Abigail Cooke

Unexpected Outcomes of Thai Cassava Trade: A Case of Global Complexity and Local Unsustainability

Abstract Tracing the Thai cassava (Manihot esculenta) trade network, between 1960 and 2000, offers a compelling example of global complexity at work. The emergence of Thailands dominance of world export markets caught the world by surprise. The opening up of a European market for cassava was supposed to be met by Brazilian and Indonesian producers. Instead, Thailand took over the market by 1975. Several factors facilitated this emergence including: entrepreneurial diasporic networks of Thai-Chinese traders, local political economy conditions in both Europe and Thailand, and ecological conditions in Thailand. These same factors also shaped the subsequent timing of the closing of the European market, the emergence of a new industry association, the creation of new cassava products, and the expansion to other markets. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of cassava market yielded equivocal outcomes for both Europe and Thai farmers. A Chinese version of this articles abstract is available online at: www.informaworld.com/rglo

Urban Immigrant Diversity and Inclusive Institutions

abstract Recent studies identify a robust positive correlation between the productivity of urban workers and the presence of a diverse range of immigrants in their midst. Seeking to better understand this relationship, this article tests the hypothesis that the rewards from immigrant diversity will be higher in metropolitan areas that feature more inclusive social and economic institutions. Institutions ought to matter because they regulate transaction costs, which, in principle, determine whether or not diversity offers advantages or disadvantages. We exploit longitudinal linked employer–employee data for the United States to test this idea, and we triangulate across two measures that differently capture the inclusiveness of urban institutions. Findings offer support for the hypothesis. In cities with low levels of inclusive institutions, the benefits of diversity are modest and in some cases nonexistent; in cities with high levels of inclusive institutions, the benefits of immigrant diversity are positive, significant, and substantial. We also find that weakly inclusive institutions hurt natives considerably more than foreign-born workers. These results confirm the economic significance of immigrant diversity, while suggesting the importance of local social and economic institutions.

Cheap Imports and the Loss of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs

This paper examines the role of international trade, and specifically imports from low-wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor-proportions-inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry-level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics dataset, detailed establishment information from the Census of Manufactures, and transaction-level trade data, we find that rising import competition from China and other developing economies increases the likelihood of job loss among manufacturing workers with less than a high school degree; it is not significantly related to job losses for workers with at least a college degree.

Conclusion: Negotiating the Dynamics of Global Complexity

The original call for papers for the ‘Trading Morsels’ conference asked authors to address the social and environmental consequences of the globalization of agriculture by focusing on an important traded commodity and a major geographical link in that commodity’s trade. During the course of the conference itself, and in subsequent discussions, we learned that the globalization of agriculture is a complicated story that does not always or easily lend itself to a commodity chain approach. Perhaps this is not surprising. Social systems are almost always more complicated than our models suggest. The important question is whether the complexity matters. And in this case we believe not only that the complexity matters but that it is the defining characteristic and most policy relevant feature of the global food trade.

Introduction: Agriculture, Trade, and the Global Governance of Food

For most of human history, people consumed what they produced and produced what they consumed. The current era is notable, however, in that more people than ever before are no longer directly involved in the production of their own food. Instead, they are connected, usually through extensive and opaque webs, to disparate and distant production locales (Smith, 1998, p. 208).

Spillovers from Immigrant Diversity in Cities

Using comprehensive longitudinal matched employer-employee data for the U.S., this paper provides new evidence on the relationship between productivity and immigration-spawned urban diversity. Existing empirical work has uncovered a robust positive correlation between productivity and immigrant diversity, supporting theory suggesting that diversity acts as a local public good that makes workers more productive by enlarging the pool of knowledge available to them, as well as by fostering opportunities for them to recombine ideas to generate novelty. This paper makes several empirical and conceptual contributions. First, it improves on existing empirical work by addressing various sources of potential bias, especially from unobserved heterogeneity among individuals, work establishments, and cities. Second, it augments identification by using longitudinal data that permits examination of how diversity and productivity co-move. Third, the paper seeks to reveal whether diversity acts upon productivity chiefly at the scale of the city or the workplace. Findings confirm that urban immigrant diversity produces positive and nontrivial spillovers for U.S. workers. This social return represents a distinct channel through which immigration generates broad-based economic benefits.

