The unprecedented palm-oil boom, meanwhile, has enriched and emboldened many of the region’s largest corporations, which have begun using their newfound power and wealth to suppress critics, abuse workers and acquire more land to produce oil.
During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
Economists have put forward a range of explanations for why inequality has in fact been increasing in many developed countries. Some argue that advances in technology have spurred the demand for skilled labor relative to unskilled labor, thereby depressing the wages of the latter. Yet that alone cannot explain why even skilled labor has done so poorly over the past two decades, why average wages have done so badly and why matters are so much worse in the U.S. than in other developed nations. Changes in technology are global and should affect all advanced economies in the same way. Other economists blame globalization itself, which has weakened the power of workers. Firms can and do move abroad unless demands for higher wages are curtailed. But again, globalization has been integral to all advanced economies. Why is its impact so much worse in the U.S.?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-american-economy-is-rigged/
Natural resource revenues have also been linked to slow economic growth rates, inequality, and poverty. One culprit may be the so-called “Dutch disease,” whereby resource revenues raise a country’s exchange rate, hurting competitiveness in non-resource sectors.
This week, back in 1933, a team of American Geologists from Standard Oil Company in California arrived on the shore of a small, sparsely populated Middle Eastern country called Saudi Arabia. Today on the Indicator: what the team of geologists found and how it changed the economy of a country and the global economy for better … and for worse.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/09/24/651231709/saudi-arabia-the-paradox-of-plenty
Trade deals were hammered out in secret by multinationals at the expense of workers and citizens. Benefits must be shared if the global economy is to work
The US basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation. In some of these institutions – for example, the International Monetary Fund – the US still has veto power, despite America’s diminished role in the global economy (a role which Trump seems determined to diminish still further).
The repercussions of the post-national ideology that (re-)emerged in the 1980s, and then became all-pervasive in the 1990s and 2000s, are still being felt today. Conventional wisdom holds that that globalisation and the internationalisation of finance has ended the era of nation-states and their capacity to pursue policies that are not in accord with the diktats of global capital. But does the evidence support the assertion that national sovereignty, which so often throughout the twentieth century has been wrongly proclaimed dead, has truly reached the end of its days?
China is undertaking massive infrastructure projects across the world and loaning billions of dollars to developing nations. On paper, the objective is to build a vast trade network, but is China also exporting authoritarianism?
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