Global Free Market Research Articles

MIGRASI INTERNASIONAL, JAMINAN PERLINDUNGAN, DAN TANTANGAN EKONOMI GLOBAL

The setback of regional economic growth, in turn, has a big enough influence in the regional labor market. This condition is deteriorated by the decrease of investment flow as a consequence of the existing political rush and it has a direct impact toward the economic field. The reality that the political virus has transformed and even nearly destroyed the national and regional economic structures becomes an inevitable thing. The fact that the economic pressure incomparable with the economic potency of the country of origin becomes one of important determinants for the rise of new dimensions in migration activities. It is also pushed by the development of globalization spirit which has direct consequence in economic field of some countries. Therefore, in the next era of global transparency and free market, government in many countries (including countries in the third world) can no longer shoot aside on behalf of any political interests or economic protections but open a political entrance to give a more transparent security commitment to their labors in general.

Innovation for de-growth: A case study of counter-hegemonic practices from Kerala, India

Our research focuses on the cross-pollination of the discourses of innovation and (post)development in the Global South. We suggest that the buzzword innovation is progressively infiltrating the lexicon and situated practices of development. Within this a hegemonic framing of innovation is emerging that leverages the language of inclusion to promote connection to, and participation in, the global free market economy. This, we hypothesise is closing down a broader debate concerning the goals and roles of innovation and technology in the so called developing world. At the same time, our research suggests that this emerging hegemony is contested, presenting as alternative, minority framings with different normative underpinnings for technology and innovation that challenge the pro-growth and market-led dominant paradigm. We present the results of one of these through a qualitative in-depth case study conducted in the Indian state of Kerala. The case provides interesting insights for the degrowth community in two regards. First it shows a concrete example of an alternative framing of technology underpinned by a set of normative principles connected to those of degrowth. Second, the case shows that alternative technological paradigms based on principles aligned with those of degrowth are not only possible, but can and do co-exist with the hegemonic paradigm.

David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. xxviii + 402 p. $27.00; $18.96 (pbk).

David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. xxviii + 402 p. $27.00; $18.96 (pbk).

Modernity and the embedding of economic expansion

The nationally embedded and relatively broad-based economies characteristic of developed industrial countries are usually seen as the incarnation of a modern economy. These economies are largely internally oriented and are based, to a relatively great extent, on production and services based on local and national needs. Their provenance is generally assumed to have been processes of development that began in the sixteenth century and that, in the nineteenth century, accelerated with the expansion of industrial production and the growth of global trade. This article challenges that assumption. It argues that today’s modern economies represent, not the culmination of long-term processes, but a recurring phenomenon within capitalism. It argues that, in the history of capitalism, there have been phases of nationally embedded and global free market capitalism – periods when capital is relatively more, and relatively less, free from the regulation of nation state. Today’s nationally embedded economies represent, not a further point along a unilinear developmental trajectory, but a return to features of the moral economies that characterized both European and non-European societies before the nineteenth century.

Mission Together toward Economy of Life: Feminist Perspectives

Mission toward economy of life The new mission statement produced by the World Council of Churches (WCC), Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, grapples with the current context of a brutal, complex globalized economy that is enriching a powerful and privileged few at the expense of the lives of the majority of people subsisting in poverty and the planet's increasingly fragile ecosystems. It observes: Jesus has told us "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6: 24, KJV). The policy of unlimited growth through the domination of the global free market is an ideology that claims to be without alternative, demanding an endless flow of sacrifices from the poor and from nature. "It makes the false promise that it can save the world through creation of wealth and prosperity, claiming sovereignty over life and demanding total allegiance, which amounts to idolatry." This is a global system of mammon that protects the unlimited growth of wealth of only the rich and powerful through endless exploitation. (1) In an economic landscape marked by pervasive suffering amidst unprecedented plenty and widespread ecological devastation, Together towards Life affirms that "the purpose of God's mission is fullness of life for all" (John 10: 10). Thus, the role of mission today is to resist idolatry in free market capitalism, "to denounce the economy of greed, and to participate in and practice the divine economy of love, sharing, and justice." (2) In other words, mission today must join in the urgent task of building life-affirming economies that benefit all across gender, race, class/casteism, age, ability, or sexual orientation. Together towards Life poses challenges to churches' and Christians' missionary work toward an "economy of life": "How can we proclaim the good news and values of God's kingdom in the global market, or win over the spirit of the market? What kind of missional action can the church take in the midst of economic and ecological injustice and crisis on a global scale?" (3) It also offers a paradigm change in missional engagement, from "mission to the margins" to "mission from the margins," declaring: Mission has been understood as a movement taking place from the center to the periphery, and from the privileged to the marginalized of society. Now people at the margins are claiming their key role as agents of mission and affirming mission as transformation. This reversal of roles in terms of envisioning mission has strong biblical foundations because God chose the poor, the foolish and the powerless (1 Corinthians 1: 18-31) to further God's mission of justice and peace so that life may flourish. (4) Against this backdrop, this paper invites readers to put on gender-just lenses in engaging in mission toward economy of life. For what has yet to be mentioned is that women comprise the greater part (60-70 percent) of the global poor who are compelled to make sacrifices in the name of growth and development and who suffer the brunt of chronic financial and economic crises. Moreover, women - who have the main responsibility for everyday tasks of preparing meals; collecting firewood, water, and medicinal herbs; and planting rice and other food staples - are disproportionately affected by human-induced climate change and other burgeoning ecological issues that are inextricably rooted in our unsustainable and destructive systems of production and consumption. While they produce more than 60 percent of the world's food and other produce, they own only less than 2 percent of the world's property and account for 70 percent of the population living in absolute poverty. (5) At the same time, women are not merely victims of the development agenda. They are frequently at the forefront of struggles to defend livelihoods and creation. They have an essential and transformative role in envisioning and constructing an economy of life. …

Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization: Rethinking <em>The End of Education</em>

Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization:Rethinking the End of Education William V. Spanos (bio) To return to play its purely profane vocation is a political task. —Giorgio Agamben (2007, 77) I am grateful to the editors of this volume on the urgent question of humanism and the humanities in higher education for inviting me to reconsider what I wrote about this urgent issue nearly twenty years ago—in the aftermath of the Vietnam War—in my book, The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (1993), from the vantage point of the post-9/11 occasion, an expanse of volatile time that bore witness to the implosion of the Soviet Union and the United States’ renewed initiative (following its “kicking” of the”Vietnam syndrome” at the time of the first Gulf War), to achieve global hegemony. I mean the imperial initiative, precipitated, above all, by the al Qaeda bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that, in providing the U.S. with a”new frontier” (enemy)1 “justified” the George W. Bush administration’s declaration of an unending global “War on Terror,” which is to say, not only to undertake, in the name of “the clash of civilizations,” [End Page 15] unilateral “pre-emptive wars” against “rogues states” and the imposition of ventriloquized governments on them (“regime change”), but also, and equally, if not more important, particularly as it pertains to the issue of higher education (knowledge production) and the American polity, the announcement of the Homeland Security State, that is, the establishment of the state of exception as the norm. Such an invitation not only offered me the pleasurable opportunity to reread for the first time what I wrote about higher education in the United States so long ago at such a volatile time but also, given the epochal transformations, both local and global, that have ensued in the interim, a certain anxiety about some of the recommendations concerning the university, humanist studies, and, not least, the “post-human” I proffered in my concluding chapter. In the following remarks about The End of Education, written retrospectively from the vantage point of the fraught local and global post-9/11 occasion, I will first posit what I continue to think is not only valid about my initial understanding of the idea of humanism but, because it remains inadequately thought, in need of further thinking: that humanism is not simply a worldly/historical, but also and at bottom an ontological phenomenon, that is, a way of representing (the “truth” of) being at large. Second, I will suggest that the modern University had its origins in the disciplining of being in the age of the Enlightenment. Third, I will show that the poststructuralists de-centering of Man constituted a revolution—an event, in Alain Badiou’s sense of the word—that was immediately betrayed by their failure to perceive the ontological de-centering of Man as a de-centering that also occurred at the more “worldly” sites on the continuum of being. Fourth, I will suggest that this betrayal, aided and abetted by the United States’ globalization of the free market in the post-Cold War period and, after the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al Qaeda on 9/11, its apotheosis of the “Homeland Security State” and the normalization of the state of exception, enabled an invasion of the University by neoliberal capitalism intended not only to recuperate but to aggrandize the control over knowledge production it lost during the turbulent Vietnam decade. I am referring to the corporate initiative tacitly (in the name of the failing economy) but massively committed to the obliteration of both the residual traditional function of the humanities (the production of good “nationalist“ citizens of the nation-state) and, above all, the function of the humanities inaugurated by the protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s that would supersede the former—the instigation [End Page 16] of critical consciousness—in favor of reducing them to service departments: instrumentalist agencies for providing students—native and foreign—with the skills (particularly “global English”2) to operate the electronic tools of the neoliberal global free market. Fifth, and in keeping with the lesson...

