scholarly journals The Economic Ascent of China and the Potential for Restructuring the Capitalist World-Economy

2004 ◽  
pp. 565-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Ciccantell ◽  
Stephen Bunker
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Developmental State ◽  
Chinese Economy ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

The economic ascent of China in the past two decades is the most dramatic change in the capitalist world-economy of this period. Analyses focus on changes in government control of the economy, the availability of low cost workers for export production, the historical characteristics of Chinese economy and society, and the role of the Chinese government as a developmental state. All highlight key parts of China’s economic ascent, but none addresses what we argue will be the critical component of future sustained economic ascent, if it is to take place in China: the role of raw materials and transport industries as generative sectors. These generative sectors in the most successful historical cases articulate domestic economic development with the creation ofnew systems of international economic and political relations, ultimately restructuring the capitalist world-economy in support of a nation’s ascent to core status and its ability to challenge the existing hegemon and other ascendant economies for hegemony. China is following the Japanese model of coastal greenfield heavy industrialization as state policies focus on deepening industrialization in steel, shipbuilding, and other heavy industries. However, following the models of earlier ascendant economies does not guarantee success. In this paper, we analyze the efforts underway in China to use steel, coal and other linked industries as driving forces for sustained economic ascent, and the potential consequences of these efforts for China and for the world economy.

scholarly journals SOBRE A MOBILIDADE NO SISTEMA MUNDIAL: A RELEVÂNCIA DO CONCEITO DE SEMIPERIFERIA PARA OS PROJETOS DE DESENVOLVIMENTO NO SÉC. XXI

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (17) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Freitas
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
System Approach ◽  
World Economy ◽  
World System ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

The objective of this article is to discuss the relevance of the concept of semiperiphery to analyze the world system in the 21st century. First, the main concepts of the world-system approach will be analyzed. In the second part, a more in-depth examination of the question of the semi-periphery will be made through its political and economic characteristics. Later, we will examine the empirical attempts to define the semiperiphery, its role in the reproduction of the capitalist world-economy and the question of mobility in the world-system hierarchy. In conclusion, the role of government apparatus in the issue of development and overcoming the status of semi-periphery in the capitalist world-system will be highlighted.

scholarly journals International Inequality in the Age of Globalization: Japanese Economic Ascent and the Restructuring of the Capitalist World-Economy

2002 ◽  
pp. 62-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Ciccantell ◽  
Stephen Bunker
Keyword(s):  
Joint Ventures ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Transnational Corporations ◽  
New Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

This paper shows how Japanese ?rms and the Japanese state constructed a development model based on the steel industry as a generative sector that drove Japan’s economic ascent in the world-historical context of U.S. hegemony. We make three arguments in this paper. First, there is a new model of capital accumulation that does create new forms of social inequality by redistributing costs and bene?ts in very di?erent ways than earlier models. Second, Japanese ?rms and the Japanese state created this new model of capital accumulation and social inequality via mechanisms including joint ventures, long term contracts, and other forms of international trade and investment, not U.S.-based transnational corporations, as is usually assumed. Third, world-systems theory reconstructed through the lens of the new historical materialism explains this restructuring of the capitalist world-economy as the outcome of Japan’s economic ascent over the last ?fty years. Further, we argue that this new model of capital accumulation has had similar impacts on redistributing the costs and bene?ts of development between core and peripheral regions of the capitalist world-economy in a wide range of global industries. These strategies created a tightly linked set of technological and organizational innovations to overcome the natural and social obstacles to Japanese development, dramatically increase Japan’s international economic competitiveness by lowering production costs in all sectors of the economy, turn Japan into the world’s largest exporter of manufactured products, restructure a range of global industries, and recreate the world-system hierarchy in support of Japanese development. In particular, organizational inno-vations in the use of long term contracts and joint ventures in raw materials industries to foster global excess capacity and lower rents to resource extracting ?rms and states reallocated the costs of providing the material building blocks of Japanese development to the states and ?rms of its new raw materials periphery. This competitive advantage drove Japanese capital accumulation and economic ascent, and simultaneously drove underdevelopment in Japan’s periphery. These Japanese innovations became key elements of globalization as U.S. and European transnational corporations and states sought to compete with Japan. Joint ventures, long-term contracts, and other forms of inter?rm cooperation have replaced vertically integrated foreign direct investment, the earlier U.S. model of capital accumulation and international economic linkage, as the model for global industries.

