Industrial convergence, globalization, and the persistence of the North-South divide

Arrighi, Giovanni; Silver, Beverly J.; Brewer, Benjamin D.

doi:10.1007/bf02686319

Cited by 262 publications

(214 citation statements)

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“…While the exceptional performance of East Asia has generated ongoing debate about the reasons for this divergence and the consequent disarticulation of the long wave rhythms of the world market, both the Cold War on whose frontlines they were situated, and transformations initiated by Japanese colonialism and sustained by the dirigiste policies of the post-colonial states, will necessarily have their place in any balanced account. Deliberate policies aimed at fostering pragmatic distortions of the market, and the imposition of high but flexible tariffs, make it clear however that their exceptional growth rates had little to do with neoliberal prescriptions for a night watchman state and for getting "prices right" (Wade 1996: 3-37;Arrighi 2007 Source: Arrighi, Silver, and Brewer (2003) China's high-speed growth since the eighties shares certain salient features with the wider regional pattern in East Asia, including an agrarian reform that did away with traditional landlordism; an abundant flow of cheap yet literate labor; a high rate of household savings; a strongly dirigiste state intervening in factor markets; and a prodigious export drive (Anderson 2010;Arrighi 2007). 15 The rise of China as the workshop of the world, together with the global crisis triggered by the financial collapse on Wall Street in 2008, has set-off a new scramble for Africa's resources -both mineral and farmland.…”

Section: The Long Downturn and Neo-liberal Globalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-Colonial Africa and the World Economy: The Long Waves of Uneven Development

Makki

2015

JWSR

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Post-Colonial Africa and the World Economy:The Long Waves of Uneven Development Keywords: post-colonial Africa, capitalist world economy, long-waves, uneven developmentThe fiftieth anniversary of the "Year of Africa," marking the beginning of the end of European colonial rule in the continent, was commemorated in 2010 with a euphoria and exuberance reminiscent of the formative years of decolonization in the early sixties. Coming on the crest of a commodities boom that has seen average growth rates at an all time high, the commemorations were accompanied by a widespread sense of an African renaissance, and Africa's statesmen used the occasion to project a redemptive narrative of seamless progress. These self-congratulatory pronouncements came a mere decade after the Western media had contemptuously dismissed Africa as a "hopeless continent" whose very name was synonymous with primordial backwardness, recurrent ethnic wars, and self-inflicted inexplicable sufferings.

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Section: The Long Downturn and Neo-liberal Globalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-Colonial Africa and the World Economy: The Long Waves of Uneven Development

Makki

2015

JWSR

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“…Other authorss, by contrast, maintain that this dominant perception insufficiently focuses on long-term stratification, the reproduction of hierarchy in global power relations, and the emergence of new inequalities (Cooper and Mo, 2013). World-systems scholars have found evidence confirming that, contrary to neo-liberal predictions, the processes associated with globalization reproduce existing inequalities in the world-system (e.g., Arrighi et al, 2003, Mahutga, 2006. Against the wide-spread allegations of large-scale change, the counterargument holds that globalization does not fundamentally challenge inequalities and in fact, may exacerbate them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An often heard argument holds that globalization, or political and economic integration into the system, both directly and indirectly benefits countries' global economic and political positions, and thus undermines stratification in the system (e.g., Friedman, 2005;Zakaria, 2008). By contrast, a considerable number of scholars, especially world-systems scholars, contest the above perspective that globalization undermines the stratified nature of the global system, and argue that it might in fact even reinforce systemic inequality (e.g., Arrighi et al, 2003;Clark and Beckfield, 2009;Mahutga, 2006;Wallerstein, 1974).The dominant argument stemming from neo-liberal economics holds that growing interdependence through political and economic integration underpins development opportunities and economic growth (e.g., Dollar and Kraay, 2002;Dreher, 2006;Sala-i-Martin, 2002), whether it is because of greater trade openness (Frankel and Romer, 1999), economic liberalization (Collins and Bosworth, 1996; Sachs and Warner, 1997), or increased financial flows. The emergence of the new international division of labor (NIDL) (Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye, 1980) and the expansion of neoliberal trade policy since the 1980s is especially believed to benefit developing countries.…”

