Global Political Economy

This paper will provide an overview of the fundamental changes that the cruise ship business has undergone with the emergence of capitalist globalization and in the context of the Caribbean region. Rising profits and investments in tourism during the later decades of the 20th century and into the 21st century have been an important part of the globalizing economy. This has been a consequence of both the major technological and organizational developments of global capitalism, but also, and most importantly, of the global system's changing social and class relations. The shifting social relations and productive activities that undergird the cruise ship business have meant gains for some involved, most especially, transnational capitalists, and exploitative and contradictory dynamics for many others. Annually millions of tourists from high consuming sectors worldwide partake in brief holiday escapes aboard cruise ship vessels. At the same time, the cruise ship business has become an oligopoly, controlled by a handful of large companies, that has driven many competitors out of business or acquiried them. Labor in the business has become more flexibilized, with low-wage workers (from a variety of nationalities) whose activities are increasingly standardized, monitored and micro-managed. While moving away from indicative development planning (with an eye to national goals), state policymakers in the Caribbean, for their own social reproduction, increasingly promote the interests of transnational capital such as with the cruise ship business. Importantly, labor and environmental protections have been stymied as the cruise ship companies, adept at public relations and skirting regulations, remain largely unaccountable.

Crypto-coins (CCs) like Bitcoin are digitally encrypted tokens traded in peer-to-peer networks whose money laundering potential has attracted the attention of regulators, firms and the wider public worldwide. This article assesses the effectiveness of the global anti-money laundering regime in balancing both the challenges and opportunities presented by these novel ‘altcoins’. Two main arguments are advanced. First, the implications that crypto-coins presently pose for global anti-money laundering efforts stem less from the threats of their illicit uses as digital currencies and more from the opportunities presented by their underlying blockchain technologies. Second, despite several shortcomings, the risk-based approach pursued by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) strikes an effective balance between the existing threats and opportunities that crypto-coins currently present. Rather than a conclusive evaluation however this article stresses the need for continual monitoring and investigation of the wider ethical implications raised by CCs for global efforts to combat money laundering in an era of rapid technological change.

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

Using objective measures of investor protections in 170 countries, I establish that the level of investor protection matters for cross-country differences in GDP growth: countries with stronger protections tend to grow faster than those with poor investor protections.

Governing oil has been key to the emergence of particular sociotechnical realities throughout the last century and a half. A time-span of the modern/colonial which has been conceptualised by competing social science discourses as 'capitalism' and 'democracy'. A hydrocarbon centred era throughout which the political substance of oil in the form of fuel and energy, as infrastructure or as commodity has shaped the ecology of our politics. An epoch of 'petrocapitalism' and 'carbon democracy' we may refer to as 'oil modernity'. Recently, 'oil assemblages' have emerged in the capitalist periphery that have challenged the political economy of oil modernity. Thus, a particular category of oil politics has been made possible through the novel practices, technopolitics, expertise and governing oil at play in these sites. Such a 'critical oil politics' will be of greater significance within the epoch of transitions the contemporary world has now entered and as we begin to address the breaching of ecological frontiers.

The research project offers an analysis of contemporary instances of critical oil politics taken from Latin America and the Caribbean. The research focuses primarily on two oil assemblages and the forms of 'political oil' they put forward. It takes as its cases Venezuela's Petrocaribe - an oil and energy cooperation program established by the Bolivarian revolutionary government in 2005 - and its form of 'socialist oil', together with Ecuador's oil-based and environmentally informed Yasuni-ITT Initiative (2007-2013) and its promise of an 'oil that stays in the ground', an 'ecological oil'. Both Petrocaribe and the Yasuni-ITT Initiative put forward novel understandings of economy and particular oil objects that go beyond the oil commodity as they shaped Latin America's left turn. The research details both left turn oil assemblages in order to approach the forms of political oil they develop while seeking to comprehend their possibilities and limitations as critical oil politics. To do this the project focuses on particular practices and knowledges linked to the forms of political oil, which may be seen as constituting a novel governing of oil.

The project engages with postcolonial and assemblage approaches to politics and economy, but also builds on Latin American texts on oil. These approaches stand in tension with mainstream Anglophone political science approaches to the politics of oil, international relations and political economy. The project is in dialogue with and contributes to research within the social sciences seeking to incorporate and underscore the role of practices, materiality, and human/nonhuman relations into the study of politics, development, and international political economy.

There is no such thing as a coherent, unified postpositivist political theory. Postpositivist political theory is rather an umbrella description, which is loosely used to group together a variety of different theories and approaches that critically engage with different forms of essentialism in the political and social sciences – assumptions reflected in conventional, traditional, and especially positivist approaches. Among  other paradigms, the term postpositivism encompasses poststructuralism, most feminist theories, critical theory (in the sense imposed by the Frankfurt School), critical realism, the interpretative tradition, and neo-Gramscian approaches, notwithstanding the tendency, on the part of many scholars representing these currents of thought, to reject the label of postpositivism.

