The global political economy is undergoing a moment of profound change and upheaval, precipitated by the recentering of the global economy back toward Asia, where it had traditionally been until the shock of colonialism and European industrialization. China, in particular through decades of sustained, rapid economic growth and domination of global manufacturing capacity, has greatly increased its influence over international affairs. This work explores some of the challenges generated by China and the other ‘rising powers’, including increased military and diplomatic confrontation, the erosion of core norms that underpin key institutions of economic governance and the creation of new institutions that may undermine the existing framework of global economic governance. The work reflects on the future of global political economy and questions the basis of the existing set of approaches, norms and institutions of global governance, whom they were created to benefit, and the extent of their claims to legitimacy.
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12. China and the Global Political Economy
Scott James
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3. Cooperation and Conflict in the Global Political Economy
Vinod K. Aggarwal and Cédric Dupont
How can one understand the problems of collaboration and coordination in the global political economy (GPE)? In situations of global interdependence, individual action by states often does not yield the desired result. Many argue that the solution to the problem of interdependence is to create international institutions. Yet this approach itself raises the issue of how states might go about creating such institutions in the first place. This work examines the conditions under which states might wish to cooperate and provides an introduction to game theory as an approach to understanding interdependent decision-making. It then discusses the conditions under which international institutions are likely to be developed and how they may facilitate international cooperation. Finally, the work examines dimensions of institutional variation, with a discussion of factors that shape the design of international institutions.
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8. The Evolution of the International Monetary and Financial System
Eric Helleiner
The international monetary and financial system plays a central role in the global political economy (GPE). This work examines how the contemporary system is still shaped by many legacies of the Bretton Woods monetary and financial order established in 1944 and the political priorities of its architects. That order has also undergone several pivotal transformations. An important gradual change has been dramatic globalisation of financial markets since the 1960s. A more sudden one was the abandonment of the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard in 1971. The dollar standard that replaced it faces a number of challenges in the contemporary era. Also significant have been the breakdown of the adjustable peg exchange rate regime in the early 1970s as well as regionalization and decentralization trends.
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10. Global Finance and the Everyday
Clarke Chris and Roberts Adrienne
This work uses ‘the everyday’ as a lens to explore the worlds of finance, debt and money. It offers a ‘bottom up’ perspective on broader structural trends in the world economy, showing both how these affect the day-to-day experiences of individuals and households, and how everyday financial practices are constitutive of the world economy. The work uses debt and money as entry points for this discussion. It discusses how and why households have come to rely on debt as part of everyday life and shows how debt reliance has unequal consequences. It also surveys the use of money by ordinary people and the everyday political economy of monetary governance.
Book
Erin Hannah and John Ravenhill
What constitutes Global Political Economy? In whose interest is GPE constructed, and by whom? How can inequalities in GPE best be redressed? These are some of the key questions addressed in the 7th edition of this title.
As an ever-evolving field, subject to constant changes and developments, Global Political Economy provides a comprehensive introduction to GPE written by leading experts in the field. Under the direction of new editor Prof. Erin Hannah, the 7th edition surveys major contemporary issues and debates in GPE while being attuned to silences, marginalizations, and exclusions that predominate the field. By integrating a wide range of theoretical approaches, rich empirical material, non-western viewpoints and diversity of contributors, the 7th edition provides enhanced coverage of the central axes of inequality in GPE and centers topics such as colonialism, race, gender, North-South divides and everyday life throughout chapters on GPE theory, global trade and production, global money and finance, the resurgence of the state, development and inequality, the environment, and digital technologies.
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14. The Global Political Economy of Development
Ali Bhagat
Some major advances in the betterment of human life have been made in recent years but at the cost of accelerated climatic change and through uneven means of development. A reduction in child mortality, a rise in literacy and education, and by some measures the fewest people live in extreme poverty than they ever have before. Nevertheless, inequality on the multiple axes of health, income, environment, gender, education, technology, finance, shelter, food, water, and various other issues concerning access persist. This work examines efforts by various actors to deal with these problems with mixed and contested results. The analysis is centered around a key question: who benefits and why from globalised development? In so doing, it examines various development theories, traces the history of globalisation-led development post-WWII, and scrutinises contemporary challenges like the Great Recession and the Global Refugee Crisis, in order to understand the crisis prone tendencies of globalisation and its linkages to everyday practices in global political economy.
