Global Economic Institutions Research Articles

The Return of the white plague: global poverty and the "new" tuberculosis

As fear and paranoia about chemical weapons and bio-terrorism are ratcheted up by Western governments, a global health catastrophe threatens to undermine all efforts to eradicate poverty and human suffering. The resurgence of old diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, along with the spread of new diseases such as HIV, are already having devastating consequences for ever increasing numbers of people worldwide. Tuberculosis, a disease destined as recently as thirty years ago for complete eradication, is now back on the increase: a total of one third of the world's population is infected with TB bacillus, and the disease is currently killing around two million people each year. Contrary to popular belief, the epidemic is not confined to sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia; reflecting the increasing divide between rich and poor everywhere, outbreaks of the disease have occurred in London and New York, and prevalence is alarmingly high in Eastern Europe and Russia. This book provides an international survey of current thought on the spread and control of tuberculosis, covering historical, social, political, and medical aspects of the crisis. While the contributors may differ in their opinions over specific treatments or policy strategies, all are agreed on the overriding thesis of this book - that the resurgence of disease is one of the most telling indictments of the failure of global political and economic institutions to improve the lives of ordinary people.

COMPETING CONCEPTIONS OF GLOBALIZATION

Globalization is a relatively new idea in the social sciences, although people who work in and write about the mass media, transnational corporations and international business have been using it for some time. The purpose of this paper is to critically review the ways in which sociologists and other social scientists use ideas of globalization and to evaluate the fruitfulness of these competing conceptions. The central feature of the idea of globalization is that many contemporary problems cannot be adequately studied at the level of nation-states, that is, in terms of each country and its inter-national relations. Instead, they need to be conceptualized in terms of global processes. Some have even gone so far as to predict that global forces, by which they usually mean transnational corporations and other global economic institutions, global culture or globalizing belief systems/ideologies of various types, or a combination of all of these, are becoming so powerful that the continuing existence of the nation-state is in serious doubt. This is not a necessary consequence of most theories of globalization. The argument of this paper is that much of the globalization literature is confused because not all those who use the term distinguish it clearly enough from internation-alization, and some writers appear to use the two terms interchangeably. I argue that a clear distinction must be drawn between the inter-national and the global. The hyphen in inter-national is to distinguish (inadequate) conceptions of the global' founded on the existing even if changing system of nation-states, from (genuine) conceptions of the global based on the emergence of global processes and a global system of social relations not founded on national characteristics or nation-states. This global system theory is the framework for my own research. Globalization studies can be categorized on the basis of four research clusters:1. The world-systems approach; 2. The global culture approach; 3. The global society approach; 4. The global capitalism approach;The body of the paper is an exposition and critique of these approaches. The paper argues that the global capitalism approach is most productive for theory and research in globalization and concludes with a brief discussion of resistances to globalization.

The Global Economic Crisis, Contagion, and Institutions: New Realities in Latin America and Asia

This article uses the current economic crisis in Asia to analyze the impact that economic turmoil—especially economic contagion—in emerging markets can have on the process of social, political, and economic institutionalization and reform in Asia and Latin America. It argues that continued financial instability will result in increased democratization and transparency in Asia, as has happened in Latin America as a result of its struggles to consolidate and reconcile democratization and economic reform from the late 1980s to today. This transformation in Asia will temper the argument that the Asian development model was the path Latin America should have followed. This does not mean, however, that the reform path that the Asian countries choose will be successful or certain. Rather, although many authoritarian tenets of the Asian model will be challenged by calls for political and economic reform, the ultimate degree of liberalization in Asia will be uneven and incomplete, especially if the economic crisis deepens. Conversely, Latin American nations will need to use the Asian crisis as further evidence that the most sustainable form of economic and political reform necessitates a renewed commitment to promoting democracy and liberal institutions.

