Documents globalization 2 143 results

"An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource--microchip technology--with the United States and China increasingly in conflict. You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil--the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything--from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market--runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower. Now, America's edge is slipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and, above all, China. Today, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity. Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America's victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. But here, too, China is catching up, with its chip-building ambitions and military modernization going hand in hand. America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, contributing not only to a worldwide chip shortage but also a new Cold War with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap. Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War shows that, to make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips."

"In 1933, Keynes reflected on the crisis of the Great Depression that arose from individualistic capitalism: 'It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous - and it doesn't deliver the goods ... But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.' We are now in a similar state of perplexity, wondering how to respond to the economic problems of the world.
Martin Daunton examines the changing balance over ninety years between economic nationalism and globalization, explaining why one economic order breaks down and how another one is built, in a wide-ranging history of the institutions and individuals who have managed the global economy. In 1933, the World Monetary and Economic Conference brought together the nations of the world: it failed. Trade and currency warfare led to economic nationalism and a turn from globalization that culminated in war. During the Second World War, a new economic order emerged - the embedded liberalism of Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development - and the post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. These institutions and their rules created a balance between domestic welfare and globalization, complemented by a social contract between labour, capital and the state to share the benefits of economic growth.
Yet this embedded liberalism reflected the interests of the 'west' in the Cold War: in the 1970s, it faced collapse, caused by its internal weaknesses and the breakdown of the social contract, and was challenged by the Third World as a form of neo-colonialism. It was succeeded by neoliberalism, financialisation and hyper-globalization. In 2008, the global financial crash exposed the flaws of neoliberalism without leading to a fundamental change. Now, as leading nations are tackling the fall-out from Covid-19 and the threats of inflation, food security and the existential risk of climate change, Martin Daunton calls for a return to a globalization that benefits many of the world's poor and a fairer capitalism that delivers domestic welfare and equality.
The Economic Government of the World is the first history to show how trade, international monetary relations, capital mobility and development impacted on and influenced each other. Martin Daunton places these economic relations in the geo-political context of the twentieth century, and considers the importance of economic ideas and of political ideology, of electoral calculations and institutional design. The book rests on extensive archival research to provide a powerful analysis of the origins of our current global crisis, and suggests how we might build a fairer international order."

"The enlargements of the Single Market in 2004 and 2007, have fundamentally altered shipbuilding employers' production and staffing possibilities. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Norwegian shipbuilders began to offshore hull production and outfitting to countries in central and eastern Europe (the CEE countries) and eventually acquired several Romanian yards. From 2004, Norwegian yards also hired large amounts of CEE workers through temporary agencies and subcontractors. Transforming the mode of production and staffing in the yards, this two-way mobility has been driven by opportunities to increase production, overcome labour shortages, reduce labour and production costs, and adjust more flexibly to fluctuations in markets and production. This enabled the shipbuilding industry to handle a boom in production of offshore supply ships and the ensuing bust after the oil price dived in 2014.
The shipyard industry is part of the Norwegian core industrial relations system, with strong trade unions and employers' associations. As wages and labour costs are among the highest in Europe, the yards' competitiveness depends on high quality and productivity.
The dual mobility and outsourcing of work has led to a dualisation of the workforce, and declining employment among local blue-collar workers. Due to numerous examples of inferior wages and conditions among the subcontracted CEE-workforce, the unions in 2008 won through with demands for extension of minimum terms in the collective agreement, fueling tension and legal strife between the social partners. Eventually further re-regulation and enforcement measures were enacted, strengthening the rights and remuneration of migrant workers.
Our overall findings suggest that the two-way mobility of production factors can generate gains both for western and eastern yards and workers. However, the dual mobility has contributed to erosion of the industry's national skill base and establishment of a flexible segment of migrant workers who are not incorporated in the model of organised labour relations, lacking institutional representation and voice.
Looking ahead, the ongoing turn towards the production of more technology-intensive ‘green' vessels will require upgrading of qualifications, calling for more investment in vocational training, skill formation and long-term recruitment."

"The purpose of this paper is to develop a political economy approach able to examine the multiple, global crises of our times, a crisis of global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global ecology. Based on the philosophy of internal relations, I make three claims in this paper. First, we need a historical materialist approach to comprehend the historical specificity of capitalism. Second, we need an expanded conceptualization of capitalist accumulation, understanding that capitalist reproduction depends not only on the exploitation of wage labour in the sphere of production, but equally on different forms of expropriation in the sphere of social reproduction. Third, to reveal the internal relations between these different crises, we need to focus on class struggle in our analysis, defining both class struggle and labour movement broadly when doing so."
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

"Outlining the economic significance of the role of global supply chains (GSCs) in the organisation of the global economy, this paper initially presents some indications of health and safety outcomes in low- and middle-income counties (LMICs) where GSCs source much of the production destined for use in advanced economies. It goes on to discuss the operational dynamics of these chains and the corporate priorities that they reflect, which, it argues, do little to improve the poor work health and safety (WHS) outcomes in LMICs. It then examines evidence for the effectiveness of various private and public regulatory strategies that are claimed to bring about improved health and safety practices and outcomes among GSC suppliers in these countries. The paper critically evaluates this evidence and argues that, while there may be some examples of effective strategies and regulatory practices in particular contexts, their overall influence remains limited. It identifies and discusses the principal reasons for these limitations and concludes that the global regulation of conditions of labour – including WHS – at the end of GSCs falls well short of universal best practice and is, more generally, insufficient to counter the economic forces working against the maintenance of adequate standards of worker protection."

"Taking Back Control? examines the ongoing tug of war between the forces of globalism and those of democracy, between centralisation and decentralisation, and between the unifica­tion and the differentiation of states and state systems. On this territory are fought the defining geopolitical struggles of our era, which will determine the advance of global capitalism and shape the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.
The neoliberal revolution of the 1990s gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralisation and unification of states and state systems. This was the "New World Order" proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But it proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combina­tion of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy, and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalisation called forward various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward trans­fer of state authority in its tracks.
Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, Wolfgang Streeck formulates a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, he discusses the potential outlines of a state system that allows for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation­states."

"The continuing advance of globalization, together with deepening European integration, has increased the significance of the transnational level of trade union organization and action. This study offers a comprehensive overview of the development, structure, and policies of global and European trade union federations to serve as a reference work on all the key trade union movements operating globally and in Europe. It presents an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing these organizations and their strategic and policy responses. As a handbook, this volume provides extensive and systematically presented data on transnational sectoral trade union federations. Applying an analogous structure in the presentation of both global and European levels, the study features extensive organizational profiles, portraits, and overviews. This empirical material serves to reveal recent innovations in cross-border policy instruments and strategic approaches since the 1990s. The changing profiles of international trade unions - as measured against a set of functional criteria drawn from political science - and key developments in transnational trade union activity since the start of the new century are also investigated."