(Fall 2019) Public Policy POL 211- A01

Elayne Guzman Chap 13- Branko Milanovic, “The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It” Quote: “The left view, regards globalization as a malignant force that leads to child labor in the South and takes away middle-class jobs in the North… today’s globalization is led by a triumphant, and often unbridled capitalism. Unbridled capitalism does produce the effects of which the Left complains; destruction of environment, obliteration of indigenous cultures and exploitation of the weak” Meaning/Chosen:     There is no question that globalization has been a good thing for many developing countries who now have access to our markets and can export cheap goods. Globalization has also been food for multi-national corporations and Wall Street. But globalization has not been good for working people (blue or white collard) and has led to continuing de- industrialization of America. The general complaint about globalization is that has made the rich r...

Elayne Guzman Chap 12- Dani Rodrik “Trading in Illusions” Quote: “Openness to trade and investments flows is no longer viewed simply as a component of a country’s development strategy; it has mutated into the most potent catalyst for economic growth known to humanity” Meaning/Chosen:     Joining the world economy is no longer a matter simply of dismantling barriers to trade and investments. Countries must comply with a long list of admission requirements from new patent rules to more rigorous banking standards. Global integration has become, for all practical purposes, a substitute for a development strategy. This strategy is not quite good for the world’s poor. By focusing on international integration, governments in poor nations divert human resources, administrative capabilities and political capital away from more urgent development priorities such as education, public health, industrial capacity and social cohesion.    The rules for admission int...

Elayne Guzman Chap 12- Robert H. Wade, “Is Globalization Reducing Inequality and Poverty” Quote: “If the number of people in extreme poverty is not falling and if global inequality is widening, we cannot conclude that globalization in the context of the dollar Wall Street Regime is moving the world in the right direction” Meaning/Chosen:     We live in an unequal world in which descriptors of global inequality, especially inequalities in income abound. Globalization has intensified flows of goods, finance, people and political/cultural interactions all across our planet. Understanding the nature of, and linkages between globalization and inequalities is crucial because disparities abound in access to needs such as shelter, land, food and clean water, sustainable livelihoods, technology and information. Inequalities in all of these realms pose challenges to human security and environmental sustainability.   Much of the research on the link between globali...

Elayne Guzman Chap 11- Steven Rattner, “Will China Stumble, Don’t Bet on It” Quote: “…That illustrate China’s great strength: its ability to relentlessly grind down costs by combining high labor efficiency with wages that remain extraordinary low” Meaning/Chosen:    China labor market remains tight and unemployment low and yet, just like in the US, Europe and elsewhere- wages growth is not reflecting that strength. China labor cost is a key driver in production, an area China is well known to the world competitive advantage. However, China’s economy growth has reduced this luxury as the manufacturing workforce has experience yearly rising wages in China. But even with large increased in China labor costs, wage rate in China remains relatively low; the minimum monthly wage is around $280 a quarter of that in American. China wage increases are predominantly in coastal regions whereas inlands areas see a much lower wage growth. For this reason factories are relo...

Elayne Guzman Chap 11- The Washington Post “Bashing China” Quote: “China is not quite the unstoppable threat to U.S. prosperity that we hear about in crowd-pleasant rhetoric; undoubtedly China has grown explosively over the past two decades, capturing a huge share of world trade” Meaning/Chosen: As technology, capital and flows of trade between China and the world have shifted; China’s exposure to other countries has declined, while the world’s exposure to China has increased. Consumers around the world have been benefiting from trade with China. However, the nature of China’s rise is coming under scrutiny; criticism has been voided about, for instance China’s policies to support technology transfer from foreign to local firms, weak intellectual-property protection and industrial policies that favor domestic players.

Elayne Guzman Chap 10- Michael McFaul, “ State Power, Institutional Change and the Politics of Privatization in Russia” Quote: “The degree of consensus within the state is a key determinant of its ability to define preferences independently of leading economic interest groups. The effectiveness and cohesiveness of government institutions are key determinants of the state’s capacity to implement these preferences; state power must as also be measured in relation to the strength of the leading interest groups in society” Meaning/Chosen: Society is the source of immense power. Humanity possesses the power and capabilities needed to fully meet the multi dimensional challenges confronting global society. People often think of power ins  society as shaping the results of political decision making; policies, laws, ruling decisions make by public of officials, legislators  and members of the executive and judicial branches of the government. The power to shape what gets...

Elayne Guzman Chap 9 “ Audio lecture: David Harvey, “Production of Capitalist Spaces” “The production of space, especially the distribution and organization of the territory constitutes a principal aspect of capitalist economies.”   While space and time may seem ubiquitous, human experiences of space and time are remarkably specific to certain groups and cultures in particular places and times. The production of space occurs through both social practices and material conditions, meaning that space and time are contingent upon and shaped by macro-scale policies and innovations, such as calendars and maps, as everyday routines like finding a parking space. Space is socially produced.

Elayne Guzman Chap 9 -Geoffrey Glass “Review of Manual Castell’s Network Society” Quote: “Communications technologies allow for the annihilation of space and for globalization; the potential for rapid and asynchronous communication also changes the relationship to time…networking are not a new form of social organization, it has become a key feature of social morphology” Meaning/Chosen:    For Castell, communication technologies, such as the internet, allow for decentralization of operations and focusing control, increasing the effectiveness of networking relative to the hierarchical structures. Some networks are global in scale. In most countries, including emerging markets, best of breed infrastructures are typically provided on a local/regional scale. The new economy is certainly “capitalist” in the classic sense that is a system of private property characterized by highly developed nearly universal commodity production. Network is inextricably intertwin...

Elayne Guzman Chap 9- Jeffrey Hart “Review of Globalization in Question, by Hirst, Thompson and Bromley” Quote: “Most of the people of the Third World have not yet benefited from internalization, but that they must do so in the future, even if this means greater market intervention on the part of the world’s agreement” Meaning/Chosen: Attention to international dimension of higher education is increasingly visible as national and institutional agendas rise to the challenge of globalization and its opportunities, yet in the current globally interdependent, knowledge based societies, the concept of internalization of higher education has itself globalized. As countries in the developing world open up to internalization and enter into partnerships with western institutions their reflections on practice and outcomes offer significant learning opportunities for those with longer histories

Elayne Guzman Chap 8- Stephen Haggard, “The Politics of the Asian Financial Crisis” Quote:   “When countries exhibit signs of financial vulnerability, the reaction of markets is based in part on expectations of how governments will respond. When crises actually break, an even wider array of actors sit in direct judgment on a country’s adjustment efforts, including international financial institutions, ratings agencies, financial analysts, banks and institutions. Their assessments also are influence by political expectations.” Meaning/Chosen:    The moral hazard problem in Asia magnified the financial vulnerability of the region during the process of financial markets centralization in the 1990’s, exposing its fragility via the macro economic and financial shocks that occurred in the period 1995-1997. Investments rates and capital inflows in Asia remained high eve after the negative signals sent by the indications of profitability. In part this occurred bec...

Elayne Guzman Chap 7 –John Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order” Quote: “ To say anything sensible about the content of international orders and about the regimes that serves them, it is necessary to look at how power and legitimate social purpose become fused to project political authority into the international system” Meaning/Chosen:    International regimes limit discretion of constituents units to decide and act on issues that fall within the regime’s domain. It also converge expectations and delimit discretion through inter-subjectivity.   Ruggie argues that international regimes provide permissive environment for specific kinds of international transactions flows, ones that are complementary to particular fusion of power and purpose embedded in those regimes, If power changes, the instruments of regime may change. However, so long as purpose is held constant, there’s no reason to ...

Elayne Guzman   Chap 6- World bank, “Trade Blocs”   Quote: “Trade policy gets shaped by the political needs of the governments and by the political pressures exerted by well funded lobbies. Adding a regional dimension to trade policy, meets some political needs and changes lobbying opportunities” Meaning/Chosen:     Regionalism adds an existing dimension to the flat plane of unilateral versus multilateral trade policy. Countries are located at particular places of the glove, and their trade policies reflect this placement. Regional trade agreements reach their full potential when the political and ideological differences among participant countries are minimal. Trade blocs work best when members state coordinate monetary and physical policies. Any policy that derived from free trade world be manipulated by special interests, leading to decrease national welfare.     The policy makers is assumed to be partial to political influence from an or...

Elayne Guzman World Trade Organization, ”World Trade Report 2011: The WTO and Preferential Trade Agreements: From Co-existence to Coherence” Quote: “In the first stage, the policy preferences of a government are shaped by national welfare considerations and by the politically organized groups that represent different industrial sectors. In the second stage, governments negotiate a PTA under the constraints imposed by the domestic political environment. The outcome of this game is the politically viable preferential agreement.” Meaning/Chosen: Starting from a situation with an arbitrary structure of trade barriers, if two or more countries freeze their net external trade vector with the rest of the world through a set of common external tariffs and eliminate the barriers of the internal trade, the welfare of the union as a whole necessarily improves and that of the rest of the world does not fall. By fixing the combined, net extra union trade vector of member countries a...

