The Global Political Economy

Mayıs ayında dünya ekonomisi açısından iki kritik gelişme oldu. İlki 26-27 Mayıs'ta Japonya'da G7 zirvesinin 42.'sinin toplanmasıydı. Zirveye damgasını vuran temel konu küresel ekonominin giderek kötüleşen seyri idi. Hatta Japonya başbakanı Abe, küresel ekonominin yeni bir Lehman Brothers çöküşünün eşiğinde olabileceğini ileri sürdü. Mayıs ayındaki bir diğer önemli gelişme OECD tarafından yayımlanan küresel üretkenlik raporu idi. Rapora göre 1970'li yıllardan itibaren erken kapitalistleşmiş ülkelerde üretkenlik artış hızı düşüyor! Bu yazıda öncelikle G7 zirvesi ışığında küresel krizdeki güncel gelişmeleri ve merkez ülkelerde çatallaşmaya başlayan politika tepkilerini değerlendirip, ardından kapitalizmin tılsımlı gücü olan üretkenlik artışında yaşanan tıkanıklıklara krizin derinleşmesi bağlamında değineceğim.

In recent years considerable attention has been devoted to the evaluation of effective protection afforded by national tariff structures. The concept of effective protection is based on the notion that protection of value added, rather than the duty on the product itself, is the primary ...

... Thus, for ' Smith says that "a real bill of exchange [is] drawn by a real creditor upon a real debtor, and . . . , as soon as it becomes due, is really paid by that debtor" (p. 288). According to Mints (1945, p. 9), a critic of the real-bills doctrine, Smith provided the most elegant statement ...

Critics of the global debt regime have long since demanded a state insolvency procedure. When the IMF in 2001 proposed a Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism, there was widespread astonishment that it had seemingly adopted the position of the critics. However , there was no majority in the board of directors and the SDRM proposal failed in 2003. The article now discusses the ability of several theoretical approaches to explain the proposal and its failure, highlighting the different implicit conceptions of power. It concludes that different approaches show different strengths, that neither discursive nor structural power must be neglected, and that limiting the influence of financial markets is a crucial prerequisite for enlarging the scope of action of political actors.

2016’nın Ocak ayının ikinci yarısında Davos’ta gerçekleşen Dünya Ekonomik Forumu toplantısı, 2016’nın ilk günlerinde dünya genelinde yaşanan borsa çöküşlerinin gölgesinde yapıldı. Zaten forumun beş ana temasından üçü doğrudan küresel ekonomik krizle ilgiliydi. Kapitalizmin geleceğine dair umutları diri tutmanın temel amaç olduğu Davos zirvesinde dahi küresel krizin bu denli önemli bir yer kaplaması, meselenin ne denli ciddi olduğunu gösteren bir işaret. Bu yazıda 2008’de ABD’deki dev yatırım bankalarından biri olan Lehman Brothers’ın batmasıyla patlak veren ve halen süren küresel ekonomik krizin ana hatlarıyla gelişimi ve 2016 itibariyle beklenen güncel gelişmeler konu ediliyor. Bu bağlamda Türkiye ekonomisinin 2016 serüveni de kısaca ele alınacak. Bu durum tespiti için bir adım geriye çekilip 2008 öncesini kısaca hatırlamak gerek.

Üye ülkelerin maliye bakanları ve merkez bankası başkanlarının katıldığı ve geçtiğimiz hafta Shanghai'da gerçekleştirilen G20 zirvesine, IMF'nin önerdiği mali genişleme planı damgasını vurdu. Plan reddedildi. Ancak bu tartışma, 2008'den itibaren süren krizde, politika yapıcıların alet çantasındaki araçların birer birer tükendiğini göstermesi açısından önemli idi.

The following policy brief looks into the manner in which civil society organisations in Germany and Europe organised themselves to express displeasure against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being negotiated by the U.S. and the E.U. The policy brief asks whether the successful organisation of civil society (between 150 000 and 250 000 demonstrators) presents lessons for practitioners and non practitioners of foreign policy in South Africa.

The Dialectics of Inquiry Across the Historical Social Sciences turns conventional global-historical analysis on its head, demonstrating, first, that local events cannot be derived—logically or historically—from large-scale, global-historical structures and processes and, second, that it is these structures and processes that, in fact, emerge from our analysis of local events.  This is made evident via an analysis of three disparate events, the New York City Draft Riots, AIDS in Mozambique, and a 2007 flood in central Uruguay.  In each case, Baronov chronicles how expressions of human agency at the level of those caught up in each event give form and substance to various abstract global-historical concepts—such as slavery in the Americas, global capitalist production, and colonial/postcolonial Africa.  Underlying this repositioning of the local and the ephemeral is an immanent, phenomenological analysis that illustrates how mere transient events are the progenitors of otherwise abstract, global-historical concepts.  Traversing the intersections of human agency and structural determinism, Baronov deftly retains the nuance and serendipity of everyday life, while deploying this nuance and serendipity to further embellish our understanding of those enduring global-historical structures and processes that shape large-scale, long-term, historical accounts of social and cultural change across the historical social sciences.