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17. The Global Political Economy of Digital Technology
Tyler Girard
The current digital transformation of the global economy continues to create new forms of power, new political cleavages, and new coalitions to which the governance of the GPE need to adapt. This work explains the technologies and firm dynamics at the center of this transformation, as well as the new analytical tools and concepts being used to explain these changes. It explores the digital transformation across three interrelated areas. The fragmentation of national and global governance initiatives for artificial intelligence is contrasted with the emergence of the European Union (EU) as a global standard-setter in data and privacy governance. The disruption of labour markets and shifting political cleavages caused by the digitization of global trade, as well as the creation of new points of conflict in global trade governance are explored. Finally, the work provides an assessment of the disruptive impact of technology firms and cryptocurrency on global finance.
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15. The Global Political Economy of North–South Relations: A View from the South
J. P. Singh
Some major advances in the betterment of human life have been made in recent years but at the cost of accelerated climatic change and through uneven means of development. A reduction in child mortality, a rise in literacy and education, and by some measures the fewest people live in extreme poverty than they ever have before. Nevertheless, inequality on the multiple axes of health, income, environment, gender, education, technology, finance, shelter, food, water, and various other issues concerning access persist. This work examines efforts by various actors to deal with these problems with mixed and contested results. The analysis is centered around a key question: who benefits and why from globalised development? In so doing, it examines various development theories, traces the history of globalisation-led development post-WWII, and scrutinises contemporary challenges like the Great Recession and the Global Refugee Crisis, in order to understand the crisis prone tendencies of globalisation and its linkages to everyday practices in global political economy.
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7. Global Production and Unfree Labour
Gore Ellie
The presence of extremely exploitative labour conditions in the supply chains of key commodities is now widely recognized. Yet there is relatively little agreement over what causes severe labour exploitation, commonly referred to as ‘forced’ or ‘unfree labour’, in global production and how to address it. This work explores these debates by examining the patterns, prevalence, and drivers of severe labour exploitation in global production. The debate is framed through an analysis of key frameworks and concepts, focusing on the divide between proponents of the ‘modern slavery’ paradigm and their critics who prefer the conceptual framing of ‘unfree labour’. The structural drivers of labour exploitation and key factors making individual workers vulnerable to this labour exploitation are examined, followed by an evaluation of the effectiveness of current public and private initiatives to address unfree and forced labour in global production.
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5. Global Trade
Silke Trommer
Across history, all successful human civilisations have engaged in one form of cross-cultural trade or another. Following decades of contested but successful trade multilateralism under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) established in 1947 and the World Trade Organization (WTO) established in 1995, hybrid governance structures characterize the global trade system of the 21st century. In this system, multilateral, regional and bilateral institutions provide overlapping and separate rules and regulations for the conduct of global trade. Meanwhile, global trade is widely perceived as a key arena within which we need to address key challenges, from climate change and big data, to economic and social inequalities within and between countries. This work reviews the history, politics, and recent trends and challenges of the global trade system.
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4. Ideas, Social Hierarchies, and the Everyday
Erin Hannah and Lucy Hinton
Unequal relations of power along classed, racialized and gendered lines are central to the functioning of the global political economy (GPE). Beginning with this understanding this work centers some of the empirical and conceptual margins of GPE and highlights the interplay of ideas, social hierarchies and the everyday in order to shed light on some of the most important but often neglected aspects of GPE: gender, race, and everyday life. The work discusses the role of ideas in establishing and legitimizing different patterns of authority and power, social hierarchies, and the ways in which they are upheld by dominant ideals and power dynamics, and centers the experiences of the‘globally governed’ to better understand how everyday people experience the GPE and exercise agency, power, and resistance..
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6. Identity and Attitudes Towards Trade
Guisinger Alexandra
International trade shapes everyday lives and life chances the world over. Trade also can strengthen global cooperation or create conflict. Although trade policy is often considered within the purview of domestic and international elites, the public’s attitudes towards trade have both shaped and stymied elite behaviour. Understanding how individuals develop preferences about trade policy is challenging but can help explain when and how the public matters. Economic explanations based on individuals’ employment and consumption patterns underpin most scholarly work in this area but such models fall short in predicting individuals’ stated preferences and voting patterns. This work considers alternative explanations, rooted in race and gender, for individuals’ preferences for trade policy. It concludes by showing that political and media messaging serve to highlight and replicate gender- and race-based biases in trade.
