Emerging World Economy Research Articles

Hanseatic Merchants and the Procurement of Palm Oil and Rubber for Wilhelmine Germany’s New Industries, 1850–1918

This article analyses the reorientation of Hanseatic merchants’ involvement in world trade during the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. This shift was influenced by the independence of former British and Iberian colonies in the Americas, which caused the implosion of colonial trade monopolies. The abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the Scramble for Africa also allowed German commerce to obtain more direct access to markets in and raw materials from tropical regions. An examination of the commodity chains of rubber and palm oil/kernels reveals the great influence of Hanseatic merchant families (e.g. O’Swald, Schramm or Woermann) on determining and shaping the terms by which African and South American regions became incorporated into the emerging world economy.

Theoretical Approach to the Emerging World Economy in the 16th and 17th Centuries

This article wishes to grasp the nature of the emerging world economy in the 16th and 17th centuries in terms of theories of integration and connection. Generally speaking, the combination of the enormous silver demand of China and the spontaneous discoveries of large silver mining in Spanish Americas and Japan prompted the world silver trade in that time. Above all, the pressures of Chinese silver demand triggered the commercial activities for the sake of profit across the world, and was the prime mover in the making of the world silver trading networks as well as the world economy. The world economy mainly owing to the world silver trade had emerged connecting the all around world via overland and sea routes. It connected all the heavy populated landmasses by linking Americas with AfroEurasia, and prompted the complicated interactions of economies, cultures, and intelligences between them.BR However, it seems the fallacy to equate the emergence of the world economy with the ‘birth of globalization

Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent

Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent, by international reporter Peter Van Buren, is set in the late 1970s, but it is as timely as today's reports of social inequity. Van Buren's novel reminds readers that poor and working class Americans have continued to struggle long after the 1930s and long before the Great Recession we have just experienced. While Steinbeck is invoked in the title, the book is closer to the spirit of the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. There are numerous Steinbeck connections and references in the book, such as a character named Muley, similar to Okie Muley Graves, who refuses to move to California in The Grapes of Wrath. Like Steinbeck's character, this Muley is a “ghost” in that he is alive but living in a world he no longer understands. A minister named Casey serves as a symbolic “ghost” of one of Steinbeck's most famous characters, the Reverend Casy of The Grapes of Wrath. Towards the end of the novel, Van Buren's Casey even quotes Tom Joad's famous speech to his mother almost verbatim: “So if you see a group standing up for themselves, look for me, because I'll be there. If you see a cop beating a man, or a kid crying because she's hungry, I'll be there” (170).The novel's plot centers on the closing of a factory in a southern Ohio town and the resulting economic problems for its residents. The 1970s economy has failed these people, who are depicted as unemployed, with some resorting to selling drugs and some even turning to prostitution in their desperation. Meanwhile, the one percenters are not making things better for the 99 percenters. There is no “trickle down” in this story, which is told mostly through the eyes of underemployed Earl, whose father is a Korean War veteran who is ashamed of something that happened in the war that he might have been able to stop. Earl decides to commit suicide, and readers get flashbacks about his previous life. Before the novel ends, Earl, too, becomes a symbolic ghost.Here the story departs from Steinbeck's typical exploration of the American character. Although Earl rides a metaphorical “wayward bus,” he is not on the move. Steinbeck usually writes about people in transit, or relocated. Also, no ecological blight has led to the problems this Ohio town faces, but rather socio-economic decline. The novel, therefore, closely resembles Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, except that Earl, unlike Ethan Hawley, does not find a spiritual solution to his life crisis. Ghosts of Tom Joad is a book in which the main character Earl stays, like Muley, even though life has gone sour. He describes his town as it was before economic decline: “I say let the young men in other small Ohio towns dream of bright lights. We didn't need a fortune teller. We knew growing up we were going to work in the factory. We said, “Graduate today, factory tomorrow.” Life was rich, fat, happy enough” (9).While Springsteen's “Ghosts of Tom Joad” shares some thematic similarity with Steinbeck's Grapes, Van Buren's book has a different tone than the title reference may lead the reader to expect. For example, there is more and more graphic sex, the Korean War, and tensions between immigrants and the local work force. And the Korean War episodes are certainly not what a pro-military man like Steinbeck would have written. There is a cover-up and self-imposed guilt for Earl's father. Ray. The main character commits suicide. Overall, Van Buren effectively invokes a troubled 1970s emerging world economy, but this novel offers little hope for new beginnings. Steinbeck's Okies try harder than these Ohioans to find solutions to their problems. Their discontent is driven home early in the book, but the villains are not clearly identified or named. The novel, though it tries, does not evoke sympathy for its characters as Steinbeck, at his best, does.Steinbeck readers will appreciate Van Buren's update on a changed world in which the 99-percent movement may conceivably galvanize the country. By presenting a symbolic afterlife, however, in which it is revealed that Earl may have fared better in another place with his true love and by having the two meet again in a fantasy towards novel's end, the book strays too far from the socio-economic core of the story. Ghosts of Tom Joad will satisfy those looking for a tale of modern American angst, but it does not fit well with Steinbeck's more realist depiction of the very human suffering that is the outcome of an economic system's failure.

