Handbook on International Political Economy

The following sections are included:

• Foreword

• Contents

• List of Contributors

International political economy (IPE) is a very diverse discipline. It covers a wide range of issues not only to do with the analytical discourses currently used to describe and explain (and prescribe policy for) its many and varied concerns, but also to do with the history of the discipline per se. The most significant aspect of contemporary IPE is the way it exemplifies the industrial/scientific revolution and its technological consequences. This revolution has made — and continues to make — radical changes to global production and consumption, finance and trade, management and work, overdevelopment and underdevelopment, global gender balances and imbalances, and environmental sustainability and distress…

As noted in the first chapter, international political economics (IPE) is a highly complex discipline, drawing not only from the fields of politics and economics, but also those as varied as philosophy, history and anthropology. This makes the task of producing a brief and yet coherent history of it an extremely challenging one…

The industrial revolution was both a shattering and a creative event. It is still shattering and recreating our lives. It is also relatively recent…

The remarkable growth in the extent of international economic integration in recent decades has far outpaced the existing capacity for global economic governance. The intensification of globalisation has increased the inadequacy of the institutions of global economic governance and their policies. This became especially apparent during the Global Financial Crisis, also known as the Great Recession, which began most notably in 2008 and from which the destructive effects still continue. The crisis showed that contemporary national and international economic institutions could not achieve stability let alone other goals. In fact, some of the policies that multilateral economic institutions have been promoting over the last thirty years contributed to the contagion which spread globally from the US where the crisis began. The frequency and speed with which economic problems in one country have spilled over into others indicates the need to strengthen international institutions sufficiently to ensure that they are capable of taking swift, effective corrective action…

Economic production is fundamental to the operation of any economic system, serving to transform economic 'inputs' such as raw materials and labour hours into other more highly valued goods or services. Production is also a dimension of economic life in which most individuals participate directly in the form of paid or unpaid work, with significant and immediate consequences for their quality of life. It is perhaps not surprising then that the social organisation of production is one of the most controversial subjects within the field of international political economy…

Over the past decade or more, a great deal of attention has been focused on the rise of China and India, especially the economic and security dimensions of their emergence as significant players on the world stage. One of the motivations behind this growing interest in the two Asian countries is a desire to understand the impact that their dynamic economic growth is having on the international political economy. Some in the developed world worry that the rapid economic growth in the world's two most populous nations, and their voracious appetite for natural resources, will push the global prices of essential commodities higher and add to the cost of living pressures for consumers in other parts of the world. Others worry about losing their jobs as domestic manufacturers move production offshore to China and companies outsource their back-office operations to India. Such concerns reflect a view of the international economy as a zero-sum game. The reality is much more complex. The emergence of China and India as economic giants in Asia presents the rest of the world with both challenges and opportunities. The balance in this regard for individual countries depends on a number of factors, including their competitive position in the global economy, the strengths and weaknesses of their economic structures, the openness of their economies, and the quality of their infrastructure and institutions. Given the critical importance of access to natural resources for China and India, the resource-rich countries such as Australia and Brazil are in a particularly strong position to benefit from their economic rise. However, like every other country, they also face challenges from these rising powers…

This chapter examines the political economy of the European Union (EU). It seeks to illustrate that the EU is not simply an economic project but rather that it is a political and social experiment in supranational and transnational cooperation. The economic imperatives of the EU are perhaps its most obvious characteristics, yet the political motivations behind it were clearly in evidence from its origins as a new international organisation that pooled national sovereignty in the aftermath of the devastation of the Second World War. The EU is both an economic and a political project, therefore, and as such has been distinguished by distinct phases of development. Economic policy was pursued at times for political ends, but both imperatives were evident from the beginning. In addition, a civic component was increasingly developed in terms of workers' rights and social policies…

Who trades with whom in the international political economy and why? For many analysts and policy maker a question like this is little more than a distraction from the main business of world affairs, which they see as being the practice of 'high politics'. Analysts like these call international political economy 'low politics'. They would not talk about it at all except that ministries like the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, for example, now calls itself the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and defines its fundamental purpose not only in terms of enhancing Australia's security but also in terms of the contribution it makes to Australia's economic growth and market performance. Only relatively recently, in other words, have questions about trade been deemed legitimate ones to ask if one wants to be considered a serious student of world affairs. Even now, international political economy in general and trade issues in particular are seen as the second string to the international relations bow…

The multilateral trading system is currently seen as failing due to the lack of any agreement in the current Doha Development Agenda (DDA) negotiations of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Is this really the case and if so what are the current difficulties besetting the system? Are they endemic or are they due more to a lack of 'political will'?…