Coal's Persistence in the Capitalist World-Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul K. Gellert ◽  
Paul S. Ciccantell
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Ecological Modernization ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Coal Consumption ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

Predominant analyses of energy offer insufficient theoretical and political-economic insight into the persistence of coal and other fossil fuels. The dominant narrative of coal powering the Industrial Revolution, and Great Britain's world dominance in the nineteenth century giving way to a U.S.- and oil-dominated twentieth century, is marred by teleological assumptions. The key assumption that a complete energy “transition” will occur leads some to conceive of a renewable-energy-dominated twenty-first century led by China. After critiquing the teleological assumptions of modernization, ecological modernization, energetics, and even world-systems analysis of energy “transition,” this paper offers a world-systems perspective on the “raw” materialism of coal. Examining the material characteristics of coal and the unequal structure of the world-economy, the paper uses long-term data from governmental and private sources to reveal the lack of transition as new sources of energy are added. The increases in coal consumption in China and India as they have ascended in the capitalist world-economy have more than offset the leveling-off and decline in some core nations. A true global peak and decline (let alone full substitution) in energy generally and coal specifically has never happened. The future need not repeat the past, but technical, policy, and movement approaches will not get far without addressing the structural imperatives of capitalist growth and the uneven power structures and processes of long-term change of the world-system.

The Capitalist World-Economy.

1980 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Friedmann ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

scholarly journals The Second Slavery and World Capitalism: A Perspective for Historical Inquiry

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Tomich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Us South ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
World Economic ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Economic Zones

AbstractThe concept of the second slavery radically reinterprets the relation of slavery and capitalism by calling attention to the emergence of extensive new zones of slave commodity production in the US South, Cuba, and Brazil as part of nineteenth-century industrialization and world-economic expansion. This article examines the conceptual framework and methodological procedures that inform this interpretation. It reformulates the concept of the capitalist world-economy by emphasizing the mutual formation and historical interrelation of global–local relations. This open conception of world-economy permits the temporal-spatial specification of the zones of the second slavery. In this way, it is possible both to distinguish the new zones of the second slavery from previous world-economic zones of slave production and to establish the ways in which they are formative of the emerging industrial world division of labor. From this perspective, analysis of sugar production in Jamaica, Guyana, and Cuba discloses spatial-temporal differences between what would otherwise be taken as apparently similar historical-geographical complexes. This comparison demonstrates how world-economic processes produce particular local histories and how such histories structure the world-economy as a whole. This approach locates the crisis of slavery during the nineteenth century in the differentiated response to processes of world accumulation, rather than the incompatibility of slave production with industrialization and open, competitive markets. More generally, it calls attention to the continuity of forms of forced labor in the historical development of the capitalist world-economy and to the ways that processes of capitalist development produce social-economic differentiation and hierarchy on a world scale.

State maneuver in the capitalist world-economy: A political geography of contextualized agency

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (8) ◽  
pp. 1580-1601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Flint ◽  
Raymond Dezzani
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Transition Probabilities ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Emergent Structure ◽  
Spatial Formations

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate a theoretical perspective and outline an analytical framework for state maneuver in the hierarchical world-economy that incorporates the idea of context with structural imperatives. Maneuver is the agency of states within conjunctures of structural imperatives and spatial settings of inter-state alliances and established cultural understandings and historic relations. The hierarchy of the capitalist world-economy is conceptualized as an emergent structure, one that emerges from competition for scarce resources. The resources are economic attributes defined by the process of capital accumulation, political attributes emanating from the imperative of state territorialization, and the agglomeration of these attributes in spatial formations. The structure is emergent from the actions of states that create these spatial formations, but transformation is limited given structural constraints. States maneuver can be modeled as Markov transition probabilities decomposable as logits for covariate analysis.

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