Shaking an invisible hand

The research program of general equilibrium theory originated with Adam Smith’s vision of the emerging world economy. It evolved through a long series of efforts by economists and mathematicians. However, a major challenge arose with the discovery that the shape of Walrasian excess demand functions makes unique stable equilibria the exception rather than the rule. This has led to a highly problematic disconnect between modeling for policy support and the understanding of the world economy that is actually available. A promising route to overcome these difficulties has been opened by recent research on the dynamics of social norms, building on the theory of perturbed dynamical systems. This work could lead to a fruitful new reading of Adam Smith. The marginal analysis of current general equilibrium theory can be successfully applied to processes within a historically established basin of attraction, and it can be complemented by the “inframarginal” study of historical transitions from a given basin of attraction to one of several future possibilities.

From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715

Scholars once referred to the years spanning 1540 to 1715 as part of the forgotten centuries in the Native American history of the South. In recent years, however, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have shed more light on this period's history, and Robbie Ethridge has done a service in compiling and synthesizing all the new work into one much-needed volume. She has also contributed some original research of her own, and the book as a whole represents a refreshing conceptualization. Ethridge's theme is one of transformation: she shows how southern Native Americans, from Mississippian times to the early eighteenth century, changed and restructured their societies under the weight of a European invasion. Within what she calls the Mississippian shatter zone, natives faced the devastating Hernando de Soto expedition in the 1540s, the advent of horrific Old World diseases, the introduction of the Spanish mission system, and periodic entanglement in colonial wars as the Spanish, French, and English fought for control of the region. Yet Ethridge claims that European trade, notably the Indian slave trade, served as the most destructive force and greatest impetus for change among southern natives. She helps illustrate this fact by using the Chickasaws—descendants of the Mississippian chiefdom of Chicaza—as a focus group. In reaction to the turmoil going on around them and the need for European trade goods (including guns), the Chickasaws became a “militaristic slaving society” (p. 155), preying on neighboring tribes to supply the Europeans with captive laborers. Here Ethridge makes another important contribution to our understanding of Indian life in the South by tying the collapse of the Mississippian chiefdoms and the creation of the coalescent Indian confederacies of the eighteenth century—including Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws—to the emerging world economy in which the South was a “strategic outpost” supplying the core capitalist countries of Europe, most notably England, with “labor and resources” (p. 90). Too often, historians have neglected the world systems concept as an integrating technique that enables world and American history to be linked together for a better understanding of each.