We are confronting a formidable problem in our global po liti cal
economy: the emergence of new logics of expulsion. The past two
de cades have seen a sharp growth in the number of people, enterprises,
and places expelled from the core social and economic orders
of our time. This tipping into radical expulsion was enabled by elementary
decisions in some cases, but in others by some of our most
advanced economic and technical achievements. The notion of expulsions
takes us beyond the more familiar idea of growing in equal
ity as a way of capturing the pathologies of today’s global capitalism.
Further, it brings to the fore the fact that forms of knowledge
and intelligence we respect and admire are often at the origin of
long transaction chains that can end in simple expulsions.......

Аннотация. Несмотря на многолетнее активное использование понятия «цифровая экономика» в научном и общественном дискурсе, четкого устоявшегося значения у него до сих пор нет, как не существует и единой методики количественной оценки этого явления как статистического агрегата, что ставит вопрос о его реальных масштабах. На наш взгляд, цифровая экономика – это пока лишь бизнес-модель и некий амбициозный глобальный проект социально-технической модернизации общества, который существует на стыке политического дискурса и реальности как конструируемый объект знания, статистических и прогнозных манипуляций и пока не воплотился в экономике. В статье анализируется эволюция различных концепций определения цифровой экономики и методик ее статистической количественной оценки. Авторы показывают, что соответствующие методы значительно видоизменялись в зависимости от экономической конъюнктуры, однако их основная цель – любыми средствами (зачастую в ущерб объективности) выработать определение цифровой экономики и оценить ее масштаб так, чтобы постоянно демонстрировать высокую динамику и опережающие темпы роста.

Abstract. The term «digital economy» was introduced to the academic literature over 20 years ago and many governments adopted their national programs to develop digital economy proclaimed a new driver of global economic growth. However, the concept still has neither a clear definition, nor a single methodology for quantifying the digital economy as a statistical aggregate, which raises the issue of the real
scope of this phenomenon. The authors believe that the digital economy is just a new business model and an ambitious global project of social and technological modernization of society at the intersection of political discourse and reality. This project has not yet materialized in the economy and exists as a constructed object of knowledge, statistical and forecast manipulation. The paper reviews the evolution of various concepts employed to define the digital economy and methods of its statistical quantification. The authors show that such methods have changed considerably depending on the economic environment. However, their main goal was to use any means (often at the expense of objectivity) in order to elaborate such a definition of the digital economy, which is gradually expanding to the level of almost entire economy, and to assess its scale in such a way as to continuously demonstrate high
dynamics and accelerated growth rates.

In this article we analyse Fair Trade as a form of non-state regulation, building on the literature on the internal politics and governance of Fair Trade International (FTI) certification. We focus on recent developments in the FTI certification system, including the split of Fair Trade USA from FTI and the emergence of the Small Producer’s Symbol (SPP) as an alternative to FTI certification. We highlight the role of the three regional Producer Networks, in particular the Latin American Producer Network, the CLAC, in the politics and governance of the FTI system. In order to analyse these issues we employ an alternative reading of Karl Polanyi’s work in relation to Fair Trade. We problematise the claim made by some in the literature that FTI certification is an example of Polanyi’s concept of re-embedding. Instead, we draw on Polanyi’s concept of oversight to analyse Fair Trade certification. We argue that the emergence of the SPP out of the CLAC shows promise for being a mechanism of oversight more reflective of Polanyian re-embedding than FTI certification. We also emphasise how the growth of the SPP and the pressure from the Producer Networks have prompted governance reform within the FTI system.

China is the first major country to begin its rapid rise in the era of globalization — yet many observers who study the rise of China continue to interpret Chinese national accounts, such as world share of exports, manufacturing, and most of all GDP, as if we still live in a pre-globalization age. That is, with production and value chains now globalized, it becomes more important to investigate who ultimately controls and owns that production rather than discerning its geographic concentration. This essays demonstrates that this is especially the case for China's role as workshop of the world, since it is foreign corporations — especially American — that ultimately own and profit by far the most from the bulk of the internationally

Presentation on 4th February 2022 as part of the 'Corporations and Power' panel at the 12th Australian International Political Economy Network's Workshop, The University of Queensland. AIPEN and UQ provided travel bursary assistance for this presentation.

Simandan D (2009) Industrialization, In R Kitchin & N Thrift, (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography , Oxford: Elsevier, volume 5, pp. 419-425.
ABSTRACT: This article (1) defines industrialisation and indicates ways in which it can be measured, (2) highlights the importance of the timing of industrialisation and the inherent limits to the proper scientific explanation of this phenomenon, (3) disentangles the often confused conceptual relation between industrialisation and capitalism, (4) explicates the causal links between industrialisation and modernisation, (5) undertakes a brief assessment of the relative costs and benefits of industrialisation, and (6) discloses the defining contours of scholarship on industrialisation in Anglo-American human geography and illustrates it with a recent attempt to integrate the field with the help of a master metaphor called ‘recursive cartographies’. Its portrayal of economic reality as interplay of legacies, rhythms, and events conveys the usefulness of spatial thinking in industrialisation research.