The Meaning of Globalization for Development Policy

The Secretary of State for International Development reviews the Government’s development strategy. The core commitment is to help mobilize the international political will to meet the aims of the UN international poverty eradication strategy. This will require resource transfers in the form of aid as investment, if the poorest countries are to be enabled to develop more trade and become part of the global economy. Globalization increases wealth creation, yet there is a danger that some countries could become marginalized from the world economy. To avoid this, developing countries must become full participants on the global economic stage, shaping and influencing the global rules in line with their interests and needs. There are three key challenges at the top of the Government’s agenda: (1) the mainstreaming of development issues in the formation of UK and EU policy, (2) encouragement and active support for the efforts of developing countries themselves to become active players on the world economic stage, (3) the building of partnerships to make this happen—with governments, with global economic institutions, with the business sector, with donors and with NGOs. Globalization is characterized by the pace of technological change, the emergence of a more sophisticated system of global economic rules—with the World Trade Organization now at centre stage alongside the IMF and the World Bank—and the increasingly important role of multinational companies. Responding to globalization is not an optional extra. The old models of development need to be rethought. The Department for International Development has a key role to play in this, by ensuring that policy‐makers in the UK, within the EU and internationally take full account of development aspects from the outset.

Trade and Financial Market Reforms in ASEAN: Putting the Cart before the Horse?

Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand in general opened up their capital markets at a faster pace and before liberalization of trade. McKinnon (1991) and others have cautioned against such a sequencing of reforms as it may encourage the financing of investments in inefficient industries. Trade policy reforms adopted thus far have gone only part way towards creating an open and competitive system of trade. Government-sponsored efforts to promote heavy and technology-intensive industries have often relied on protection, monopoly, or hidden subsidies. These industries are unlikely to be able to successfully compete in an open competitive environment. Regional and global initiatives that advance the cause of real sector liberalization will force these industries to undergo restructuring or even to close down. Resistance to such changes is inevitable. Hence, there is a high likelihood that pressures will be placed on governments to adopt alternative forms of protec tion as trade liberalization takes place in the form of AFTA-CEPT and on a unilateral MFN basis. Global and regional economic institutions limit the degree to which discriminatory and non-transparent policies can be adopted. Yet such institutions provide only weak discipline over numerous trade practices, so there remain numerous unexploited protection ist measures available even as tariffs come down. Extending these arrangements to limit

Capital and Labor in the Emerging Global Economy

The theoretical structure supporting liberalization of international trade is becoming increasingly inappropriate for the study of the emerging global economy. The theory of international trade was formulated as the nation-state emerged as the dominant political structure. The assumptions of mercantilism were discredited by classical economic theory and replaced by theoretical arguments for free trade. The zenith of free trade theory and practice was the nineteenth century. However the assessment of free trade in that period must place trade relations in the institutional context of colonialism and the relatively primitive transportation technology of the time. In this paper, the focus is on the differences between the economic relations of the international system of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries and the global system that is now emerging. I ask what effect these differences have for relations between owners of capital and labor. The major point of the article is that public discussion of the emerging global relations provides institutional economists with the opportunity to make an effective argument that institutions do matter. If institutions matter, so does history. We cannot pretend, for instance, that former colonies have the same market culture as do the imperial nations. We must begin to design global economic institutions within the present web of institutions, rather than from a set of axioms. These institutions must account for the evolution of production from dependence on natural resources and physical capital to the increasing role of intellectual capital. The current public debate about global economic policies is being argued from the mental model of trade in finished goods when natural and capital resources cannot be moved across national borders. This mental model confines the debate to free

Regulation Theory, Global Competition Among Cities And Capital Embeddedness

This paper reviews the contribution of regulation theory to our understanding of urban development and its regulation by the state. The theory provides a useful instrument for convergence of politics, economics and geography in which the crucial questions of territoriality of local states and the embeddedness of capital can be considered. But there remains much to be explored both in the mode of development of the global economy over time, and in the relationship between global economic structures and local political institutions. The further development of regulation theory demands a reconceptualisation of power and the absorption of ecological/environmental and feminist discourses into the debates.

The Implications of Migration Theory for Distributive Justice

This paper explores the implications of empirical theories of migration for normative accounts of migration and distributive justice. It examines neo-classical economics, world-systems theory, dual labor market theory, and feminist approaches to migration and contends that neo-classical economic theory in isolation provides an inadequate understanding of migration. Other theories provide a fuller account of how national and global economic, political, and social institutions cause and shape migration flows by actively affecting people's opportunity sets in source countries and by admitting people according to social categories such as class and gender. These empirical theories reveal the causal impact of institutions regulating migration and clarify moral obligations frequently overlooked by normative theorists.