely accentuated phenomena of exclusion.