CHAPTER 8 Sweetening the Pot: How American Sugar Buys Protection OMER GOKCEKUSa,*,JUSTIN KNOWLESb, and EDWARD TOWERc aJohn C ... Araiza, Charles Cording, Julia Cormano, John Brehm, Erin Fletcher, Paul Gronke, Craufurd Goodwin, Paul Izzo, Bill Kaempfer ...

... University of New Mexico Jack Hirshleifer University of California, Los Angeles ... Even under the more onerous sealed-bid (simultaneous play) protocol, the experimental subjects were able to make some partial progress toward the theoretical ideal. I. Introduction ...

... of nonpecuniary "liquidity services." It is shown that if the government acts like a competitive producer of these services, as would be dictated by a public choice process which reflects efficiency criteria, then the net-wealth effect of government bond issue would be zero on this ...

Remy Davison
Jean Monnet Chair in Politics & Economics
Monash University
© 2015. Published at The Conversation, 9 September, 2015.  Republished in J. Watson (ed.), Politics, policy and the chance of change, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015). Link: http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/john-watson/politics-policy-and-the-chance-of-change-the-conversation-2015-yearbook-9780522869811.aspx

Link: https://theconversation.com/the-quantitative-easing-experiment-is-ending-in-global-recession-47104

US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi have seen quantitative easing pay off, but what about on the way out?

Recession. Recession. Recession. In Canada, Belgium, Czech Republic, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Taiwan, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Brazil and Russia. They’ve all either had recent recessions, are in deep danger, or have one now. Who’s next?

Not us. We hope. Australia has dodged the recession bullet for 24 years. But economic pessimists abound, predicting bust anytime soon.

The BRICS aren’t looking too flash. Brazil and Russia are in recession. China’s stock market has wobbled disconcertingly. Even the US$24 billion the panicked Chinese central bank threw at the markets wasn’t enough to stop Beijing’s brokers from running for their financial lives.

Speaking of BRICS, South Africa is also in deep, deep trouble. Only India appears oblivious to the carnage wracking world markets.

Canada has experienced five consecutive months of economic contraction, although it has continued to add jobs, haphazardly, fuelled by the credit cards of the citizens of the Great White North. But it was the global slump in oil prices, caused by the US shale oil glut and a refusal by Saudi-led OPEC to cut production that has caused black gold prices to plummet. That’s why Canada is in recession.

Got the picture? Commodity-dependent economies are vulnerable. Once the Beijing bubble began to burst, Chinese demand for iron ore – which has driven the flood of wealth into Australia for two decades – forced a rapid adjustment, leaving iron ore prices falling lower in the final two quarters of 2015.

Iron ore prices are currently around US$56 per tonne, but markets are predicting sub-US$40 prices, if Chinese growth and demand continue to sink. BHP has seen its full-year profit fall 52%, as China, its biggest market, undergoes a serious slowdown.

Commodity-driven economies are not the only victims of this global downturn. Japan, which emerged from recession in the first quarter of 2015, is teetering on the brink once again. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics”, once praised for its debt-driven mass infusions of capital, has produced a sake-driven hangover. But all eyes are on China right now: will it be a soft landing? Or bust?

China has integrated with the global economy, but done so to reinforce the power of the state. This combination of transnational integration and state capitalism shapes its international behavior. While integrating into the global system and its governing institutions, China’s party-state favors sovereignty as the core principle of international relations, supports military strengthening, and demands recognition on equal terms with the West. Acceptance of the international system comes with increased demands upon it.

This article analyses the re-emergence of the working poor phenomenon in Western Europe. Critically engaging with comparative welfare regimes literature on in-work poverty (IWP), it argues that an international political economy (IPE) perspective is key to understanding the economic and international dimensions of IWP. By focusing on three countries belonging to different welfare regimes, namely Britain, Germany and Italy, the article examines the relationship between production restructuring, IWP trends and the nature of work, with particular attention to working-hour dynamics. It argues that the increasing IWP observed in these countries since the outbreak of the global economic crisis is linked to longterm trends in the IPE and to the growth of new competitors, mainly from emerging countries.

