At the Margins of the Global Market

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip A. Hough

Contemporary scholars debate the factors driving despotic labour conditions across the world economy. Some emphasize the dominance of global market imperatives and others highlight the market's reliance upon extra-economic coercion and state violence. At the Margins of the Global Market engages in this debate through a comparative and world-historical analysis of the labour regimes of three global commodity-producing subregions of rural Colombia: the coffee region of Viejo Caldas, the banana region of Urabá, and the coca/cocaine region of the Caguán. By drawing upon insights from labour regimes, global commodity chains, and world historical sociology, this book offers a novel understanding of the broad range of factors - local, national, global, and interregional - that shape labour conditions on the ground in Colombia. In doing so, it offers a critical new framework for analysing labour and development dynamics that exist at the margins of the global market.

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christof Parnreiter

Cycles of accumulation and hegemony. A critical discussion of Giovanni Arrighi’s arguments on the relocation of centre and periphery of the world economy. Based on data on GDP and on stock market capitalization, the paper takes issue with Giovanni Arrighi’s notion of the “terminal crisis” of the US hegemony and the related relocation of the center of the world economy to China. While some indicators support Arrighi’s argument (e.g. the shift of the accumulation dynamic from the material to the financial sphere), others don’t. My analysis in this paper does not yield unambiguous results. Moreover, I question Arrighi’s primary unit of analysis, national economies, maintaining that such a focus downplays the recent fundamental changes in the organization of the world economy. I propose a less state-centric approach to identify centres of the world economy, which is derived from an integration of the concepts of global commodity chains and global cities.


2019 ◽  
pp. 46-69
Author(s):  
Intan Suwandi

The analysis of global commodity chains creates some crucial questions in relation to the nature of imperialism in the twenty-first century: (1) whether decentralized global commodity chains can be seen as constituting a decentralization of power among the major actors within these chains, and (2) whether the complexities of these chains suggest that the hierarchical, imperialist characteristics of the world economy have been superseded. I argue that the answer to both of these questions is no. Despite the seemingly decentralized networks, and notwithstanding the existing complexities that characterize global commodity chains, the capital-labor relations inherent in these chains are still imperialistic in their configurations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 463-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Komlosy

The decline of the “West” and the loss of U.S. global hegemony is accompanied by a three-sided debate. Some scholars have argued that emerging powers in the Global South will succeed the United States and assume a hegemonic role in the world-economy. They argue that China or an alliance of semi-peripheral states in the South will dominate capitalist or post-capitalist cycles of accumulation in the future. Other scholars rather think that China and other emerging states will find it difficult to catch up and assume a hegemonic role. This paper discusses the consequences of decline for the West and describes three possible western responses to its global economic and hegemonic decline: Resisting Decline—The West will seek to maintain its claim to lead by mobilizing defensive and aggressive military forces, searching for new alliances and partnerships, undermining old and new competitors; Suffering (Semi-) Peripheralization—The West will surrender control of global commodity chains, which will move to the new cores, a development that will contribute to social polarization and the precarization of labour-relations in the old core; Accepting Re-regionalization/Provincialization—The West will accept the loss of hegemony and become just another “province” of the world.


2014 ◽  
pp. 82-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald A. Clelland

The capitalist world-economy takes the form of an iceberg. The most studied part which appears above the surface is supported by a huge underlying structure that is out of sight. Unlike the iceberg, the world-economy is a dynamic system based on flows of value from the underside toward the top. These include drains of surplus (expropriated value) that take two forms: visible monetarized flows of bright value and hidden un(der)costed flows that carry dark value (the unrecorded value of cheap labor, labor reproduction and ecological externalities). Commodity chains are central mechanisms for these surplus drains in the world-economy. At each node of the chain, participants attempt to maximize their capture of bright value through wages, rent and profit. They do this by constructing differential degrees of monopoly (control of the markup between cost and sale price) and degrees of monopsony (control of markdowns of production costs). However, this process depends upon the transformation of dark value into bright value for capture. Via an examination of the Apple iPad commodity chain, I show how the bright value captured by Apple depends on the dark value extracted by its suppliers. Dark value is estimated by measurements of the value of under-payments for wage labor, reproductive labor and environmental damage in Asian countries, especially China. Surprisingly, most dark value embedded in the iPad is captured by final buyers (mostly in the core) as consumer surplus.


Author(s):  
E. Smirnov

In the context of digitalization in the world, competition is intensifying, lead-ing to a significant transformation of international business and a change in the development strategies of global digital platforms in the global market. The article analyzes and summarizes the prevailing approaches to competition and antitrust policy in the context of the “platformization” of the world economy and its impact on international economic dynamics.


2001 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Conca

Economic globalization demands two important adjustments in how we understand and undertake efforts to protect the global environment. One critical but overlooked effect of globalization is its impact on the “sustaining middle”—the large but fragile stratum of the Earth's population that lives, works, and consumes in ways most closely approximating genuine sustainability. Although we tend to view the world in dichotomous North/South terms, perhaps the greatest challenge of global environmental protection is to stem the corrosive effects of globalization on both ends of this middle stratum. Second, we must understand and respond to the ways that globalization undermines traditional regulatory approaches to environmental protection. Power in global production systems has shifted both upstream and downstream from the factory floor, where environmental efforts traditionally have focused. Viewing the problem from the consumption angle calls attention to the importance of following economic power “downstream” in global commodity chains, to the ideologies, symbols, relationships and practices that drive consumption.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
John Bellamy Foster

Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism's creative destruction of the bases of all social existence. Since the late 1980s, the world has been engulfed in an epoch of catastrophe capitalism, manifested today in the convergence of (1) the planetary ecological crisis, (2) the global epidemiological crisis, and (3) the unending world economic crisis. Added to this are the main features of today's "empire of chaos," including the extreme system of imperialist exploitation unleashed by global commodity chains; the demise of the relatively stable liberal-democratic state with the rise of neoliberalism and neofascism; and the emergence of a new age of global hegemonic instability accompanied by increased dangers of unlimited war.


Author(s):  
Ольга Николайчук ◽  
Olga Nikolaychuk ◽  
Д. Кадырова ◽  
D. Kadyrova

The article analyzes the monetary policy in the context of exogenous shocks of the external sector. The Bank of Russia and Rosstat use official statistics for 2000–2018. The parameters of the action of negative factors of the world economy apply the conditions of world trade and changes in the exchange rate of national currencies. The graphic form analyzes the susceptibility of macroeconomic indicators to changes in the external market and their dependence on fluctuations in energy prices. The influence of consumer prices and inflation on the monetary policy of the Central Bank is considered. The analysis allows us to conclude about the relationship of the effect of events from processes in the global market. It was concluded that, despite these risks, there are optimal ways of conducting monetary policy, which remain the targeting of inflation and the effect of the floating exchange rate regime of the national currency. For effective results in reducing the dependence of macroeconomic processes on the impact of external shocks, coordinated activities of all branches of economic power, and their effective macro-prudential and fiscal policies are important.


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