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11. Ideologies of Globalism, Populism, and Economic Nationalism
Harmes Adam
The issues at the core of the global political economy are complex and multidimensional, but must be dealt with in a clear and decisive way. This work examines how political ideologies can help to explain the contemporary politics of globalisation, anti-globalisation, and global governance including new forms of populism and economic nationalism. It outlines the main ideologies of international relations and economic policy including liberal internationalism, progressivism, neoliberalism, populist conservatism and, to a lesser extent, realism and neoconservatism. It also shows how these ideologies influenced the preferences of political actors and contributed to a globalisation/anti-globalisation sequence that has been strongly consistent across Anglo-American countries.
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13. The Political Economy of Global Inequality
Erin Lockwood
The GPE is characterized by tremendous disparities in wealth and income both within and between countries. Patterns of inequality have their origins in both historical institutions, like colonial extraction, as well as contemporary institutions, like the liberal trading order and financial capitalism. Although typically measured in economic terms, this work shows that the consequences of global inequality go beyond wealth and income to affect political institutions, labor conditions, and migration pressures and restrictions. However, not everyone agrees that global inequality is inherently a bad thing: some approaches to global justice emphasize absolute measures of economic well-being, such as GDP growth or declines in the number of people living in poverty, over relative concepts like levels of inequality. Nonetheless, many scholars and practitioners would prefer to reduce the level of global inequality in practice, and this work concludes with an overview of some policies that have been proposed as partial solutions.
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16. The Political Economy of the Environment
Kate Ervine
The global community is confronted with an unprecedented array of overlapping environmental crises, threatening humanity and non-human species, though the impacts remain highly uneven, with nations and communities least responsible for contemporary ecological problems paying the highest cost. With widespread climate disruption projected to intensify in the coming years and decades, this work illustrates the critical need for effective and democratic governance. It unpacks the prevailing relations of power connected to the global political economy of advanced capitalism, dominant debates and disagreement about how environmental crises are understood, and how governments and various actors respond to climate crises based on these understandings and power structures. It pays particular attention to how uneven development and colonialism have shaped inequality and ecological decline, showing that effective and meaningful responses to planetary crises will also need to respond to the deep injustices and inequalities that mark the contemporary GPE.
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9. The Politics of Global Financial Stability
Louis W. Pauly
After the early 1970s, the global increase in capital flows, driven by a shift away from capital controls and heightened dependence on external financing, has interconnected national capital markets, making them more volatile and contingent on a consensus among leading states for policy collaboration during crises. In the late twentieth-century most cross-border financial crises began in emerging market economies. However, the 2008 financial crisis, which began in the United States and spread to Europe, and ongoing pressures such as COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, emerging digital technologies, and geopolitical strife between the US and China have tested the resilience and stability of the global financial system. This work examines these key events, as well as deepening domestic and international struggles over the unequal distribution of costs and benefits of financial openness in the global economy.
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2. Race, Empire, Colonialism, and the Pre-history of Global Political Economy
Matthew Watson
Global Political Economy (GPE) scholars have often claimed an interest in thinking historically, contextualizing how the world economy is managed today through reference to the dilemmas faced by older generations of policymakers. Yet their historically-oriented analyses often seem to be divorced from some of the biggest issues on which they might be asked to adjudicate, such as race, empire and colonialism. This work reveals how narrowly GPE typically draws the parameters of intellectual history, as well as how much it simplifies the multi-dimensional arguments of early modern political economists who did address at length many of the issues that GPE scholars have recently ‘discovered’ should have been central to their own research all along.
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1. The Study of Global Political Economy
John Ravenhill and Erin Hannah
The multilateral economic order is facing several major challenges, including the persistent impact of COVID-19 on global output and growth, the shift towards decoupling and fragmentation in economic relations with China, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the disruption of global value chains, and the rise of conservative populism. Together these challenge the principles of liberal internationalism and provide a clear illustration of the relationship between trade, finance, international institutions, and the difficulties governments face in coping with the problems generated by complex interdependence. This chapter explores past and emerging challenges in the Global Political Economy (GPE) through a range of theoretical lenses. It also pays attention to the significance of race, colonialism, gender, and the intersections of GPE with everyday life.