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“…Wallerstein (2000,2005) contends that what appears to be sudden, globalization-induced change, in fact reflects a combination of long term cyclical rhythms and secular trends inherent to the systemic mechanisms that underlie the workings of the world-system. Arrighi et al (2003), Mahutga (2006), and Mahutga and Smith (2011) focus on countries' production processes to study the impact of globalization on structural inequality and economic growth in the world-system. Arrighi et al (2003) find that the mechanisms of both structural and ideological globalization (of the 1980s and 1990s) underlie the reproduction of the North-South income divide.…”

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The Rising Powers and Globalization: Structural Change to the Global System Between 1965 and 2005

Jacobs

Rossem

2016

JWSR

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This article critically assesses the increasingly prevalent claims of rapidly changing global power relations under influence of the 'rising powers' and 'globalization.' Our main contention is that current analyses of countries' degree of global power (especially for the BRICS) has been dominated by the control over resources approach that, although it gauges power potential, it insufficiently accounts for how this potential is converted into actual global might. By drawing on a unique and extensive dataset comprised of a wide array of political, economic, and military networks for a vast number of countries between 1965 and 2005, we aim to 1) reassess alleged changes in the structure of the world-system since 1965 and 2) analyze whether or not these changes can be attributed to globalization. We pay attention to the trajectories of the BRICS and to the possibly divergent structural evolutions of the political and economic dimensions that constitute the system. Our results show that despite a certain degree of power convergence between countries at the sub-top of the system, divergence continues to take place between the most and least powerful, and stratification is reproduced. Globalization is further shown to exacerbate this trend, though its effect differs on the political and economic dimensions of the system. Though the traditional 'core powers' might have to share their power with newcomer China in the future, this hardly heralds a new age in which the global system of power relations are converging to the extent that stratification is being undermined. KeywordsRecent developments have created the impression that the global power structure is shifting; new countries appear to be rising to prominence in the global system, while the traditional powers are stagnating or even declining. The economic and social transformations in the traditionally dominant Western powers, combined with the rise of the BRICS countries, including the spectacular rise of China, suggest that the era in which Western nations dominated the global system may be coming to an end, and that in the near future these countries may have to share power with these new rising powers (e.g., Cooper and Flemes, 2013;Layne, 2009). Globalization is often identified as the primary cause of this alleged structural change (Friedman, 2005;Zakaria, 2008).Globalization is employed here to denote a transformative process in which countries become more integrated and interdependent in the economic as well as political, social, and cultural subsystems. This process is said to cause countries to increasingly lose autonomy, to become more affected by domestic affairs in other countries, and to be more dependent on their relations with other countries. Scholarly communities and popular opinion contend that global power relations have changed irrevocably under influence of the globalization process and the subsequent rise of a number of non-traditional powers (e.g., Cooper and Flemes, 2013;Friedman, 2005;Zakaria, 2008). Other authorss, by contrast, ma...

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Globalization and Inequality

Albrecht¹,

Korzeniewicz²

2012

The Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization

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The United Nations' 2005 Report on the World Social Situation: The Inequality Predicament opens with the claim that “globalization has helped to accentuate trends that show the wealthiest 20 per cent of the planet accounting for 86 per cent of all private consumption and the poorest accounting for just above 1 per cent”; the first area demanding “urgent attention” in the report is “worldwide asymmetries deriving from globalization” (United Nations 2005: 6, 9). On the other hand, albeit writing about a previous wave of globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Williamson (1997: 405) concluded that “globalization was the critical factor promoting economic convergence” not only between nations, but within nations as well. These two examples illustrate deep disagreements about the impact of globalization on inequality.

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Industrial convergence, globalization, and the persistence of the North-South divide

Cited by 262 publications

References 21 publications

Post-Colonial Africa and the World Economy: The Long Waves of Uneven Development

Post-Colonial Africa and the World Economy: The Long Waves of Uneven Development

The Rising Powers and Globalization: Structural Change to the Global System Between 1965 and 2005

Globalization and Inequality

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