James M. Cypher

The Strategic Role of Mexican Labor under NAFTA: Critical Perspectives on Current Economic Integration

This article aims to reveal the precise meaning of Mexicos export platform by focusing on maquiladoras and the disguised maquila industry. In both sectors, imported components account for 75 to 90 percent of export value. As a result, benefits for the Mexican economy are basically restricted to wages, that is, the value of the labor incorporated into the exports. The authors argue that what is actually taking place is the disembodied exportation of labor or, alternatively, that the workforce is being exported without requiring Mexican workers to leave the country. The authors thus demystify the purported orientation of Mexican exports toward high-value-added manufactured goods and reveal the regressive movement of the export platform.

South America's commodities boom: developmental opportunity or path dependent reversion?

Abstract From 2003 through 2008 South Americas terms of trade moved strongly in favour of raw materials, and commodity prices remained very high through early 2010, potentially challenging the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis. Three possible results of the boom are analyzed: (1) a staples- or mineral-led development strategy creating linkages to overcome the enclave effects of agro-mineral export structures; (2) a transition strategy wherein ground rents form the basis for expanding national innovation systems enabling Latin America to move beyond raw material/cheap labour export dependence; (3) a return to the nineteenth-century pattern of resource and export dependence where an agro-mineral rentier/oligopolistic elite dominates production.

On the Income Gap Between Nations: Was Veblen the First Development Economist?

Development economics is understood as a postwar phenomenon without antecedents. Yet, Veblens contribution to development economics was once widely disseminated and acknowledged. Veblens evolutionary economics centered on historically relative and limited truths applicable to specific cultures. Veblens growth theory is a theory of economic development: quantitative accumulation is significant because it engenders qualitative change. Veblens analysis of the harnessing of the economic potential centers on the ability of a society to successfully introduce scientific and technological advances, giving rise to increasing returns as the surplus is invested in industrial activities. Veblen presented oblique comments and startling insights in a non-empirical manner.

Hegemony, military power projection and US structural economic interests in the periphery

Abstract Positing the dawning of a ‘post-American World’, ‘declinists’ have taken little account of the USA’s surging interventionist tendencies and the new political economy of military power arising from the relentless pursuit of global militarism. The USA has long exercised its competitive advantage in military power to enhance its diplomatic clout, as well as to advantageously reposition its national industrial and financial base. The pace of such martial efforts has accelerated as US policy makers, employing a ‘deep engagement’ grand strategy, strive for paradigm maintenance and geopolitical expansion within the periphery. Interventions have been facilitated through new processes and procedures, carefully constructed to create a sufficient degree of autonomy to permit the US state to ‘project power’ without broad societal resistance. US policy is path-dependent, locked into a reflexive pattern, unable and unwilling to learn from its long string of blunders and delusionary adventures. But US policy makers do not suffer a loss of will-to-power, as neo-conservatives allege.

Constructing Projects of National Development in Latin America

Abstract This article analyzes technology-related development in Latin America from a heterodox perspective based in Institutionalist and Structuralist Economics. Since the 1970s, the lack of systematic national projects designed to institutionalize endogenous innovation capabilities in the region has constituted a critical structural impediment to development. Eschewing the creation of public goods, most nations in Latin America abandoned important incipient efforts to develop technological autonomy as undertaken during the state-led industrialization period. This article highlights poorly understood but relatively successful aspects of the import substitution industrialization (ISI) strategy on technological advancement in the state-led era. Recently, neoliberalisms monolithic grip has been loosened. Brazil has undergone somewhat of a paradigmatic shift while advancing toward the creation of a national innovation system (NIS), thereby offering important lessons for other Latin American nations. Mexico, in contrast, shows no indication of attaining autonomous technological capabilities. The attainment of such capabilities in highly industrialized countries, and fast developing Asian nations, partially resulted from the construction of a NIS. The creation of a NIS embodies an interactive and interdependent process: it entails the joint and combined participation of scientists and others involved in research and development (R&D) activities in (1) the public and private sectors and (2) universities. These elements combine with agents of the state empowered to finance and coordinate the construction and maintenance of the NIS. The construction of a NIS has induced “increasing returns” in production processes. As Furtado emphasized, supply-enhancing technological capacity must be met by inclusive demand-enhancing policies that embed the vast underlying population in the growth process.

Energy Privatization and Land Grabbing: The Scope and Contradictions of the Mexican Neoliberal Oil Mega-initiative

The recent reforms to open Mexico’s energy sector to private and foreign investment are considered by Cypher to be the most radical change to the Mexican economy since the approval of NAFTA. In an historically contextualized analysis of these reforms, he argues that the selling off of publicly owned hydrocarbon reserves is being carried out in such a way as to privilege their transfer to the Mexican oligarchy. At the same time, Cypher observes that strategic alliances with transnational petroleum firms are promoted in order to gain access to the technology that these firms control for exploiting non-conventional oil and gas reserves. The whole process, he theorizes, can be seen as a sort of “institutionalized bonanzaism” which gives continuity to a historically entrenched culture of plunder and a rentier ethos stemming back to the Conquest. He points to new conflicts emerging around the construction of oil and gas infrastructure in different parts of the country and predicts that they will intensify and multiply as private investment begins to flow into infrastructural development and to increase the overall rate of extraction.

Instituciones y tecnología como factores clave en los proyectos nacionales del desarrollo: un análisis comparativo de Brasil y México

La ausencia de proyectos nacionales que permitan institucionalizar las capacidades innovadoras endogenas en America Latina ha constituido un impedimento estructural critico al desarrollo. Se presenta en este articulo un analisis de los temas relacionados con la tecnologia y el desarrollo desde una perspectiva heterodoxa. Gran parte de las naciones abandonaron sus esfuerzos incipientes por desarrollar un grado de autonomia tecnologica en contraste con los emprendimientos arrancados durante el periodo de la industrializacion dirigida por el Estado. Este articulo hace hincapie en las politicas tecnologicas montadas durante este periodo y las prospectivas actuales. Para anclar el trabajo, presentamos un analisis comparativo entre los casos dimetricos de Mexico y Brasil, enmarcado en las estructuras institucionales generadas por el poder economico y la ideologia dominante, siendo los factores determinantes en la formulacion de las politicas nacionales de ciencia y tecnologia.