The hallmarks of the global trading system are robust institutional evolution and increasing complexity. Built from the misery of the Great Depression and the ashes of World War Two, post-war planners designed the multilateral trading system to re-engage the world's economies and yet still allow nations to preserve a significant measure of economic autonomy. The global trading system was enshrined in a compromise of 'embedded liberalism' (Ruggie, 2007). The 'embedded' aspect refers to the social bargain that reflected a Depression-era penchant for Keynesianinspired government stimulus spending and a commitment to full employment and social safety nets. The idea was to permit some measure of autonomy to cushion national economies from global market fluctuations. The 'liberalism' component reflects the rejection of the economic nationalism and imperialism that led to global war in favour of multilateralism, economic liberalism and integration. The foundational underpinnings of the post-war global trade regime were transparency, multilateral diplomacy, and re-integration of the global economy. The Soviet Union and its satellite nations were invited to join the Bretton Woods institutions (which also included the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), but declined. They established Eastern counterparts under COMECON instead. In that sense, the Bretton Woods institutions were less global than intended…

The post-World War Two liberalist framework achieved at Bretton Woods offered both freedom and openness. This was essential for the development of a new era of global trade…

Money makes the world go round, or so the saying goes. It has a neat ring about it, suggesting that the laws of global finance, like gravity and momentum, have a Newtonian certainty about them. Certainly, the collapse of communism and central state planning in the early 1990s left only one set of economic rules with which to organise global financial flows. And so for the last twenty years or so, the world, without the limits that rival ideologies have historically imposed on capitalism, has embarked on a radical exploration of globalised finance…

For more than sixty years the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have been the bastions of the global economy. They are best described as parents of an often unruly, unpredictable, and at times irrational modern-day financial system. For decades they have guided governments, leaders, other financial institutions and organisations through the good times and the bad; through times of economic expansion and contraction; and through periods of crisis and growth. To a greater or lesser extent, both have tried to evolve as the needs of the world's increasingly interdependent economy have changed. And since the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 both have fulfilled numerous roles. Depending on the requirements of the situation and the economic and political sensitivities of the country or region in which they have worked, they have been observers, managers and/or rescuers. Like their roles, their histories have been chequered. They have borne the brunt of the blame for financial crises but they have also, more often than not, been the first port of call for governments facing severe financial trouble…

Since the early 1990s corruption has been a prominent topic in the social sciences. This is largely because of what Naím (1995) calls a 'corruption eruption', namely, a substantial increase in the scale of corruption worldwide…

'North' and 'South' have been established terms of use in debates about international political economy since the 1960s. In their most basic form the terms are regarded as a shorthand for distinguishing 'rich countries' from 'poor countries'. 'The North' is taken to include the industrialised, high-per-capita income, national political economies of which the majority are located in the Northern Hemisphere. 'The South' describes those countries with high levels of poverty and comparatively low levels of industrialisation, large numbers of which exist in the Southern Hemisphere…

Corporations are among the most powerful institutions on the planet. We are often told that as their operations increase in size and scope, the world is increasingly 'ruled' by them. This perspective has been at the heart of debates about globalisation in IPE that revolve around the prospect of the demise of the nation state due to the 'inevitability' of global neoliberal market deregulation. This prospect is celebrated by liberalists for the triumph of free market capitalism that it heralds, while it is attacked by marxist anti-globalisers as evidence of the spread of exploitative relations of production and of the deeper embedding of a core-versus-periphery structure in the global political economy. Between these views there is a more nuanced debate that revolves around the extent to which states are being constrained to function (rather than rule) in a more passive, market-facilitating role, with the interests they serve being corporate ones rather than those of their citizens. The argument about the extent to which global markets and corporations, as the key actors in them, are now 'in charge' is therefore a central and ongoing one in contemporary IPE…

In 1848 Marx and Engels famously announced in the Communist Manifesto that: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the World, Unite!" They believed the continued development of capitalism would create the conditions necessary for workers within each country to unite, because capitalist development encouraged the growth of a proletariat better able to organise and mobilise as a result of being brought together in workplaces. By the same token, they believed the spreading of capitalism around the globe provided conditions for the workers of the whole world to unite across national borders and express their shared interests in challenging the capitalists who exploited workers everywhere…

The following sections are included:

• WHO MADE ADAM SMITH'S DINNER? FEMINIST CRITIQUES AND THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

• ECONOMIC ACCOUNTING AND WOMEN'S WORK

• WOMEN AND GLOBALISATION

• GENDERING THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

• RISK TAKING IN THE FINANCE INDUSTRY?

• HYPER-MASCULINITY AND SEX INDUSTRY USE IN TRADER BEHAVIOUR

• FINANCIAL CRISIS IMPACT ON WOMEN

• CONCLUSION

• REFERENCES

Women have traditionally been invisible in studies of the international political economy (IPE). Indeed, women continue to be invisible in most mainstream and even many critical theorisations of IPE today. The issue of reproduction illuminates central debates about the continued exclusion of women in IPE. This chapter seeks to outline the history of feminist engagement with the concept of reproduction, particularly social reproduction, and with the reproductive economy in the IPE literature and the possibilities and limitations of various approaches. Following this, it is argued that feminist analyses focusing on women's work and social reproduction challenge the fundamental basis of much politico-economic thinking rather than simply being ancillary to it. Ultimately, it is suggested that future attempts to make women's work visible must put women's experiences at the core of analytic thinking rather than attempting to make women's experiences fit pre-existing politico-economic models…

The environment arguably lies at the core of international political economy (IPE) even though the fact often goes unacknowledged in mainstream IPE scholarship. The IPE literature tends to analyse the environment through an anthropogenic lens by focusing on the services that it provides to humans. From this perspective the environment fulfils two critical functions. It is both the source of the resources that drive the modern globalised politico-economic systems as well as a sink to absorb and process much of the waste that is generated as a side effect of global production and consumption. Both aspects of the environment are critical to the functioning of local, national, and international systems of production and consumption. For example, the fossil fuels that drive the global political economy are extracted from the environment, and when they are burned the carbon dioxide, sulphur oxides and nitrogen oxides that are created are released freely into the atmosphere where they contribute to climate change, acid rain, and smog. This is but one example of the intertwined relationship between the environment's role in the creation of value and the absorption of pollution. Mineral extraction and agricultural production also involve this relationship to the environment as a source of value and a sink for pollution. It is this dual role of the environment in relationship to international political economy that will be explored in this chapter…

Living in a finite world means choices have to be made as to how to utilise natural resources. Are they to be taken in the short term, trusting to science to find other raw materials when these are required? Are resources to be husbanded for future generations or used primarily for this generation? How are resources to be distributed within a particular generation or for the benefit of generations as yet unborn (and how far into the future should these calculations be made)? Are certain resources to be conserved so that they may be preserved for all? How should renewable as opposed to non-renewable resources be treated? Are resources just for the use of humans or should humans consider their impact on the rights of other non-human species?…

During the 1980s several Beluga whales were found dead in the waters off the coast of the Quebec Province, Canada. In their blubber was found a high concentration of DDT (i.e. dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a very powerful insecticide used for agriculture that was banned throughout the world during the 1960s and 1970s because of its harmful effects on the environment and human health); plus PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, a long-lived industrial compound used mainly in the manufacture of electronic goods); and Mirex (a chlorinated hydrocarbon that is used mainly as an insecticide for agricultural purposes and that was subsequently banned because of its bio-accumulative effects). All of these compounds degrade slowly. They linger in the environment, floating in the air and water, permeating the soil, and accumulating in animal fats. For this reason they are banned in most developed countries and for this reason the whales cited above were disposed of as toxic waste. Furthermore, the Quebec authorities label living whales as "toxic waste" too (Prins, 1991, p. 16). (This incident motivated Prins to write a book entitled Top Guns and Toxic Whales in which she highlighted the tensions between the dominant narrative of security and the world's politico-economic system.)…

Humans have been emitting greenhouse gases for eons but it was the industrial revolution, with its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and the capitalist system of production and consumption, that contributed most clearly to a new type of climate change — one not generated by natural events so much as by human-induced or anthropogenic activities. As archaeologists like Fagan (2008, p. xvii) say, "[W]e've entered a time of sustained warming, which dates back to at least 1860s, propelled in large part by humanity — by the greenhouse gases from fossil fuels"…

As argued in the Introduction, international political economy (IPE) is described and explained in one or another of the analytical languages used to articulate the meta-discourse of modernism or 'Enlightenment rationalism'. These languages promote the assumptions modernist/rationalists make despite the fact that, as detached social scientists, they are not supposed to make any. Since only someone divine or insane could be completely detached, and since social scientists are neither, they can be seen as making assumptions regardless. It is with these that they contend in the meta-realm of the mind where rationalism makes possible the pursuit of science — be it natural or social…

The following sections are included:

• Index