| Overview
The international diffusion of markets and associated economic activity have become so common that they are often taken to be the only factors of importance to globalization. By the same token, globalization is often taken to occur only as a consequence of the free movement of goods, services and capital. While it is the case that deregulation, investment and technological development have all had tremendous impacts on regions and states, this fails to consider what is truly exceptional about the current global expansion of economic activity--after all, capitalism has been global for 500 years. The new global political economy is structured around regions linked into networks that maximize information and knowledge transfers and applications, on the one hand, and on the conversion of public goods into proprietary ones, on the other. When the most fundamental resource is information and knowledge, comparative advantage is constantly changing but can also be constantly created, through both innovation and capture of short-term monopoly rents on intellectual property rights. The network structure of the new global political economy also generates a logic of constantly changing relative positions based on horizontal and vertical relationships. Position and success are never guaranteed, but they are also never externally or permanently determined. The possibility of creating successes, especially on the local and regional levels, offers opportunities to governments, corporations and social actors to influence and shape the economic environment in ways that were not available under prior national and international constraints. The New Global Political Economy program seeks to explore the linking of regions into global networks, through commodification and enclosure, and the ways in which social actors might structure these new relationships so as to maximize social capital and provide long-term, sustainable social and political development.
Projects
- Rethinking Globalization In South Asia
- Development and Information Technology, centers on informational practice and infrastructures, global software organization, regional economic development and e-governance in South and Southeast Asia.
- Human Rights and Property Rights, this is a new project that will examine the tensions between the protection of individuals from depredations by state and capital, on the one hand, and the intensified drive for commodification and privatization driven by the global search for profits. It will also address how these processes push and pull migration between countries, thereby creating the demand for more expansive membership rights and tensions within host societies.
- Migration
- Consortium for Social and Environmental Innovation
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