Cool, Creepy, Moé: Otaku Fictions, Discourses, and Policies

This essay looks at theotakuphenomenon in terms of the production of consumption (what produces consumption, and what consumption produces) primarily three registers: fictions ofotakuthat stage the repression ofotakudesires and identities in order to form erogenous zones; cultural discourses that pathologizeotakuconsumption; and government policies related to Cool Japan that strive to reconfigureotakuconsumption in terms of markets and self-satisfying subjects. Considering these different registers brings into a focus a neoliberal socius or social being, which allows constant intervention into everyday life in the name of the fragility of the global free market by typologizing and pathologizing consumers.

Milton and Rose Friedmanns 'Free to Choose' and its Impact in the Global Movement Toward Free Market Policy: 1979-2003

This paper examines the impact of Milton and Rose Friedman’s 'Free to Choose' on the global movement toward free market policies between 1979 and 2003.

The freight consolidation and containerization problem

In today’s global free market, third-party logistics providers (3PLs) are becoming increasingly important. This paper studies a problem faced by a 3PL operating a warehouse in Shanghai, China, under contract with a major manufacturer of children’s clothing based in the United States. At the warehouse, the 3PL receives textile parcel shipments from the suppliers located in China; each shipment is destined for different retail stores located across the United Sates. These shipments must be consolidated and loaded into containers of varying sizes and costs, and then sent along shipping routes to different destination ports. An express company, such as UPS and FedEx, unloads the shipments from the containers at the destination ports and distributes them to their corresponding stores or retailers by parcel delivery. The objective is to find an allocation that minimizes the total container transportation and parcel delivery costs. We formulate the problem into an integer programming model, and also propose a memetic algorithm approach to solve the problem practically. A demonstration of a good solution to this problem was a decisive factor in the awarding of the contract to the 3PL in question.

Becoming a “Society of the Spectacle”: Ghanaian Hiplife Music and Corporate Recolonization

Hiplife music in Ghana, West Africa, is explored not merely as an adaptation of hip hop, but as a revision of Ghana's own century-old popular music known globally as highlife; yet it is subject to the same postcolonial, global, and neoliberal corporate “recolonization” to which other sectors of Africa societies are subject. I dissect neoliberalism as the global free market agenda acting as a new form of colonialism in Africa through examining Ghana's ubiquitous telecommunications companies. Their lucrative corporate relationships with hiplife artists allow me to explore the meaning of modernity in Africa, as well as the place of the Structural Adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank. I conclude that hiplife music has given Ghanaian youths a counter-hegemonic voice while enabling their gainful employment, but, while doing so, hiplife music necessarily had to involve itself in capitalism's global dominance with increasing corporate privatization in Ghana and Africa in general.

Struggles Against Bilateral FTAs: Challenges for Transnational Global Justice Activism

The past decade has seen major movements and mobilizations against the new crop of bilateral free trade and investment agreements being pursued by governments in the wake of the failure of global (World Trade Organization) and regional (e.g. Free Trade Area of the Americas) negotiations, and the defeat of an attempted Multilateral Agreement on Investment in the 1990s. However, in spite of much scholarly, non-governmental organization (NGO) and activist focus on transnational global justice activism, many of these movements, such as the major multi-sectoral popular struggle over the recently-concluded US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, are hardly acknowledged in North America and Europe. With a shift in emphasis pushing liberalization and deregulation of trade and investment increasingly favouring lower-profile bilateral agreements, this article maps the resistance movements to these latest shifts in global free market capitalist relations and discusses the disconnect between these (mainly Southern) struggles and dominant scholarly and NGO conceptions of global justice and the global justice movement as well as questions of knowledge production arising from these movements.

The Imperialist Claws of Metacapitalism

The information and industrial revolutions are so different and yet similar. Both enjoyed the emergence of accounting measurement and management techniques which privileged the efficient allocation of resources as the principal imperative to a firm's participation in a free market economy. MetaCapitalism is one such corporate change strategy which promised untold wealth and unprecedented growth, and under that guise a predatory Darwinistic corporate strategy was implemented. Fundamentally, it promotes extreme outsourcing and downsizing of human capital, de-capitalisation of all non-core capital assets and the diminished role of the State in the global free market economy. Yet the most disturbing aspect is its complete and total disregard for even the slightest social or public policy implications. Essentially then, its most salient danger is an unmistakable endorsement of a fundamentalist brand of value free, reckless capitalism that is ultimately detrimental not only to the long-term business interest, but human as well. One of the main findings of evaluating the Fortune 100 companies' performance in implementing MetaCapitalism was the resulting monopolies. Lenin described monopolies as essential to imperialism which is the highest stage of capitalism. The parallels between the resulting monopolies under MetaCapitalism, and what Lenin described as the final stage of Capitalism are poignant. I would like to draw upon those parallels in the hope that earlier work might enlighten our understanding and inform our critique of MetaCapiatlism.

Christian ‘Renewalism’ and the production of global free market hegemony

Charismatic and Pentecostal elements of global Christianity serve key roles in the production of free market hegemony within and between states, societies and markets across the world. While many of the institutions of these Christian social forces are fiercely decentralised, this popular global movement has converged on key elements of a shared conception of the world which links core, semi-peripheral and peripheral societies across national boundaries and class distinctions. These activities highlight the necessity of linking the emergent narratives on ‘global religious economy’ with the larger narratives of Critical IPE. It is argued here that Gramsci provides us with useful conceptual tools with which we may contextualise specific transnational religious movements and social forces within the framework of globalisation and the production of neoliberal hegemony within and between specific states, societies and markets.

Indonesia: Telling Lies

Indonesia: Telling Lies

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation: A Media Institution with A Mission

Two recent events in the United States have focussed attention on the political influence of the giant media group News Corporation and its chief executive officer, Rupert Murdoch. In the aftermath...

Risks in development of enterprises – Silesian exporters in the times of the growing world economic crisis

The author carries out systematic research on economic transformations of the Southern Macro-region in context of transformation, privatisation and restructuring processes. The work presents risks in development of enterprises – Silesian exporters of the South Macro regions experience from the process of social and economic transformation and at the same time integration with the Western world in the time of the growing world economic crisis. In the mechanisms of the global market economy we, as a country, can have impact on formation of these processes, (basically only, if at all) in proportion to our significance on the economic map of the world market. But this impact is quite modest and, in addition to that, has been decreasing (in the Silesian enterprises exporters, in the Polish example) since 1980. Majority enterprises, especially small or very small enterprises will be fit to survive on the global free market.

European values and globalization

Good Governance, Social Market Economy, Culture and Education are the decisive elements for Human Development. We need a third way between the extremes of the Utopian Global Free Market and a new nationalism. A Social Market Economy and the European Model of a Union could be such third way. For a new Social Market Economy we need a renaissance of the European dialectics between culture and society, idealism and materialism, religion and enlightenment, solidarity and profitability. The balancing of those poles is deeply rooted in our best traditions. Â

The Global Free Market in Biofuels

The current model for a global trade in biofuels is one of industrial export agriculture, which brings with it negative environmental and social impacts. Efforts to mitigate these impacts through narrow regulation of biofuels without addressing the regulatory dynamics of agriculture, energy, and financial markets will be ineffective. Gretchen Gordon argues that such a free market in industrial biofuels threatens to detract from real solutions to the energy crisis and equitable development needs.

The Airlines Efficiency Myth

One of the emerging issues with the internationalisation of accounting in enabling the globalisation of markets is its implicit role in privileging the destabilising social effect of globalisation, which risks alienating emerging economies and contributing to global instability. Accountants' preoccupation with measuring the efficient allocation of resources when reporting the financial position, only privileges the inherent ideal of market efficiency as the principal imperative to a firm's survival in a global market. This focus on free-market efficiency, with its disregard for social and public policy implications, is an unmistakable endorsement of a fundamentalist brand of value free, reckless capitalism that is ultimately detrimental not only to the long-term business interest, but human as well. It seems to me that international accounting should not only play a role in enabling a global free-market, but also safeguard society against the uninhabited pursuit of efficiency - especially when emerging economies are vulnerable to questionable social cost in their efficiency race to join the spoils of a global free-market. This is of concern when a global corporation's failure, such as: Enron or WorldCom, caused ripples in the economy of an advanced industrialised nation, because a comparable failure in an emerging market may have irreversible societal injustices. Therefore, we would like to argue that there is a need to evaluate the uninhabited pursuit of efficiency to have an informed debate about its merit and effect on firm performance given its far reaching ramifications. This paper examines how efficiency has shaped the global airline industry, over the period from 1995 until 2005 to determine whether a correlation exists between the level of efficiency and airline performance. The findings highlight the imperative for international accounting standards to play a role in addressing the inherent deficiencies of such an obsession with efficiency because of its detrimental effect on the firm, the industry and society in the long term.

Hidden Monopoly in the Free Market

Global free market economy is comparatively a better concept of market structure. Free market economy ensures full competitive market where rights of buyers as well as sellers will be protecting. Now let's try to know what free market is? A market will be treated as free market when it fulfills the following conditions: a. Price of the product will be fixed upon buyers and sellers bargaining, b. there will no influential actions taken by anybody to control demand and supply, and, c. there will no actions taken by government to fix up products price, etc. But, what we are observing in Bangladeshi market by the name of free market economy? Is it is the face of free market? Here sellers are not going to compromise with the buyers, sellers are fixing price of one product according to his part there is no options to take it otherwise by the buyers. Buyers has no role to play either he can buy or left the store. The first condition of free market economy is showing thumbs by the sellers.