Trade governance at a crossroads: Continuity and change in uncertain times:

The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 represented a watershed in international trade governance. The agreement set precedent in new trade disciplines, such as intellectual property rights, that had hitherto remained outside of the traditional trade realm. It was also credited with rescuing then-stalled multilateral trade talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and shaping their outcome (Wilkinson, 2014). At least equally significant is what the agreement achieved in terms of political discourse. In the United States, for instance, debate over NAFTA was central to the 1992 Presidential election. Independent candidate Ross Perot famously croaked from the edge of the debate stage that if NAFTA were passed, ‘you are going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country’ (quoted in Mayer, 1998). His opponents, Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party and the incumbent George H.W. Bush of the Republican Party, were unfazed. Both mainstream parties had signed on to the free trade agenda. Opposition from sectors fighting for the wellbeing of US, Canadian and Mexican workers alike in the face of lowest common denominator environmental and labour regulations, and the then new, binding investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, were delegitimized in the face of this mainstream consensus, dismissed as a facet of the billionaire-turned-presidential candidate’s parochial nationalism (Sparke, 2005). In the years that followed, far-reaching regional trade agreements (RTAs) would become principal tools to organize a new global trade and investment order amid continued protest from labour and progressive social movements. A quarter of a century later, another billionaire, Donald Trump, revived the discourse of Ross Perot, this time from the centre of the Presidential debate stage as the candidate for the Republican Party. Trump mixed racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric with a potent message on trade: NAFTA had been ‘the worst trade deal ever’ (quoted in Hirschfeld, 2017), responsible for huge losses in US jobs, leaving disinvested communities and disenchanted workers in its wake. To bring ‘their jobs’ back, Trump pledged not only to renegotiate NAFTA under the threat of US withdrawal (Appelbaum and Thrush, 2017), but also to cease participation in what he argued was a continuation of the same bad strategy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (Swanson, 2016). The TPP had been touted by the Obama Administration as the next

Task Trade and the Wage Effects of Import Competition

Do job characteristics modulate the relationship between import competition and the wages of workers who perform those jobs? This paper tests the claim that workers in occupations featuring highly routine tasks will be more vulnerable to low-wage country import competition. Using data from the US Census Bureau, we construct a pooled cross-section (1990, 2000, and 2007) of more than 1.6 million individuals linked to the establishment in which they work. Occupational measures of vulnerability to trade competition – routineness, analytic complexity, and interpersonal interaction on the job – are constructed using O*NET data. The linked employer-employee data allow us to model the effect of low-wage import competition on the wages of workers with different occupational characteristics. Our results show that low-wage country import competition is associated with lower wages for US workers holding jobs that are highly routine and less complex. For workers holding nonroutine and highly complex jobs, increased import competition is associated with higher wages. Finally, workers in occupations with the highest and lowest levels of interpersonal interaction see higher wages, while workers with medium-low levels of interpersonal interaction suffer lower wages with increased low-wage import competition. These findings demonstrate the importance of accounting for occupational characteristics to more fully understand the relationship between trade and wages, and suggest ways in which task trade vulnerable occupations can disadvantage workers even when their jobs remain onshore.

Branding and Certification

Shifts in consumption practices in industrialized countries are closely linked to the rise of quality standards and their importance in the shape of what we refer to as the global food web. Increased consumer awareness of food safety, environment, social justice, and the rise of product differentiation within a saturated market for homogeneous commodity foods have all contributed to numerous and increasingly specific quality standards (Ponte & Gibbon, 2005, p. 2). Key to implementing or meeting the standards is the control and communication of information about the product, production, and process and their quality-related attributes. Vertical integration is one solution to this information problem. However, labels, branding, certification, and codification also allow quality information to get from the producers through processors, distributors and retailers to the consumers (p. 3). One example of this kind of branding or certification is a geographical indication: ‘A product’s quality, reputation or other characteristics can be determined by where it comes from. Geographical indications are place names (in some countries also words associated with a place) used to identify products that come from these places and have these characteristics . . .’ (WTO, 2005). While there are many types of labels of origin, some of which are basically just advertising, geographical indications, such as the French appellation d’origine côntrolée, have state protection and administrative support (Barham, 2003, p. 128). Their exact extent as intellectual property under World Trade Organization agreements is still under debate, which hints at their importance to producers for market access. This is but one example of branding, but the high stakes and potential impacts on producers and markets apply to other schemes as well. Complicating this is that quality is not objective nor understood in the same way by different people. Further, conventions about what is understood as quality can arise intentionally with planning or unintentionally through practice or problemsolving (Ponte & Gibbon, 2005, p. 6). Some of this complexity is reflected in the variety of new standards and the shifts in older ones. The papers in this section explore different branding and certifying schemes and provide grounded investigation of their impacts on localities. Aparicio and her colleagues examine