Category: Livres anglais et trangers,Business & Investing,Economics
Outsourcing Economics: Global Value Chains in Capitalist Development Details
Outsourcing Economics has a double meaning. First, it is a book about the economics of outsourcing. Second, it examines the way that economists have understood globalization as a pure market phenomenon, and as a result have 'outsourced' the explanation of world economic forces to other disciplines. Markets are embedded in a set of institutions - labor, government, corporate, civil society, and household - that mold the power asymmetries that influence the distribution of the gains from globalization. In this book, William Milberg and Deborah Winkler propose an institutional theory of trade and development starting with the growth of global value chains - international networks of production that have restructured the global economy and its governance over the past twenty-five years. They find that offshoring leads to greater economic insecurity in industrialized countries that lack institutions supporting workers. They also find that offshoring allows firms to reduce domestic investment and focus on finance and short-run stock movements.
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Reviews
This book provides a broad coverage of the new pattern of international trade that deeply affects the type of economic activity taking place in rich and poor countries alike. The former ones are gradually becoming "post-industrial" for good, as most of the labor-intensive manufacturing is now performed in the latter. International trade has entered into a new "mercantilist" era, where the modern equivalent of the East Indies Companies of the 17th and 18th centuries are competing to procure cheap goods in the "global south" that they will sell dear in the "global north". The book mentions all the important theoretical and empirical works that has been done to understand these new developments, although the theoretical discussions would have deserved a deeper, more analytical description. The authors indulge in a sort of "paradigmatic rebel" posturing that becomes taxing for the reader after a while. The econometrics, most of it original, is at times naive in terms of identification strategy. Still, I learnt a lot from this book, I found plenty of incentives to go to the original sources, and I will include it my reading list for students, albeit with a word of caution.
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