front cover of Fast, Easy, and In Cash
Fast, Easy, and In Cash
Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy
Jason Antrosio and Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld
University of Chicago Press, 2015
“Artisan” has become a buzzword in the developed world, used for items like cheese, wine, and baskets, as corporations succeed at branding their cheap, mass-produced products with the popular appeal of small-batch, handmade goods. The unforgiving realities of the artisan economy, however, never left the global south, and anthropologists have worried over the fate of resilient craftspeople as global capitalism remade their cultural and economic lives. Yet artisans are proving to be surprisingly vital players in contemporary capitalism, as they interlock innovation and tradition to create effective new forms of entrepreneurship. Based on seven years of extensive research in Colombia and Ecuador, veteran ethnographers Jason Antrosio and Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld’s Fast, Easy, and In Cash explores how small-scale production and global capitalism are not directly opposed, but rather are essential partners in economic development.

Antrosio and Colloredo-Mansfeld demonstrate how artisan trades evolve in modern Latin American communities. In uncertain economies, small manufacturers have adapted to excel at home-based production, design, technological efficiency, and investments. Vivid case studies illuminate this process: peasant farmers in Túquerres, Otavalo weavers, Tigua painters, and the t-shirt industry of Atuntaqui. Fast, Easy, and In Cash exposes how these ambitious artisans, far from being holdovers from the past, are crucial for capitalist innovation in their communities and provide indispensable lessons in how we should understand and cultivate local economies in this era of globalization.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
The Financial Crisis and the Global South
A Development Perspective
Yilmaz Akyuz
Pluto Press, 2013

This book is a major contribution exploring the policy options available for developing and emerging economies in response to the global economic crises.

Written by a highly respected development economist, the book gives a clear-eyed account of the issues particular to these countries and critically evaluates different policy approaches, including reforms in financial, monetary and trade policies. Informed by deep scholarship as well as practical experience, Yilmaz Akyüz draws on empirical data, historical context and theoretical expertise, with special attention paid to issues such as the role of the International Monetary Fund and China.

The Financial Crisis and the Global South is a landmark book that will be of interest to practitioners, scholars, theorists and students of economics and development studies.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Financial Liberalization and Economic Development in Korea, 1980–2020
Yung Chul Park
Harvard University Press, 2021

Since the early 1980s, Korea’s financial development has been a tale of liberalization and opening. After the 1997 financial crisis, great strides were made in building a market-oriented financial system through sweeping reforms for deregulation and the opening of financial markets. However, the new system failed to steer the country away from a credit card boom and bust in 2003, a liquidity crisis in 2008, and a run on its savings banks in 2011, and has been severely tested again by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Financial liberalization, clearly, has been no panacea.

This study analyzes the deepening of and structural changes in Korea’s financial system since the early 1980s and presents the empirical results of the effects of financial development on economic growth, stability, and the distribution of income. It finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, financial liberalization has contributed little to fostering the growth and stability of the Korean economy and has exacerbated income distribution problems. Are there any merits in financial liberalization? The authors answer this query through empirical examinations of the theories of finance and growth. They point to a clear need to further improve the efficiency, soundness, and stability of Korean financial institutions and markets.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, 1840-1937
Chi-ming Hou
Harvard University Press

front cover of Foxconned
Foxconned
Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government
Lawrence Tabak
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Powerful and resonant, Foxconned is both the definitive autopsy of the Foxconn fiasco and a dire warning to communities and states nationwide.

When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker stood shoulder to shoulder with President Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan at the White House in July 2017, they painted a glorious picture of his state’s future. Foxconn, the enormous China-based electronics firm, was promising to bring TV manufacturing back to the United States with a $10 billion investment and 13,000 well-paying jobs. They actually were making America great again, they crowed.
 
Two years later, the project was in shambles. Ten thousand construction workers were supposed to have been building what Trump had promised would be “the eighth wonder of the world.” Instead, land had been seized, homes had been destroyed, and hundreds of millions of municipal dollars had been committed for just a few hundred jobs—nowhere near enough for Foxconn to earn the incentives Walker had shoveled at them. In Foxconned, journalist Lawrence Tabak details the full story of this utter collapse, which was disturbingly inevitable.
 
As Tabak shows, everything about Foxconn was a disaster. But worse, he reveals how the economic incentive infrastructure across the country is broken, leading to waste, cronyism, and the steady transfer of tax revenue to corporations. Tabak details every kind of financial chicanery, from eminent domain abuse to good old-fashioned looting—all to benefit a coterie of consultants, politicians, and contractors. With compassion and care, he also reports the distressing stories of the many individuals whose lives were upended by Foxconn.
[more]

front cover of From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt
From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt
Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938–1980
Bruce J. Schulman
Duke University Press, 1994
From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt investigates the effects of federal policy on the American South from 1938 until 1980 and charts the close relationship between federal efforts to reform the South and the evolution of activist government in the modern United States. Decrying the South’s economic backwardness and political conservatism, the Roosevelt Administration launched a series of programs to reorder the Southern economy in the 1930s. After 1950, however, the social welfare state had been replaced by the national security state as the South’s principal benefactor. Bruce J. Schulman contrasts the diminished role of national welfare initiatives in the postwar South with the expansion of military and defense-related programs. He analyzes the contributions of these growth-oriented programs to the South’s remarkable economic expansion, to the development of American liberalism, and to the excruciating limits of Sunbelt prosperity, ultimately relating these developments to southern politics and race relations. By linking the history of the South with the history of national public policy, Schulman unites two issues that dominate the domestic history of postwar America—the emergence of the Sunbelt and the expansion of federal power over the nation’s economic and social life. A forcefully argued work, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, originally published in 1991(Oxford University Press), will be an important guide to students and scholars of federal policy and modern Southern history.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter