Monthly Archive for October, 2011

Editing Services Now Available

Published on October 31, 2011 in Journal. 0 Comments

The Global Studies Journal is pleased to offer editing services for authors who would like to have their work professionally edited. The services offered can help authors at the point of initial submission or during the revision stage, before the final submission of their paper. Please contact journals@onglobalisation.com for more information.

The editing process

  1. Email journals@onglobalisation.com to express your interest in having your paper edited.
  2. The Commissioning Editor of the Journal will review your paper and provide you with a quote.
  3. Once you accept the quote, the Commissioning Editor will assign a copyeditor to your paper.
  4. Within 7-14 business days of your confirmed payment, you will receive a copy of your edited paper via email.

Disclaimer

Please note that this service is not mandatory for publication in a Common Ground journal. Using this service does not guarantee acceptance for publication, nor are you obliged to submit your edited manuscript to a Common Ground journal.

Request More Information

For more information or to request a quote, please email journals@onglobalisation.com

Rethinking Central Banking

Published on October 31, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Barry Eichengreen, Eswar Prasad, Raghuram Rajan, VOX

Central banks have massively broadened their remit in recent crisis-laden years, but the standard analytic framework – ‘flexible inflation targeting’ – has not changed. This column argues that it is time to properly flesh out an alternative framework. Financial stability should be an explicit mandate of central banks, and international coordination among central banks should be boosted by forming a small group of systemically significant central banks that regularly meets and issues reports to the G20 on their financial-stability policies.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, there is an emerging consensus that the framework underpinning modern central banking – known as flexible inflation targeting – needs to be rethought.

  • A monetary policy framework focusing on price stability and output growth will also affect financial stability through its impact on asset valuations, commodity prices, credit, leverage, capital flows, and exchange rates.
  • One country’s monetary policy can spill over to other countries, especially when central banks follow inconsistent frameworks, with cross-border capital flows serving as the transmission channel.

All this suggests that the conventional framework for central banking is inadequate (eg Dalla Pellegrina et al 2010). It is too narrow to meet domestic and global needs, as we argue in Eichengreen et al (2011).

To Read More…

Image: Salvatore Vuono

Call for Book Reviewers

Published on October 28, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

Common Ground Publishing is seeking distinguished peer reviewers to evaluate book manuscripts submitted to the On Globalization Book Series.

As part of our commitment to intellectual excellence and a rigorous review process, Common Ground sends book manuscripts that have received initial editorial approval to peer reviewers to further evaluate and provide constructive feedback. The comments and guidance that these reviewers supply is invaluable to our authors and an essential part of the publication process.

Common Ground recognizes the important role of referees by acknowledging book reviewers as members of the On Globalization Book Series Editorial Review Board for a period of at least one year. The list of members of the Editorial Review Board will be posted on our website. In addition, Common Ground also offers a US$200 voucher for each completed review which meets the standards set out by the Commissioning Editor at the commencement of assignment. Vouchers may be used in the Common Ground Bookstore or for registration at one of our international conferences.

If you would like to referee book manuscripts submitted to On Globalization please email. Please make sure to include:

  1. a brief description of your professional credentials
  2. a list of your areas of interest and expertise
  3. a copy of your CV with current contact details

If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for manuscripts within your purview, we will contact you.

Trade With China Is A Really Big Deal

Published on October 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Matthew Yglesias, ThingProgress.Org

I was emailed Justin Lahart’s writeup of “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market E?ects of Import Competition in the United States” (PDF) by David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson just earlier and I have to say that looking at the paper I don’t totally understand the fanfare the Wall Street Journal gave it. Here’s the abstract:

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial di?erences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by industry to other high-income countries. Rising exposure increases unemployment, lowers labor force participation, and reduces wages in local labor markets. Conservatively, it explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. Transfer bene?ts payments for unemployment, disability, retirement, and healthcare also rise sharply in exposed labor markets. The deadweight loss of ?nancing these transfers is one to two-thirds as large as U.S. gains from trade with China.

