This book explores tensions in global trade by examining the role of experts in generating, disseminating and legitimating knowledge about the possibilities of trade to work for global development. To this end, contributors assess authoritative claims on knowledge. They also consider structural features that uphold trade experts' monopoly over knowledge, such as expert language and legal and economic expertise. The chapters collectively explore the tensions between actors who seek to effect change and those who work to uphold the status quo, exacerbate asymmetries, and reinforce the dominant narrative of the global trade regime. The book addresses the following key overarching research questions: Who is considered to be a trade expert and how does one become a knowledge producer in global trade? How do experts acquire, disseminate and legitimate knowledge? What agendas are advanced by expert knowledge? How does the discourse generated within trade expertise serve to close off alternative institutional pathways and modes of thinking? What potential exists for the emergence of more emancipatory global trade policies from contemporary developments in the field of trade expertise? This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of IPE, Trade Politics, International Relations, and International Organizations.
The development of international trade theory has created a wide array of different theories, concepts and results. Nevertheless, trade theory has been split between partial and conflicting representations of international e- nomic interactions. Diverse trade models have co-existed but not in a structured relationship with each other. Economic students are introduced to international economic interactions with severally incompatible theories in the same course. In order to overcome incoherence among multiple theories, we need a general theoretical framework in a unified manner to draw together all of the disparate branches of trade theory into a single - ganized system of knowledge. This book provides a powerful – but easy to operate - engine of analysis that sheds light not only on trade theory per se, but on many other dim- sions that interact with trade, including inequality, saving propensities, education, research policy, and knowledge. Building and analyzing various tractable and flexible models within a compact whole, the book helps the reader to visualize economic life as an endless succession of physical ca- tal accumulation, human capital accumulation, innovation wrought by competition, monopoly and government intervention. The book starts with the traditional static trade theories. Then, it develops dynamic models with capital and knowledge under perfect competition and/or monopolistic competition. The uniqueness of the book is about modeling trade dyn- ics.
Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World explores the links between trade, empire, exploration, and global information trans>fer during the early modern period. By charting how the leaders, members, employees, and supporters of different trading companies gathered, pro>cessed, employed, protected, and divulged intelligence about foreign lands, peoples, and markets, this book throws new light on the internal uses of information by corporate actors and the ways they engaged with, relied on, and supplied various external publics. This ranged from using secret knowl>edge to beat competitors, to shaping debates about empire, and to forcing Europeans to reassess their understandings of specific environments due to contacts with non-European peoples. Reframing our understanding of trading companies through the lens of travel literature, this volume brings together thirteen experts in the field to facilitate a new understanding of how European corporations and empires were shaped by global webs of information exchange
“A superb new understanding of the dynamic economy as a learning society, one that goes well beyond the usual treatment of education, training, and R&D.”—Robert Kuttner, author of The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy Since its publication Creating a Learning Society has served as an effective tool for those who advocate government policies to advance science and technology. It shows persuasively how enormous increases in our standard of living have been the result of learning how to learn, and it explains how advanced and developing countries alike can model a new learning economy on this example. Creating a Learning Society: Reader’s Edition uses accessible language to focus on the work’s central message and policy prescriptions. As the book makes clear, creating a learning society requires good governmental policy in trade, industry, intellectual property, and other important areas. The text’s central thesis—that every policy affects learning—is critical for governments unaware of the innovative ways they can propel their economies forward. “Profound and dazzling. In their new book, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald study the human wish to learn and our ability to learn and so uncover the processes that relate the institutions we devise and the accompanying processes that drive the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge . . . This is social science at its best.”—Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge “An impressive tour de force, from the theory of the firm all the way to long-term development, guided by the focus on knowledge and learning . . . This is an ambitious book with far-reaching policy implications.”—Giovanni Dosi, director, Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna “[A] sweeping work of macroeconomic theory.”—Harvard Business Review
This title provides a comprehensive introduction to the key issues in trade and liberalization of services. Providing a useful overview of the players involved, the barriers to trade, and case studies in a number of service industries, this is ideal for policymakers and students interested in trade.
Global value chains (GVCs) have driven dramatic expansions in trade, productivity, and economic growth in developing countries. This book examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on GVCs and explores whether they can continue to be a driver of trade and development. The report reviews previous crises and what these tell us about the resilience of GVC firms to shocks. It examines the observed impact of COVID-19 on trade during the sharp global recession of 2020. It summarizes discussions with GVC firms on the impacts of, and their responses to, the COVID shock. GVCs showed surprising resilience, but the rapid recovery raised new issues with supply chains. The book then explores simulations from a global economic model of the potential longer-term impacts of COVID-19 on developing countries and other key factors shaping the global economy, including the evolving role of China, increasing trade restrictions and policy responses to global warming. The analysis shows that while there are risks associated with GVCs, especially those concentrated around key nodes and where opportunities to find alternative suppliers or buyers are limited, there are mechanisms by which GVCs maintain trade relationships during a crisis, paving the way for a strong trade-led recovery. Measures are identified that can enhance the resilience of GVCs in low-income countries. This report finds that policies that maintain and enhance trade can contribute toward crisis management and recovery. Attempts to reshore production would make all countries worse off, including those that implement them, and could drive 52 million people, mainly in Africa, into extreme poverty. Measures to meet climate change commitments will have more profound impacts, leading to a shift away from carbon-intensive GVCs, while new opportunities for trade will arise in GVCs that are less carbon intensive.
A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. Hanushek and Woessmann contend that the cognitive skills of the population—which they term the “knowledge capital” of a nation—are essential to long-run prosperity. Hanushek and Woessmann subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the “Latin American growth puzzle” and the “East Asian miracle” can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance.
Globalization and its relation to poverty reduction and development is not well understood. The book identifies the ways in which globalization can overcome poverty or make it worse. The book defines the big historical trends, identifies main global flows - trade, finance, aid, migration, and ideas - and examines how each can contribute to undermine economic development. By considering what helps and what does not, the book presents policy recommendations to make globalization more effective as a vehicle for shared growth and prosperity. It will be of interest to students, researchers and anyone interested in the effects of globalization in today's economy and in international development issues.
The first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge. In this groundbreaking book, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.