Leonard Seabrooke argues that they key to understanding 'change' in international finance in the last forty years rests with US structural power. He demonstrates for the reader how structural power draws from embedded state-societal relations and how the US promotion of 'direct financing' has encouraged Britain, Japan, and Germany to 'catch-up' to US-led innovations. In drawing considerably on multidisciplinary insight, the book will benefit all those who wish to understand more about 'change' in the international political economy.
This book examines global change from a dialectical perspective. Looking at global change in terms of unipolarisation in international security, globalisation in the world economy, and democratisation in global governance, the volume provides a refreshingly Japanese angle on addressing complex interplays between the social forces underlying these themes. The book is indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students or IR theory, international security, international political economy, and global governance, as well as American and Japanese foreign policy.
Globalization poses a formidable dilemma for the third-world state. While there are compelling external pressures to liberalize domestic economies, market-oriented reforms threaten the economic well-being of various societal groups. Popular resistance to these reforms has been strong throughout the developing world. This volume examines the political strategies employed by third world governments to maintain programs in the face of domestic opposition.
This is an edited collection of items on unionism worldwide, recognising the crisis that an informatised and globalised capitalism implies for work, workers and the trade-union movement. It considers radical alternatives for labour organisation and action in the 21st century. The book includes contributions by informed academics and unionists and proposes alternative union policies or models in relation to the working class(es), to women, democracy, ecology, internationalism.
This book is by Mohiuddin Alamgir and Poonam Arora with an introduction by Idriss Jazairy. This book from IFAD is an in-depth user-friendly study of global food security, focused at the household level, which includes dozens of revealing figures, charts and tables. This introduction to global food security issues provides an analysis of production and supply systems, factors contributing to domestic production growth and variability, the relationship between the macro-economic environment and food security, and options for the future. The authors illustrate how a micro-economic grassroots approach, rooted in the self-help capabilities of the poor, is not only feasible, but is in fact a productive means of enhancing food security. The text contains charts and tables and a food security index that ranks developing countries in terms of their vulnerability to hunger.
The author provides a clear portrait of the dramatic transformation of the global financial system in the late 20th century. Drawing on work by a prestigious and interdisciplinary set of specialists, this volume looks at the political economy of individual sectors of the financial services industry, at regional market patterns such as the EU and NAFTA, and at individual countries from the Asian NICs to Europe and the United States. The book captures the complexity and dynamics of a sector with vital implications for the future of global economic development.
Food aid is historically a major element of development aid to support longer-term development, and the primary response to help countries and peoples in crisis. This examination of food aid focuses in particular on institutional questions.
First published in 1997, this volume asks whether Africa’s future is necessarily rooted in peasant agriculture. The title of this book, Farewell to Farms, is deliberately intended to challenge the widely held view that Africa is the world’s reserve for peasant farming. African rural populations are themselves moving away from a reliance on agriculture. ‘De-agrarianisation’ takes the form of urban migration as well as the expansion of non-agricultural activities in rural areas providing new income sources, occupations and social identities for rural dwellers. Using recent continent-wide case study evidence, the authors assess the impact of de-agrarianisation on household welfare, business performance and national development. Their findings, which reveal new economic trajectories and social patterns emerging from a period of accelerated change, call into question assumptions about Africa’s future place in the world division of labour.
The diamond fields of Chiadzwa, among the world's largest sources of rough diamonds have been at the centre of struggles for power in Zimbabwe since their discovery in 2006. Against the backdrop of a turbulent political economy, control of Chiadzwa's diamonds was hotly contested. By 2007 a new case of 'blood diamonds' had emerged, in which the country's security forces engaged with informal miners and black market dealers in the exploitation of rough diamonds, violently disrupting local communities and looting a key national resource. The formalisation of diamond mining in 2010 introduced new forms of large-scale theft, displacement and rights abuses. Facets of Power is the first comprehensive account of the emergence, meaning and profound impact of Chiadzwa's diamonds. Drawing on new fieldwork and published sources, the contributors present a graphic and accessibly written narrative of corruption and greed, as well as resistance by those who have suffered at the hands of the mineral's secretive and violent beneficiaries. If the lessons of resistance have been mostly disheartening ones, they also point towards more effective strategies for managing public resources, and mounting democratic challenges to elites whose power is sustained by preying on them.
This collection examines the theoretical, analytical and political implications of global developments involving telecommunications and related technologies. The book's contributors - from fields such as economics, political science and communication studies - relate research on the political economy of communication with the work of international political economy scholars. The book stimulates cross-disciplinary debates among readers in these and other areas in order to, first, critically evaluate recent global developments involving communications and, second, to encourage the development of a more holistic and inclusive approach to these and related issues.