Increasingly, a range of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.). While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between – it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being framed as a problematic 'side-effect' of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the consequences for social equity, etc.).

The world confronts an interlinked ecological, economic, social, and political crisis crystallised in the issue of climate change. The failure of governments acting alone and through international institutions to effectively address the climate crisis has led to the growth of a distinct climate movement within civil society whose broad aim is to bring about the changes required to mitigate anthropogenic global warming.
This dissertation examines the role that ecosocialists are playing within the broader climate movement. Utilising a modified neo-Gramscian perspective that builds on the work of Robert Cox and incorporates the global political economy as a category within the Earth’s biosphere, the dissertation provides a critical ecological political economy account of the shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene in the context of post-war, US-led ‘neoliberal globalisation.’
Building on extensive literature reviews in a range of different discipline areas including the ecosocialist literature, the dissertation also draws on new primary data in the form of online audio-visual recordings of ecosocialist and scientific meetings and conferences and debates between ecosocialists published on websites. This material is supplemented by interviews with ecosocialists and climate activists undertaken as a participant observer in a number of climate movement-related protest events, including at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit.
The study confirms the value of ecosocialists’ analyses of the neoliberalising global political economy that global capitalism does, indeed, result in multiple interconnected ecological, economic, social, and political crises. Focusing specifically on the climate crisis, it describes the origins and operations of the primary institutions established to address anthropogenic global warming (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and analyses how the failure of governments working through these institutions to mitigate global warming resulted in the development and growth of the climate movement. Identifying a bifurcation of the movement into a reform-oriented climate action wing and a more system-critical climate justice wing after the 2007 Bali Climate Summit, the dissertation then studies the key role being played by ecosocialists in the movement’s more radical climate justice wing.
Using Gramscian concepts such as ‘war of position,’ ‘passive revolution’ and ‘trasformismo,’ the dissertation evaluates both the ecosocialist strengths and the challenges these actors face in participating in and influencing the broader climate movement.  The study concludes by describing some of the limitations of the approaches adopted in conducting this research, engaging in a personal reflection on the research project, and proposing suggestions for further research.

Extremely simple mathematical models are shown to be able to account for 99.2–99.91 per cent of all the variation in economic and demographic macrodynamics of the world for almost two millennia of its history. In this article we show that it is in no way coincidental that the world GDP dynamics in 1–1973 is approximated so well with a quadratic hyperbola, whereas the world population one does with a simple hyperbola. This appears to suggest a novel approach to the formation of the general theory of social macroevolution.

Office Hours: To be confirmed Course Description This course builds on themes introduced in Global Political Economy 1: History and Theory (POL 361 H1 F). It focuses on contemporary aspects of global economic governance, such as, capital flows, development, the environment, migration, and trade amongst others. Competing methods for analyzing the background and implications of regulatory and everyday policies are introduced. Students will carry out their own policy analysis in a term long group research project. Although part of the political science curriculum, the content covered is relevant to students of business and economics, sociology and history, amongst others. A grounding in international relations (POL 208 or equivalent) and familiarity with basic principles of economics (ECO 100 or 105 or equivalent) are prerequisites. The course is organized in the lecture and discussion format around required readings.

Interpretations of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) mostly agree that it is a policy opening that offers some remedies for China's economic and security challenges, as well as reflects China's increasing regional and global ambitions. This paper argues that the multiple drivers characterizing the BRI result from the multiple identities of China as a developing country struggling with several sources of instability and macroeconomic problems and, simultaneously, a regional and an emerging power, and finally a major global power with the significant economic capacity to shape the global economic order. The paper aims to substantiate the entanglement of the defensive and ambitious motivations behind the BRI by examining the background against which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership has suggested it. In so doing, it draws on Chinese official policy documents and statistics, speeches from Chinese leaders, and existing social-scientific research on the transformation of China's economic and political landscape in recent years.

This introduction frames the contributions that follow in a reflection on how the Japanese experience has been assimilated in US debates on economic policy, on the larger historical significance of the current slowdown of all advanced economies and how it relates to Hansen's original concerns about secular stagnation.