Elayne Guzman Problematic Lucidity: Stephen Krasner's "State Power and the Structure of International Trade" By Robert Keohane. Quote: “Some of the appeal of “State Power” derives from its clear specification puzzle. Puzzles are central to social science, and Krasner’s puzzle is an important one. Why, he asks, has the world economy vacillated between openness and closure? Krasner carefully defines the continuum between openness and closure. While acknowledging the significance of movements of capital, labor and technology, he focuses on trade”. Meaning/Chosen:     Keohane focuses on openness and closure in the structure of international trade that Krasner argued. In terms of openness, state power is related to hegemonic ascendency that is more likely to create openness and also determines economic patterns.   A powerful state with a technology advantage over other states will desire an open trading system as it seeks new export markets. Furthermore large ...

Elayne Guzman Summer 2019 POL 241 Chap 5 “State Power and the Structure of International” By Trade Stephen D. Krasner. Quote:    “The relationship between political power and the international trading structure can be analyzed in terms of the relative opportunity costs of closure for trading partners. The higher the relative cost of closure, the weaker the political position of the state. Other things being equal, utility costs will be less for larger states because they generally have a smaller proportion of their economy engaged in the international economy system.” Meaning/Chosen:      Krasner develops a model of receptiveness to open trade based on the interests of states. He sets up the model not to specifically refute other perspectives although presumably the superiority of his approach is implicit. He does specifically mention wishing to refute the idea that states open trade policy as the result of international elements beyond the contr...

Elayne Guzman Summer 2019 POL 241 Chap 4 Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games @ Robert D. Putnam Quote: “The politics of many international negotiations can usefully be conceived by a two level game. At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favorable policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among those groups. At the international level, national governments seek to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign developments. Neither of the two games can be ignored by central decision-makers, so long as their countries remain interdependent, yet sovereign.”   Meaning/Chosen:     Putnam wants to model how domestic politics affects international relations, thus leaving purely statistic/realist perspectives. He assumes that international decision makers are concerned both with domestic...

Elayne Guzman                              Cooperation and Conflict in the Global Political Economy, Chap 3 Mancur Olson “ The Logic of Collective Action” Quote: “But it is not in fact true that the idea that groups will act in their self-interest follows logically from the premise of rational and self-interested behavior. It does not follow, because all of the individuals in a group would gain if they achieved their group objective, that they would act to achieve that objective, even if they were all rational and self interested. Indeed, unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.” Meaning/Chosen: For Olson, if everyone in a group (of any size) has interests in common, then they will...

Elayne Guzman “The Aftermath of Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures” by Adams Smith Quote:     "Alexander Hamilton’s famous Report on the Subject of Manufactures has cast a long shadow over U.S. trade policy toward industry. Issued in December 1791, the report not only provided theoretical justifications for the promotion of domestic manufacturing, but as a policy document made specific proposals for government action. These proposals included higher import duties on certain final goods, lower import duties on certain raw materials, pecuniary bounties (production subsidies) for selected industries, government assistance for the immigration of skilled workers, among other measures. To this day, the report is often heralded as the quintessential American statement against the laissez faire doctrine of free trade and for activist government policies in favor of manufacturing, including protectionist tariffs." Meaning/Chosen:     Hamilton’s report on manufact...

Elayne Guzman                                               The Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith Quote: Human Nature and the Division of Labor “This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in views no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another. Meaning: For Smith, the fact that some nations are wealthier than other nations, it is not that other countries work harder or have better resources; it is because of free trade. Smith walks us through the foundation of money and the ways that money makes trad...

David Harvey, "Neo-liberalism as Creative Destruction" Quote: “ Neo-liberalism has not proven effective at revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded in restoring class power” Meaning:  For Harvey, neo-liberalism is a project to achieve the restoration of class power in the wake of the economic. He contends that we can interpret neo-liberalization either as a Utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re- establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economics.  Harvey argues that neo-liberalism is an ideological tool and economic formula used by the upper class to re-dominate lower class. However, neo-liberalism is not a successful economic stimulant, but a destructive one. Chosen: I chose this quote because it gives a clear insight of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism had destroyed pre-existing organization and instit...