This is interesting and important work, but it doesn’t overturn David Ricardo or whatever’s in the introductory textbooks. It says that imports from China create a broad-based consumer surplus and concentrated losses for producers of import-competing goods. The interesting empirical finding here is that the scale of the impact is really large. Some countries (Iceland, Israel, Denmark) are small so it’s always been obvious that international trade is very important to them but the traditional analysis of postwar America was that international trade just wasn’t that big a deal for the United States. But China is a huge country and it’s growing rapidly, so the scale of the trade impacts is much larger than we’ve traditionally seen.

To Read More…

How Tiny Errors in Africa Led to a Global Triumph

Published on October 24, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., The New York Times

When I helped run a measles immunization program in West Africa in the 1960s, I learned that in global health small things can spell the difference between a major success and a colossal failure.

The newly developed measles vaccine had proved to be safe and effective in tests in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). But the program to expand benefits of the successful field trial to a larger regional population failed miserably, mostly because of small errors like simple misspellings.

A request for Globaline water-purifying tablets, for example, yielded instead a large shipment of gamma globulin, a huge and costly waste of that human blood product. Other errors resulted in sending refrigerators and other equipment that could not work in the heat of the sub-Saharan region.

To Read More…

Image: United Press International

Regime Change Doesn’t Work

Published on October 20, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Alexander B. Downes, Boston Review

This article is part of “Regime Change Doesn’t Work”, a forum on the use of military intervention to overthrow foreign governments.

Still knee-deep in the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, this spring, the United States entered the regime change business in Libya.

After Muammar Qaddafi began suppressing a popular uprising there, the UN Security Council authorized a no-fly zone to protect civilians. President Barack Obama made it clear from the beginning that half-measures would not suffice, asserting in March that Qaddafi had “lost the legitimacy to lead” and demanding that he “step down from power and leave.” Although the president later backtracked somewhat from his hawkish stance, in April he reaffirmed that regime change was the U.S. objective. In an op-ed penned with British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama denied any intent to “remove Qaddafi by force,” but added, “It is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Qaddafi in power. . . . Qaddafi must go and go for good.”

The Libyan operation is the third post-9/11 U.S. military intervention whose explicit goal is regime change. The United States also played a role in a fourth case, the removal of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

To Read More…

Image: Ira F. Cummings

Thinking the Unthinkable in Europe

Published on October 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By George Soros, Project Syndicate

NEW YORK – To resolve a crisis in which the impossible has become possible, it is necessary to think the unthinkable. So, to resolve Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis, it is now imperative to prepare for the possibility of default and defection from the eurozone by Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Ireland.

In such a scenario, measures will have to be taken to prevent a financial meltdown in the eurozone as a whole. First, bank deposits must be protected. If a euro deposited in a Greek bank would be lost through default and defection, a euro deposited in an Italian bank would immediately be worth less than one in a German or Dutch bank, resulting in a run on the deficit countries’ banks.

Moreover, some banks in the defaulting countries would have to be kept functioning in order to prevent economic collapse. At the same time, the European banking system would have to be recapitalized and put under European, as distinct from national, supervision. Finally, government bonds issued by the eurozone’s other deficit countries would have to be protected from contagion. (The last two requirements would apply even if no country defaulted.)

To Read More…

1493: How Christopher Columbus Inaugurated the Age of Globalisation

Published on October 12, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

1493: How Europe’s Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth, by Charles C Mann, Granta

Reviewed by Marek Kohn, Financial Times

In hindsight, 1492 might have been a good point at which to reset the calendar. Traditionally, the year in which Columbus discovered America is seen as the moment Europe began to shape a New World. Today it looks more like the start of a process that has stitched the drifting continents back together: 1492 was the Year Zero of globalisation, and 1493 was Year One.

It has been a thrilling and frequently catastrophic ride for humankind ever since, and science writer Charles C Mann’s excitement never flags as he tells his breathtaking story. His account enshrines Columbus as a founding father of globalisation, and recognises that its effects have been as much biological as economic. Here he borrows from the historian Alfred W Crosby, who in 1972 coined the phrase “Columbian Exchange” to describe the traffic of species between continents. The term is elegant, but the exchange was often anything but equitable. Europe sent malaria to the Americas; in return the Americas gave Europe a cure, the Andean cinchona bark from which quinine is derived.