Since the 2000s, the rising power of emerging countries – China, East Asian countries and the BRICS in particular – changed the balance of power within the system of global economic governance. In an increasingly multipolar world, external policies of the main emerging countries are aimed more at legitimizing their status of regional powers rather than at promoting a truly democratic multilateralism. By doing so, the global shift in wealth puts the multilateralism to the test. Although emerging countries have claimed more room in the international economic organizations, many of their demands have not been heard by the Western traditional powers, which prompted them to launch their own initiatives. This creates an increasing fragmentation of international financial and trade rules, which makes more complex the political conditions for effectively regulate the international system. Although emerging countries have contributed to challenge the legitimacy of the global economic governance architecture, they have so far failed to change its nature or to make it more consistent.

This paper uses Leon Trotsky's theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) in order to transcend both globalising and metho-dologically nationalist theories of the global political economy. While uneven development theorists working in economic geography have demonstrated the logical corollary of capitalist development and the completion of the world market in the persistence of geographic uneven-ness, they fail to specify or problematise the role of states in this process. This leads to an ambiguity about why the states system has persisted under conditions of deep economic integration across states. State theorists, meanwhile, tend to exclude the world market and system of states as conditioning factors in state (trans)formation. For this reason, much state theory offers only a contingent account of the relationship between patterns of capital accumulation and states' institutional forms. Geopolitical economy, with its focus on the competitive 113 interrelations between states as constitutive of capitalist value relations, is well placed to transcend the pitfalls of these twin perspectives by closely engaging with the theory of UCD. UCD provides a nonreductionist means of integrating global processes of capital accumulation with their distinctive and peculiar national mediations. A research programme is developed to operationalise UCD for purposes of concrete research À something lacking from recent development in the field.

At a time when neoliberalism has become an accepted term in public debate to refer to the current state of modern societies and their political economies, Kean Birch critically analyses the conflicting theories that shape our understanding of ‘neoliberalism’.

With an ever-expanding variety of perspectives on the concept of neoliberalism, it is increasingly difficult to identify any commonalities. This book explores how different people understand neoliberalism, and the contradictions in thinking of neoliberalism as a market-based ethic, project, or order. Detailing the intellectual history of ‘neoliberal’ thought, the variety of critical approaches and the many analytical ambiguities, Kean Birch presents a new way to conceptualize contemporary political economy and offers potential avenues for future research through a judicious exploration of ‘neoliberal’ practices, processes, and institutions.

This work will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers to critically assess the concept of neoliberalism across many disciplines. The book will also serve as a general introduction to a wider audience interested in the term ‘neoliberalism’, its potential pitfalls, and its contested future.

Marx’s Capital influenced the intellectual and political debate of the last two centuries as few other works have done, and was also the object of innumerable attempts at refutation. One of the most common criticisms is that this work is valid only insofar as it is concerned with the first stages of ‘wild’ capitalist development in England and has been falsified by the evolution of mature capitalism in the West.

This book considers the contemporary relevance of Marx’s Capital, reading it in the light of his writings on colonialism – a large quantity of letters and articles on Ireland, India, China, Russia and the US – and shows that it examined capitalism, already in its first ‘English form’, as an ever-expanding international system that included a ‘centre’ and a ‘periphery’. This system is very similar to the one of the 20th and 21st centuries, whose laws of development – the law of impoverishment of the working class in particular – must be understood not in a national or European context, but in relation to capital’s process of worldwide expansion.

Only by analysing the antagonism between capital and wage labour on a global scale can we identify both the internal contradictions of the last phase of capitalist ‘globalisation’ and the causes of the recent economic crisis. These processes highlight the extraordinary anticipatory power of Marx’s Capital both with regard to its analysis and with regard to its perspectives of struggle and social emancipation.


--- Il capitale di Marx ha influenzato come poche altre opere il dibattito intellettuale e politico degli ultimi due secoli ed è stato anche oggetto di innumerevoli tentativi di confutazione. Uno dei più frequenti vuole che si tratti di un’opera valida perlopiù per l’industrialismo britannico selvaggio dei primordi, smentita in pieno dal capitalismo maturo in Occidente.

Questo saggio riconsidera l’attualità del Capitale attraverso un primo sistematico confronto con gli scritti sul colonialismo di Marx e Engels – una grande quantità di articoli e lettere su paesi come Russia, Cina, India, Irlanda, Stati Uniti – e dimostra come, già nella sua prima “forma britannica”, il capitalismo fosse un sistema mondiale e polarizzante, composto da un centro e dalle sue periferie. Un sistema molto simile a quello del XX e del XXI secolo, le cui leggi generali – a partire da quella del progressivo impoverimento della classe lavoratrice – non sono limitate alla dimensione europea ma sono da riferirsi al processo della sua espansione mondiale.

Solo ripercorrendo l’antagonismo fondamentale tra capitale e lavoro salariato è possibile individuare le contraddizioni interne dell’ultima fase della mondializzazione capitalistica e le cause della recente crisi economica: processi che rivelano la straordinaria forza anticipatrice del Capitale sia per l’analisi che per le prospettive di lotta e di emancipazione sociale.

Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies.