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This paper reviews the historical evidence on the relationship between globalisation and economic growth. Divergence in the growth of income and industrialisation in the twentieth century is documented but it is also noted that international income inequality appears to have decreased since about 1870 and that long-run trends in the Human Development Index are much less pessimistic about the experience of developing countries. It is argued that trade liberalisation has been good for growth on average but that successful capital liberalisation requires high institutional quality and that the developmental state may have an important role to play in the early stages of development. The recent claim by Robert Lucas that the 21st century will see a massive reduction in income inequality across countries in a globalised world economy is sceptically discussed in the context of empirical evidence that bad institutions are often persistent and that geography is still a major factor in explaining international income differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, the global tourism network (GTN) is studied in order to gain insight about its structure and the interactions between source and destination markets. To concentrate on the main source and destination markets for each country, only its top k inbound and outbound flows are considered. The distribution of these most important ties in international tourism seems to be scale‐free, with some occurrence of reciprocity, large transitivity, and high‐degree centralization. The GTN shows a clustered structure determined by geographical as well as trade and cultural factors. Each major global and regional power seems to have a certain tourism sphere of influence. The network has a small world character and a high degree of geographic homophily, with more links within continents than between continents. Exponential random graph models have been fit to explain the observed global structure of the network based on its local interactions, and a number of significant motifs have been identified. The picture that results is a GTN that emerges from superimposed local processes in which tourism flows between countries is determined from multiple independent individual decisions made at the local level. This insight that global tourism patterns are driven by local processes is a major contribution of this research and can help develop strategic plans and cooperation partnerships at the national and regional levels, involving private and public stakeholders and targeting specific source and destination markets. The indicators computed using network analysis of global tourism flows can also be used to complement and enrich the information provided by current tourism statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Empirical research has generally attributed the dismal performance of Africa's economic growth to country-specific socio-economic and geo-political factors. This paper shows that while country-specific issues matter for Africa's economic growth, common global economic factors do matter as well. The importance of common global economic factors has been augmented by increased globalization, the introduction of the World Trade Organization and the current global economic crisis. Using system GMM panel data techniques that extend previous literature on Africa's growth, the estimation results provide new insights into the positive relationship between the world business cycle and the growth rates of African countries. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how links between the economies of Southeast Asia and the world economy have changed over the twentieth century, paying particular attention to growth in commodity exports, investment flows and international migration. Most parts of Southeast Asia expanded their links with the global economy in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the years from 1940 to 1965 saw a decline in Southeast Asia's share of tropical exports, and of direct foreign investment. Migration flows also slowed. Over the last four decades of the twentieth century, international links expanded again, but there have been marked variations between countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long tradition in the development literature that what a country exports matters for its growth prospects. Recent work has refocused on this issue by attempting to produce numerical scores for different types of product to identify the complexity or sophistication of a country's export basket. Based on the insight that the type of product an economy exports can have important implications for its economic performance and that goods exported predominantly by rich countries will have different characteristics from those exported by poor countries, Lall et al. (2006) put forward a means of classifying commodities based on the income levels of a product's main exporters. At around the same time, Hausmann et al. (2006), following a similar approach, put forward a slightly different form of product classification and Rodrik (2006) applied this specifically to an analysis of China. This paper highlights the difference between the approaches and its implications for the analysis of China, which appears less 'special' using the approach of Lall et al. It argues that the classification of products at a disaggregate level is a helpful starting point for assessing issues of trade competitiveness and that further work using either or both forms of classification is justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study empirically focuses on examining the hypotheses of export premium (exporters are more productive than non-exporters), selection-into-exporting (more productive firms are ones that tend to become exporters) and learning-by-exporting (new export market entrants have higher productivity growth than non-exporters in the post-entry period). The propensity score matching method is used to adjust for observable differences of firm characteristics between exporters and non-exporters, allowing an adequate 'like-for-like' comparison. We also use the difference-in-difference matching estimator to capture the magnitude of different productivity growth between matched new export market entrants and non-exporters in the post-entry period up to two years. Drawing on 2,340 Chinese firms in the period 2000-02, we find evidence for export premium and self-selection, and once the firm has entered the export market there is additional productivity growth from the learning effect, in particular in the second year after entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of contemporary pressures on industrial districts and analyses the changes that are taking place in an industrial district confronted with disembedding and globalisation. We discuss the following questions: What are the processes and consequences of disembedding for the changing shape and form of inter-firm trust, contract and network forms? Is there an evolution in subcontracting and trade interdependency? What is the role of institutional infrastructures? We performed a longitudinal qualitative study using a number of different data sources to analyse the evolution of one French industrial district, particularly how new pressures of internationalisation and disembedding work to reconfigure inter-firm relations in this district. While the recent literature is dominated by notions about industrial districts that concern only the trend towards increased competition or disembeddedness, this article shows that there is no unilinear trend. In contrast with the findings of certain recent studies, we argue that economic logic does not fully account for recent developments because the adjustment that are being made by the district are characterised rather by re-embeddedness, increased cooperation, and institutionalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This lecture examines whether financial globalization is beneficial to developing countries by first examining the evidence on financial development and economic growth and concludes that financial development is indeed a key element in promoting economic growth. It then asks why if financial development is so beneficial, it often does not occur. It then goes on to examine whether globalization, particularly of the financial kind, can help encourage financial and economic development and argues that it can. However, financial globalization does not always work to encourage economic development because it often leads to devastating financial crises. The issue is thus not whether financial globalization is inherently good or bad, but whether it can be done right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to‘hold down’ the global. Conversely, work on inter-firm networks– such as the global commodity chain approach– has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms’ production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between‘globalizing’ processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the‘strategic coupling’ of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi-scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to reconcile social and environmental goals for sustainable development still poses problems for policy makers in the richer parts of the world. Using the examples of domestic water and energy, this paper argues that the problems are reflected, and often magnified, in developing countries. They arise largely from conflicts between the short-term need to alleviate poverty and longer-term objectives for environmental sustainability. The dual nature of water and energy as both social and economic goods raises questions about the most appropriate forms of provision and allocation of the utilities. It is in no one's long-term interest for developing countries to repeat the environmentally damaging mistakes of the industrialized world. But an equitable distribution of the short-term costs attached to a more environmentally responsible use of resources demands new ways of thinking about global social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the manner in which Australian policy in matters of international trade is set. The author finds a number of puzzling features. First is the lack of detailed scrutiny given to the policy mechanisms employed by the countries of North-East Asia which have recently been so outstandingly successful in furthering their international trade and economic interests. There can be no valid reason for failing to give close attention to the means whereby others have succeeded. Second is the apparent separation in Australia, unlike Japan, between international trade policy and other, broader economic objectives such as the identification and support of new high value industries with global export potential. If we lack national objectives of this latter kind it is legitimate to ask whether this lack is for the best. Third is the extent to which policy appears to assume, without more ado, that through the liberation of market forces we shall largely resolve our international competitive and trade problems. This is a truly heroic assumption which should be clearly recognised for what it is. Fourth and perhaps most puzzling of all is the extraordinarily low level of community debate, even of interest group debate, over precisely where our 1990s international trade and economic development interests lie. If the current GATT round should largely fail, which is quite likely, clear thinking about where our best interests lie will suddenly become urgent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal of the current research into nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalisation has been focused through a neoclassical trade theory lens. Applying the Stopler-Samuelson paradigm from Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory, the result is an approach that sees price convergence as pivotal in defining, identifying, and measuring globalisation. This focus, however, obscures the implications of frontier incorporation and other insights achieved by viewing nineteenth-century globalisation as a mechanism whereby peripheral economies were incorporated into the core of organised economic activity. A frontier-centred perspective also reintroduces the role of economic institutions as a crucial element of economic growth and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Identifying which socioeconomic factors can explain differences in national sociometabolic profiles, and quantifying how well they do it, is relevant to the question of whether national‐level material flows can be forecast accurately enough to inform policy. In this study, we employed panel analyses to test a wide range of socioeconomic variables with respect to their ability to explain variations in the material flows trajectories between different nations. We found that, apart from the long‐established explanatory variables of population and affluence (gross domestic product [GDP] per capita), additional variables do little to explain the remaining variation between countries. The main explanation proposed for this is that, as product supply chains are increasingly globalized, expecting national‐level material flows to closely reflect national‐level development is not appropriate. The effects of globalized trade on national material flows are profound, and come via a number of different mechanisms, discussed in the study. This implies that attempting long‐term prediction of national demand for primary materials is unlikely to be a fruitful activity, and that further efforts to refine existing models will probably not greatly improve results. Conversely, forecasting material flows at the global scale may not be unreasonable, but would be contingent on having accurate forecasts of population and GDP. The linkage of national material flows to the global economy has important implications for the efficacy of attempting to materially affect global sustainability via policy measures taken in isolation, at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses ways on how to reduce the impact of global inequality. It offers information on the duties that the people in developed countries have to perform to reduce global economic inequality including transnational exploitation, global trade, and global development. It explores the contexts in which developed countries have a duty to reduce certain material inequalities to avoid inequality.

Industrial competitiveness (IC), reflecting a country's ability to produce and export manufactures competitively, is closely associated with economic growth. How does globalization affect IC? While the topic is of great importance, empirical studies on the issue in the literature have been limited. This article attempts to close the gap by estimating the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) and international trade with cross-country data in 1985 and 1998. Taking advantage of a recently constructed IC index, we estimate several regression models of effects of FDI and trade on industrial performance. Results suggest that FDI and trade have a positive impact on IC, and increasing integration with the world economy through FDI and trade contributes to better industrial performance. ( JEL F02, F10, F21, L60) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the debate over the empirical relationship between trade openness and economic development. Unlike previous studies which treat trade openness and institutions as competitors in economic development, we find evidence that they are in fact complements. We also find that in order for a country to benefit from trade, its institutional quality has to be above a certain threshold level. These results are suggestive of an important complementary role for trade openness and institutions in economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While contemporary globalization makes the world more interconnected, it also reworks and builds on existing cleavages and uneven development. This is an under-researched dimension of the emerging twenty-first century international division of labour. The core question is whether new developments (associated with exports, offshoring and outsourcing) spin off to the majority in the countryside and the urban poor. This article examines the relationship between the dollar economy and the rupee economy in India. It documents the ways in which inequality is built into and sustains India's development. The authors discuss other instances of multi-speed economies and analytics that seek to come to grips with these relations, from combined and uneven development to global value chains. They present three ways of capturing contemporary inequality: asymmetric inclusion, enlargement-and-containment and hierarchical integration, each of which captures different dimensions of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilateral Trade Agreements (BTAs) have been proliferating. Why are they so popular? What are their impacts on multilateralism and the world trade system? The article identifies the general and specific factors driving the growth in BTAs, and examines how BTAs in general and different types of BTAs are affecting the world trade system. Although the sheer number of BTAs is fragmenting the world trade system, the impact of individual BTAs often depends on their underlying motivation. The article also portrays scenarios for the future landscape of world trade and possible responses. Is the consolidation of BTAs into region-wide agreements a solution or simply a new problem? How can we multilateralise bilateralism and repair the world trade system? The article attempts to answer these questions, with or without Doha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade, foreign direct investment, and inter-regional R&D spillovers facilitate competition, the spread of knowledge, and the adoption of more advanced technologies, which in turn hastens total factor productivity (TFP) growth. The spread of these efficiency gains from internationalization requires a sufficient local knowledge to enable them to be adapted to the domestic productive environment. Thus, higher local knowledge and internationalization will lead to TFP growth, and the greater the complementarity between variables the higher the TFP growth. We test the complementarity hypothesis using Spanish regional data over the period 1980–1995 in which both regional local knowledge and internationalization experienced a notable increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two edited collections and the monograph reviewed here provide the means to consider an extended range of commodities, locations, commodity/value chains, and issues of theory and method in political economy, beyond those presented by Gibbon and Ponte (2005) that we considered in the first part of this essay. Our discussion here touches on issues concerning how ‘global’ global commodity/value chains are; the symbolic attributes of commodities and commodity fetishism; the politics of consumption (or simply politics of selling and buying); the strengths and weaknesses of the economic sociology of commodity/value chains; and how the ‘slices’ extracted from larger organisms in studies of particular commodities may be reinserted, as it were, as part of the understanding of contemporary capitalism and of issues of development in the economies of the ‘South’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses international trade, economic aid and the development of poorer countries. While productive employment, improving education and health are growing in transitional and developing countries, millions of people in the Middle East, Russia and Central Asia are experiencing little or no economic growth despite rich natural resources. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers extreme poverty and economic stagnation as it is torn by conflicts. Immigration pressures are increasing as fertility rates in developing countries continue to exceed those in the Western democracies. Industrial and developing countries that have participated in globalization have experienced institutional change, growth and rising living standards.

This article presents a growth model including geographical space and transportation costs in which the geographical area where firms sell their product is endogenous. Growth is generated by the expansion of trade and there is a positive relationship between degree of openness and income level. The model explains why economies become increasingly more open and why the degree of openness is not robustly correlated with growth. In contrast to other growth models, investment in transport infrastructure plays an important role and the size of the country does not affect growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an Economic Viewpoint published in the September 2005 edition of Economic Affairs , ‘Can Globalisation Depress Living Standards in the West?’, Professor E. J. Mishan argued that globalisation may reduce living standards in the West by decreasing the labour–capital ratio in developed countries as firms move production to countries where labour is cheaper and/or migrants to the West from the developing world bid down wage rates. In a reply to Professor Mishan's article, Dr John Meadowcroft argues that this view of globalisation is far too pessimistic and explains why free trade, not protection, will secure the prosperity of developed and developing economies. In a final comment, Professor Mishan responds to this critique of his analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]