Quicksilver Capital: How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World by Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee (HG3891 .M42 1991)Over recent decades, capital has become smaller and lighter, less physical, more transportable. Capital, in the form of brainpower and information (which is no more tangible than electronic impulses on computer disks), can be sent around the globe at the speed of light and for the cost of a telephone call. Capital has become as slippery as quicksilver, as difficult for governments to tax as it is for them to define and harness it, and this quicksilver capital is primed to move to more cost-effective venues at the slightest government provocation. To shape and constrain government policies, quicksilver capital need not move; it need only threaten to move.
(http://www.reason.com/9302/mckenzie.html)(the term may have been coined by Walter Wriston, whose Twilight of Sovereignty: how the information revolution is transforming our world (HC79.I55 W75 1992) was a [relatively early] statement of the solvent powers of Information --see Terry J. van der Werf's review)
?"Liberal International Economic Order"?
Note on Globalisation (F. Nemani, via Iran Virual Library)
The World Situation (Kalayaan --from the Philippines)
The Return to a Global Economy (Ian Vásquez, Cato Institute)
JAPAN AND THE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS (Marcus Noland, Senior Fellow Institute for International Economics)Japan has arguably been the prime beneficiary of the liberal international economic order. In the area of trade, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and later, its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), have facilitated the reduction in barriers to international trade worldwide and thereby enabled Japan's exploitation of its comparative advantage and contributed to income growth and rising living standards in postwar Japan. The World Bank, along with its Bretton Woods twin, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), contributed even more directly to postwar Japanese economic development, by financing such infrastructural projects as the construction of the Shinkansen ('bullet train') railway system. As the post-war economic reconstruction proceeded, these institutions continued to serve Japan well, as its economic interests broadened from trade and finance, narrowly defined, to encompass a wide range of issues relevant to the expansion of Japanese firms around the world.International Trade History: GATT to the WTO
?"moral hazard"?
Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: The International Monetary and Financial Policies of the Clinton Administration (J. Bradford DeLong, Barry Eichengreen)kleptocraciesIMF Financing and Moral Hazard (Timothy Lane and Steven Phillips)
"Moral hazard" is a term frequently heard in recent debates over the reform of international financial institutions. In other words, critics argue that the knowledge that IMF financing will be made available in the event of a financial crisis makes the crisis more likely to occur. The idea is that creditors know that IMF financing helps crisis-prone countries stave off default and are therefore willing to lend to such countries at lower interest rate spreads than would prevail if the IMF did not exist. The IMF's presence thus weakens pressure on governments to pursue policies—such as sustainable fiscal policies and sound financial supervision and regulation—that could help prevent crises.Associated with this view is the suggestion that moral hazard may have increased in recent years. It has been argued, in particular, that the IMF's response to Mexico's crisis in early 1995 signaled a new era of massive "bailouts" that inspired higher levels of risk taking and set the stage for crises in East Asia, Russia, and Brazil just a few years later.
Mexico: Policy Failure, Moral Hazard,and Market Solutions (W. Lee Hoskins and James W. Coons, Cato Institute)
The U.S. government's regular practice of extending guarantees to certain countries experiencing financial difficulties underwrites policies in those countries that otherwise would be untenable. It sends a message to investors, both foreign and domestic, that they can invest with little fear of a total loss. That weakens the integrity of financial contracts and the scrutiny that contracting parties would otherwise apply to each other. It also results in excessive risk taking because a third party bears the risk. That situation is analogous to the moral hazard created by federal deposit insurance. Depositors do not scrutinize banks' financial strengths and weaknesses because they bear no risk of loss. That frees bank officials to take larger risks than they could if there were no deposit insurance. By encouraging excessive risk taking, the federal guarantee threatens large losses to U.S. taxpayers who already have paid $150 billion for the thrift bailout.
Criminal Safehavens, Kleptocracies, and Failed States
Excerpts from The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
Plug into globalization without the right software and operating system and it will melt down your economy with the blink of an eye. Plug into it without the right environmental surge protectors and it will pave over your forests in a flash. Open your borders to globalization's cultural onslaught, without protective filters, and you could go to sleep at night thinking you're an Indian, and Egyptian, an Israeli, a Chinese or a Brazilian and wake up the next morning to find that all your kids look like Ginger Spice.
Some other terms:
xrefer defines
another summery
Mike Alexander's summary
Daniel Fisher's
Mapping the Global Web at Princeton
Defining a Global Geography (Eszter Hargittai and Miguel Angel Centeno)One estimate of the globalized black market suggests that it may represent $US 500 billion dollars of transactions a year. In general, smuggling (writ large) may be the oldest form of globalization. It may also be the purest expression of the phenomenon if by that we think of it as a global search for economic or social efficiency that explicitly seeks to evade formal state authority... Money laundering may total the equivalent of 2-5% of global GDP. Drugs may be one of the most important international commodites with important consequences for capital flows, transport networks, and political complications. One estimate places this trade at $400 billion annually or 8% of world trade. Small arms may also represent an important international commodity whose flows are not well documented. Prostitution alone is said to be a $20 billion industry with an important international dimension... (pg. 15-16)
International Networks Archive at Princeton
Global Context of International Crime: Implications of a Changing World (from terrorism.com)