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.
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
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
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership(RCEP) is a free-trade deal between 10 ASEAN member states and Australia,China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. It is the world's biggest ...regionaltrade deal, and it will create the world's most populous trade area. Thisedited collection features 10 contributions from multidisciplinary authors andis meant to share research and best practises on different aspects of the RCEP.It presents research projects that contribute to the discussion about the theory,lessons learned, and business strategies, to give a better understanding of theRCEP and how it can shape policy in member countries. The themes in eachchapter can also serve to evaluate reports on the RCEP's overall progress. Thebook covers a broad range of subjects, including an overview of the RCEP,digital economy, peer-to-peer lending, international e-commerce, big data, ICTreadiness and much more. This work is a key source of information and referencefor RCEP development for academics and researchers (in economics and politicalscience), government and trade organisations and policymakers interested in theRCEP. Members of the general public who want to understand debates surroundingthe RCEP will also benefit from the information provided.
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.
Trade and the environment Copeland, Brian R; Taylor, M. Scott
2003., 20131203, 2013, 2003, 2003-01-01, 20030101
eBook
Nowhere has the divide between advocates and critics of globalization been more striking than in debates over free trade and the environment. And yet the literature on the subject is high on rhetoric ...and low on results. This book is the first to systematically investigate the subject using both economic theory and empirical analysis. Brian Copeland and Scott Taylor establish a powerful theoretical framework for examining the impact of international trade on local pollution levels, and use it to offer a uniquely integrated treatment of the links between economic growth, liberalized trade, and the environment. The results will surprise many.
The authors set out the two leading theories linking international trade to environmental outcomes, develop the empirical implications, and examine their validity using data on measured sulfur dioxide concentrations from over 100 cities worldwide during the period from 1971 to 1986.
The empirical results are provocative. For an average country in the sample, free trade is good for the environment. There is little evidence that developing countries will specialize in pollution-intensive products with further trade. In fact, the results suggest just the opposite: free trade will shift pollution-intensive goods production from poor countries with lax regulation to rich countries with tight regulation, thereby lowering world pollution. The results also suggest that pollution declines amid economic growth fueled by economy-wide technological progress but rises when growth is fueled by capital accumulation alone.
Lucidly argued and authoritatively written, this book will provide students and researchers of international trade and environmental economics a more reliable way of thinking about this contentious issue, and the methodological tools with which to do so.
Free trade has been a highly contentious issue since the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney negotiated the first deal with the United States in the 1980s. Tracing the roots of Canada's ...contemporary involvement in North American free trade back to the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada in 1985 - also known as the Macdonald Commission - Gregory J. Inwood offers a critical examination of the commission and how its findings affected Canada's political and economic landscape, including its present-day reverberations.
Using original research - including content analysis, interviews, archival information, and surveys of relevant literature - Inwood argues that the Macdonald Commission created an atmosphere and political discourse that made the continentalization of Canada possible by way of free trade agreements with the U.S. and Mexico. Through the use of a suspect research program, and with the aid of a select oligarchy within the Commission and the government bureaucracy, opposition to continentalism from both the majority of the Canadian population and even several commissioners was ignored. Accessible to readers interested in Canadian politics, policy, or economy,Continentalizing Canadaoffers a thorough examination into the Macdonald Commission and the resulting discourse in the Canadian political economy.