Edited by Tina M Chen and David S. Churchill
This volume considers the confluence of World History and historical materialism, with the following guiding question in mind: given developments in the field of historical materialism concerned with the intersection of race, gender, labour, and class, why is it that within the field of World History, historical materialism has been marginalized, precisely as World History orients toward transnational socio-cultural phenomenon, micro-studies, or global histories of networks? Answering this question requires thinking, in an inter-related manner, about both the development of World History as a discipline, and the place of economic determinism in historical materialism. This book takes the position that historical materialism (as applied to the field of World History) needs to be more open to the methodological diversity of the materialist tradition and to refuse narrowly deterministic frameworks that have led to marginalization of materialist cultural analysis in studies of global capitalism. At the same time, World History needs to be more self-critical of the methodological diversity it has welcomed through a largely inclusionary framework that allows the material to be considered separately from cultural, social, and intellectual dimensions of global processes.

In Global Political Economy and the Modern State System Tobias ten Brink contributes to an understanding of the modern state system, its conflicts, and its transformation. In contrast to the political attractiveness of optimistic theoretical approaches to globalisation, this book demonstrates how an analytical approach rooted in Global Political Economy (GPE) helps to explain both the tendencies towards integration and towards rivalry in international relations. By way of a historical reconstruction of different ‘world order’ phases in the twentieth century, ten Brink analyses multiple, phase-specific variations of socioeconomic and geopolitical conflicts that are significant for the modern capitalist world system.

The Financial Stability Forum (FSF)—now rebranded as the Financial Stability Board (FSB)—has become a focal point for financial regulatory initiatives in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Despite its central status, the body has received little attention from scholars. This is particularly striking both in light of the increasing centrality of the FSF/FSB within the realm of financial regulatory governance and the body's unusual structure and composition. Indeed, the creation and design of the FSF pose an empirical puzzle: what explains the creation of a new, informal and loosely structured institution and the centre of a financial regulatory governance regime? At the time of the Forum's creation, the broader financial architecture was marked by significant institutional density, with a large number of international organisations engaged in governance activities. This paper argues that it is precisely the structure and activities of these existing institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Joint Forum on Financial Conglomerates, which account for the creation and design of the FSF, and points to the need for scholars to take seriously the role of organisations operating within institutionally dense spaces.

""‘For too long, the rule of law has been assumed as opposed to rigorously interrogated. Christopher May’s excellent study not only draws attention to this oversight, but also lucidly demonstrates how and why the rule of law rule of law has achieved the status of common sense of global politics. For anyone interested in the legalization of global politics as well as its social, political and ideological consequences, this superb book is essential reading.’
– Susanne Soederberg, Queen’s University, Canada

This timely book explores the complexities of the rule of law – a well-used but perhaps less well understood term - to explain why it is so often appealed to in discussions of global politics. Ranging from capacity building and the role of the World Bank to the discourse(s) of lawyers and jurisprudential critiques, it seeks to introduce non-lawyers to the important and complex political economy of the rule of law.

In accessible terms, Christopher May argues that we can no longer merely use the idea of the rule of law without question but rather must appreciate its multifaceted and contested character if we are to begin to understand how and why it is now seen as a ‘good thing’ across the political spectrum. He expertly examines the problems encountered by rule of law programmes in post-conflict and developing countries, as well as presenting the range of contested meanings of the term. The author also considers the possibility of establishing a pluralistic account of the rule of law and investigates the plausibility of an international rule of law.

By building on and extending debates in socio-legal studies about the social role of law, and dealing with issues largely absent from international political economy this book will be of great interest to socio – legal scholars and political economists. It also presents an overarching analysis of the manner in which politics and law interact that will be of great value to political scientists and development economists. ""

The recovery in advanced economies is now exhibiting several signs of fragility and the medium-term growth prospects for
these economies also look difficult. Could developing economies “switch over” to become locomotives in the global economy,
providing a countervailing force against downward trends? The view taken here says, yes, as long as appropriate domestic
policies and reforms are pursued in developing countries

The European Union and Mexico have established a Strategic Partnership to provide themselves an adequate framework of dialogue and cooperation on important bilateral and global issues. One of them is the analysis of reforming the International Financial Institutions. At the same time, both actors are members of the G20, which has the forementioned reform as part of its agenda. These developments are framed in an international effort of consolidating Global Governance, where Mexico and the European Union have shown their interest to support it. However, the current economic crisis is determining not only the achievement of this goal but also the position on how to reform the international institutions.

This study reviews the perception of Global Governance in Mexico and the European Union, their participation in the G20 and the possible positions on reforming the International Financial Institutions.