Review: Endocrine disrupting chemicals (phenol and phthalates) in the South African environment: a need for more monitoring

There has been increasing concern about the impacts of exposure to chemical compounds with endocrine disrupting activities in the environment, especially aquatic environments, to wildlife and humans. South Africa is known to have used and abused most chemicals listed by developed and developing countries as endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Endocrinedisrupting chemicals have been reported in water, sediment and serum, as well as in fish tissue samples, at a level that could trigger endocrine disruption in humans and wildlife. Although some monitoring has been reported, particularly in water systems within the country, information on EDCs in other environmental matrices is scanty. The water systems monitored so far are very few. The strongest economy in Africa, and an emerging world economy depending on agriculture, mining, manufacturing and industry, needs to focus more on monitoring and to strengthen government organs and institutions to monitor and ensure environmental safety. Keywords : Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), phenols, phthalates, monitoring, South Africa

Education for Innovation: Implications for India, China and America (review)

Reviewed by: Education for Innovation: Implications for India, China and America Robert K. Toutkoushian Robert L. DeHaan K. M. Venkat Narayan (Eds.). Education for Innovation: Implications for India, China and America. Rotterdam, the Netherlands/Taipei, Taiwan: Sense Publishers, 2008. 296 pp. Paper: $49.00. ISBN: 13-978-9087900731. The provision of education services is believed to lead to a number of private and public (social) benefits. Economists generally agree that the involvement of different levels of government (local, state, national) in encouraging education follows from the social benefits of education. These social benefits would include non-pecuniary items such as increased civic participation, reduced crime rates, and so on, as well as pecuniary benefits to society from economic gains. One feature that seems to separate nations in the long term based on economic prosperity is that more economically successful nations, such as the United States, tend to be better than other nations at engaging in innovative activities. The theoretical importance of innovation in encouraging economic growth dates back to the work by economist Joseph Schumpeter (1939, 1950, 1961), and his work continues to spur additional research into the importance of innovation in society (Cantner, Dinopoulos, & Lanzillotti, 2005). The first decade of the 21st century has also brought about significant economic changes. As popularized by Thomas Friedman (2006), technological gains in recent years have helped to “flatten” the world by allowing people to more easily participate in the global economy regardless of location. This trend is particularly important for China and India, two of the world’s most populous nations. China is also undergoing significant social changes as the nation strives to expand higher education opportunities for its citizens. Regardless of their history and political structure, the United States, China, and India are all wrestling with the question of how to position themselves to succeed in the emerging world economy. Will the most successful nations continue to be those who are the most innovative, and if so, how can innovation be encouraged, nurtured, and developed? It is within this framework that Education for Innovation: Implications for India, China and America was written. Edited by Robert L. DeHaan and K. M. Venkat Narayan, the volume emerged from papers presented at an international conference on Education for Innovation at Emory University in March 2007. The contributors include an impressive list of academics from wide-ranging backgrounds including economics, physics, educational psychology, biology, and sociology. All contributors, however, share a professional interest in examining the connection between innovation and economic growth and the possible role that education can play in developing innovation. The book is divided into two sections. The chapters in the first section of the book focus on how innovation promotes economic growth. The data presented in this section effectively make the case that, while the United States currently enjoys the position of world leader in innovation, other nations such as China and India with their large populations and potential for growth are steadily increasing their capacity to become innovative leaders in the world. The information presented in these chapters shows that the United States is gradually losing its role as world leader in research and development (R&D) and innovative activity. The second section of the book deals with how education can be used to promote innovation. The [End Page 436] chapters in Part 2 examine the impact of culture on higher education, how education can help impart creativity and innovative thinking in students, and how education might better focus on increasing innovation. The book has several major strengths that should enable it to contribute to the growing literature on innovation and education. The international perspective on innovation and education is a refreshing change from the preponderance of studies that examine the topic from only the perspective of the United States. The focus on three nations—China, India, and the United States—provides important insights into how and why these countries find themselves at different positions in the world economy, yet sharing an interest in the same topic. The breadth of material covered in the 12 chapters helps the reader appreciate the enormous scope of the topic and the challenges that one faces when tackling this line of inquiry. Finally, the...

The logic of convergence and uniformity in teacher production

This paper discusses teacher education, institutional growth and the economy of information. It compares the sector of teacher education with global markets, described by Thomas Friedman in his book The world is flat, as emerging and “flattening” in light of rapid technological and communication advances. The institutional framework of teacher production has tightly aligned with a hierarchy of controls and norms used widely by both private and public universities. Authors argue that the economy of universal information cannot provide an educational system with the tools it needs to train teachers and develop students as valuable contributors to the emerging world economy. Although it may be financially costly in the short‐term, the higher‐cost variables of particular information will prove vital to giving teacher training programs and independent universities the freedom to innovate, meeting the challenges afforded by a changing world.

Américo Paredes’s The Shadow:

This essay argues that Paredes’s novel diagnoses the causal interrelations between the emerging world economy and the Mexican Revolution. It locates these broad social changes in the analytic of Greater Mexico, and links these transformations at the sulyective level by noting their effects on ideological self-understandingg. Thus, the ascendance of the world economy parallels that vexed movement between traditional and modern fonns of thought. By representing such a tenuous subject formation, The Shadow finally permits a critical relation to the processes of capitalist modernity.

Port Jewry of Salonika: Between Neo-colonialism and Nation-state

Can the Port Jew model be applied to communities temporally and geographically distinct from that of an Atlantic-orientated mercantilism? This essay argues that it can with regard to late nineteenth century Salonika. But it also seeks to show the model's problematic down-side. Salonika's new status emerged under the aegis of a neo-colonialism, the culmination of which was the bid for international free-port status in 1912. Salonika Jewry thereby found itself at odds with the town's other ethnic communities and with competing external national interests. In microcosm, a diasporic embrace of an emerging world economy came face to face with its other reality, the nation-state.

Reunifying Europe in an Emerging World Economy: Economic Heterogeneity, New Industrial Options, and Political Choices

This article examines the industrial reintegration of central and eastern Europe into the broader European economy in the context of the emerging world economy. Since the Cold War, Europe’s economic heterogeneity has sharply increased, making it comparable to Asia. And Europe as a whole must adapt to a global economy of three regional centres and industrial strategies implemented through International Production Networks (IPNs). The article asks whether policies favoring IPNs that link east and west can reconcile eastern industrial development with western prosperity and employment. Thus the eastward enlargement of the European Union, which has been driven primarily by security concerns, can also improve the region’s competitiveness in global markets.

The Emerging World Economy

The Emerging World Economy

The emerging world economy

The emerging world economy

Problems of Canadian Nationalism

subject is Canadian nationalism. This is not a subject in which I have a long-established scholarly interest. The growth of nationalist sentiment in Canada during the past five years or so has, however, forced itself on my attention through my professional interests in international trade and monetary policy, as well as through my general interests as a Canadian citizen. As a Canadian, I have been disturbed because nationalism in its recent form seems to me to appeal to, and to reinforce, the most undesirable features of the Canadian national character. In these I include not only the mean and underhanded anti-Americanism which serves many Canadians as an excuse for their failure to accomplish anything worthy of genuine national pride, but also what I think of, perhaps unfairly, as the small-town pettiness of outlook that is the shadow side of many Canadian virtues. As an economist, I have been even more disturbed by the protectionist and anti-foreign investment proposals which have been associated with nationalist sentiment. It is not just that these proposals seem to be attempting to enlist, by specious reasoning, the support of a confused nationalist sentiment for measures whose chief effect will be to increase the profits and power of particular interests at the expense of the community. Much more serious is that these proposals seem to me to be running in the precisely opposite direction to the kinds of policies Canada should be pursuing to make the most of her opportunities in the emerging world economy. What is also serious, the emphasis that has been placed on foreign competition and American investment in Canada as the causes of Canada's recent economic difficulties has served to distract the attention of the general public though not of the professional economists from the fact that these difficulties are in large part attributable to an inept and perhaps wilful certainly unnecessary failure to those in charge of Canadian economic policy to take appropriate remedial measures. Thus, far from