Mann’s argument, in which human history is considered in the light of ecology and vice versa, adopts the approach epitomised by the scientist Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. (It also follows on from Mann’s earlier book 1491, which was about the Americas before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.) But although much of his narrative is inevitably devoted to the relentless violence that enforced the Columbian Exchange, and the pestilences that accompanied it, his sources of inspiration are often closer to home. How, he wonders, did a variety of tomato bred in Ukraine come to be cultivated in New England? And how did tomatoes travel north from the Andes to Mexico, where they were brought to a level of palatability that has made them indispensable to the cuisine of, among other places, Italy? In the Philippines, children sing a song about an idealised garden that lists 18 plants, every one of which was introduced from Africa, the Americas or east Asia. “Far from being an exemplar of age-old custom,” Mann observes, “it is a polyglot, cosmopolitan, thoroughly contemporary artifact.”

To Read More…

The Ailing Euro is Part of a Wider Crisis: Our Capitalist System is Near Meltdown

Published on October 8, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Will Hutton, The Guardian

Eighty years ago, faced with today’s economic events, nobody would have been in any doubt: we would obviously be living through a crisis in capitalism. Instead, there is a collective unwillingness to call a spade a spade. This is variously a crisis of the European Union, a crisis of the euro, a debt crisis or a crisis of political will. It is all those things, but they are subplots of a much bigger story: the way capitalism has been conceived and practised for the last 30 years has hit the buffers. Unless and until that is recognised, western economies will be locked in stagnation which could even transmute into a major economic disaster.

Simply put, the world has trillions upon trillions of excessive private debt financed by too many different currencies whose risk is allegedly mitigated by even more trillions of financial bets which in aggregate do not minimise the systemic risk one iota. This entire financial edifice, underwritten by tiny amounts of capital, has been created over three decades backed by the theory that markets do not make mistakes. Capitalism is best conceived and practised, runs the theory, by hunter-gatherer bankers and entrepreneurs owing no allegiance to the state or society.

This is nonsense. Business and the state co-generate wealth in a system of complex mutual dependence. Markets are beset by mood swings and uncertainty which, if not offset by government action, lead to violent oscillations. Capitalism without responsibility or proportionality degrades into racketeering and exploitation. The prospect of limitless pay is an open invitation to bad, or even criminal, behaviour. Good capitalism cannot happen without referees to blow the whistle or robust frameworks in which markets can function; neither is reliably created by capitalism itself, hence the role of democratic government. Yet the world is trying to solve the legacy of the last 30 years as if none of this were true and, instead, that the practice and theories that created the mess are still valid.

To Read More…

Photo: africa

A Sorry Story of American Trade

Published on October 4, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By G.I., The Economist

WHEN experts try to ferret out the causes of America’s lost decade, international trade is often cast as the villain. It may in fact be the victim. In the last decade America’s commitment to openness has flagged, and with it, its trade prowess and its appeal as a destination for investment. As international trade and investment have historically been major drivers of productivity, employment, and innovation, this declining engagement with the world may be an important contributor to the malaise that afflicts the economy.

That, at least, is the upshot of an impressively detailed if troubling new report from the Council on Foreign Relations. America, it concludes, risks being left a bystander as the rest of the world integrates further.

The report was produced by a task force headed by Andy Card, the former chief of staff to George W. Bush, and Tom Daschle, former Democratic Senate leader. Its project leaders are Edward Alden of the Council and Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth College. Task force members include academics, think tankers, and labour and corporate representatives with an interest in trade.

America’s share of world exports has slipped more than that of most developed countries over the last decade while its share of direct investment has plummeted precipitously. Meanwhile, the number of export-related American jobs has stagnated and multinational companies are now expanding payroll overseas while cutting it in America, the reverse of their traditional pattern.

To Read More…

Image: renjith krishnan