Mexican cuisine has emerged as a paradox of globalization. Food enthusiasts throughout the world celebrate the humble taco at the same time that Mexicans are eating fewer tortillas and more processed ...food. Today Mexico is experiencing an epidemic of diet-related chronic illness. The precipitous rise of obesity, diabetes, and metabolic disease--all attributed to changes in the Mexican diet--has resulted in a public health emergency. In her gripping new book, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico - sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have sometimes failed, resulting in unintended consequences for people's everyday lives
This book offers a compelling new interpretation of the proliferation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) at the end of the twentieth century. Challenging the widespread assumption that RTAs should ...be seen as fundamentally similar economic initiatives to pursue free trade, Francesco Duina proposes that the world is reorganizing itself into regions that are highly distinctive and enduring. With evidence from Europe, North America, and South America, he challenges our understanding of globalization, the nature of markets, and the spread of neoliberalism.
The pursuit of free trade is a profoundly social process and, as such, a unique endeavor wherever it takes place. In an unprecedented comparative analysis, the book offers striking evidence of differences in the legal architectures erected to standardize the worldview of market participants and the reaction of key societal organizations--interest groups, businesses, and national administrations--to a broader marketplace. The author gives special attention to developments in three key areas of economic life: women in the workplace, the dairy industry, and labor rights. With its bold and original approach and its impressive range of data,The Social Construction of Free Traderepresents a major advance in the growing fields of economic sociology and comparative regional integration.
Through detailed case studies on Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, Spalding examines the debate surrounding the adoption of CAFTA alongside the simultaneous changes to the economic and ...political landscape of Central America at the turn of this century.
Outsourcing Economics has a double meaning. First, it is a book about the economics of outsourcing. Second, it examines the way that economists have understood globalization as a pure market ...phenomenon, and as a result have 'outsourced' the explanation of world economic forces to other disciplines. Markets are embedded in a set of institutions - labor, government, corporate, civil society, and household - that mold the power asymmetries that influence the distribution of the gains from globalization. In this book, William Milberg and Deborah Winkler propose an institutional theory of trade and development starting with the growth of global value chains - international networks of production that have restructured the global economy and its governance over the past twenty-five years. They find that offshoring leads to greater economic insecurity in industrialized countries that lack institutions supporting workers. They also find that offshoring allows firms to reduce domestic investment and focus on finance and short-run stock movements.
The English East India Company was one of the most powerful and enduring organizations in history.Between Monopoly and Free Tradelocates the source of that success in the innovative policy by which ...the Company's Court of Directors granted employees the right to pursue their own commercial interests while in the firm's employ. Exploring trade network dynamics, decision-making processes, and ports and organizational context, Emily Erikson demonstrates why the English East India Company was a dominant force in the expansion of trade between Europe and Asia, and she sheds light on the related problems of why England experienced rapid economic development and how the relationship between Europe and Asia shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Though the Company held a monopoly on English overseas trade to Asia, the Court of Directors extended the right to trade in Asia to their employees, creating an unusual situation in which employees worked both for themselves and for the Company as overseas merchants. Building on the organizational infrastructure of the Company and the sophisticated commercial institutions of the markets of the East, employees constructed a cohesive internal network of peer communications that directed English trading ships during their voyages. This network integrated Company operations, encouraged innovation, and increased the Company's flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to local circumstance.
Between Monopoly and Free Tradehighlights the dynamic potential of social networks in the early modern era.
In the nineteenth century Adam Smith and others gradually invented a 'tradition' of free trade. This was a towering achievement and has proved to be influential to this day. This book examines this ...construction of the free trade tradition. Showing how historical contruction is a vital component in the writing of doctrinal history, Lars Magnusson argues that it is important for historians of economic thought to distance themselves from the practice of writing history backwards. Contrasting what occurred in Britain in the nineteenth century with what occurred in the United States and in Sweden, this book shows that perhaps the classical tradition meant something else entirely in different national contexts. This original and thought-provoking book is written such that it will be of great interest not only to historians specializing in economic thought, but also historians with other areas of interest.
1. The Invention of a Tradition of Free Trade - An Introduction 2. The Heritage from Smith and Classical Political Economy 3. The Innovation of a Tradition - From the Corn Law to the Fair Trade Controversy 4. The Historical Construction of Mercantilism 5. The American System 6. The Three Systems of Political Economy - A Swedish Case of Translation 7. Epilogue
Does democracy promote the creation of market economies and robust state institutions? Do state-building and market-building go hand in hand? Or do they work at cross-purposes? This book examines the ...relationship between state-building and market-building in 25 post-communist countries from 1990 to 2004. Based on cross-national statistical analyses, surveys of business managers, and case studies from Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Uzbekistan, Timothy Frye demonstrates that democracy is associated with more economic reform, stronger state institutions, and higher social transfers when political polarization is low. But he also finds that increases in political polarization dampen the positive impact of democracy by making policy less predictable. He traces the roots of political polarization to high levels of income inequality and the institutional legacy of communist rule. By identifying when and how democracy fosters markets and states, this work contributes to long-standing debates in comparative politics, public policy, and post-communist studies.
Enclosed Grandia, Liza; Sivaramakrishnan, K
03/2012
eBook
This impassioned and rigorous analysis of the territorial plight of the Q'eqchi Maya of Guatemala highlights an urgent problem for indigenous communities around the world - repeated displacement from ...their lands. Liza Grandia uses the tools of ethnography, history, cartography, and ecology to explore the recurring enclosures of Guatemala's second largest indigenous group, who number a million strong. Having lost most of their highland territory to foreign coffee planters at the end of the 19th century, Q'eqchi' people began migrating into the lowland forests of northern Guatemala and southern Belize. Then, pushed deeper into the frontier by cattle ranchers, lowland Q'eqchi' found themselves in conflict with biodiversity conservationists who established protected areas across this region during the 1990s.
The lowland, maize-growing Q'eqchi' of the 21st century face even more problems as they are swept into global markets through the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and the Puebla to Panama Plan (PPP). The waves of dispossession imposed upon them, driven by encroaching coffee plantations, cattle ranches, and protected areas, have unsettled these agrarian people.Encloseddescribes how they have faced and survived their challenges and, in doing so, helps to explain what is happening in other contemporary enclosures of public "common" space.
Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTLvmg3mHE8
Hainan’s Free Trade Port (FTP) policy is a major initiative to promote the opening up and development of China’s southernmost province. The policy aims to create a world-class business environment ...and a high-level market system by 2035. However, the economic effects of this policy are not well understood. This paper applies the HCW method, a panel data approach for program evaluation, to assess the impact of Hainan’s FTP policy on four key indicators: trade, investment, talent and tax burden. The paper constructs optimal control groups for each indicator using the HCW and compares the actual outcomes of Hainan with the counterfactual outcomes that would have occurred in the absence of the policy intervention. The paper finds that Hainan’s FTP policy has increased its foreign trade and foreign direct investment significantly, but has not achieved noticeable improvements in attracting high-quality talent. The paper also conducts placebo tests to check the robustness and significance of the results and discusses some policy implications and future research directions based on the findings.
