Capitalist crisis in the “age of global value chains”

In this article, we analyze the strategies, surprises, and sidesteps in the World Bank’s 2020 World Development Report, Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains. Strategically, the Report promotes an expansion of neoliberal globalization couched in the language of global value chains. Curiously detached from the broader academic literature on global value chains in international trade, it promotes a sequentialist vision of global value chain upgrading that evokes the stagism of classic modernization theory. The authors sidestep important issues, such as China's pivotal role in the landscape of global trade, and are largely silent on others, including climate change. Significantly and somewhat surprisingly, given the general endorsement of global value chain integration, the Report acknowledges negative distributional trends associated with the rise of global value chains, including the excessive benefits reaped by “superstar firms” and the now well-documented decline in labor's income share. These observations are not reflected in the document's policy section, however, where the World Development Report largely recapitulates familiar prescriptions, with the threat of nationalist populism and rising protectionism providing a new bottle for this old wine. Drawing on a range of literature including United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's 2018 Trade and Development Report, we highlight not only the limits of the Bank's adherence to an increasingly embattled orthodoxy, but also the necessary starting points for a more useful discussion of the merits, limits, and future of global value chains.

Problematic Global Metrics

An added benefit of doing library instruction is you learn things from students and faculty. This knowledge informs both collection development and research consultations. It is especially interesting when a new faculty member arrives and issues a revised syllabus for a popular course. One such class at UC Berkeley is in the Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) minor, founded by Professor Ananya Roy ten years ago. Her book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, makes the uncomfortable point that people and institutions profit from poverty: it is a lucrative business. But there are also those who attempt to create and influence “poverty knowledge.” The 1998 subtitle of the World Bank’s flagship publication, the World Development Report, was “Knowledge for Development.” In 2017 the World Bank wrote a feature news article (about itself) as a “knowledge institution.” There are articles that trace the history of the World Bank’s vision of itself as a “knowledge bank,” a term I find both amusing (do they charge “interest”?) and problematic. Yet a library is also a knowledge institution, and what we purchase or recommend influences the thinking and research of students and scholars.

Seeing the "Changing Nature of Work" through a Precarity Lens

This article reviews the concept of precarity and offers critical reflections on its contribution to thestudy of contemporary labour and livelihoods. A stock-take of key and recent literature suggeststhat, despite conceptual ambiguity and overstretching, “thinking with precarity” continues to provea valuable and worthwhile exercise – so long as that thinking is carefully articulated. This involvesunderstanding precarity as: 1) rooted in concrete labour market experiences but also connected tobroader anxieties over social and political life; 2) a process-focused concept rather than end-statedescriptor; and 3) speaking to longer histories and wider geographies than its commonplace statusas a residual term or category implies. The analytical advantages of thinking in such a way areillustrated through a critical analysis of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2019 on the“changing nature of work”, and in particular its handling of digital labour.KEYWORDS: precarious work; politics of precarity; livelihoods; digital labour; gig economy