Leonard Seabrooke

Everyday politics of the world economy

1. Introducing everyday IPE: decentring the discipline - revitalising the margins John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke Part I. Regimes as Cultural Weapons of the Weak: 2. The agency of labour in global change: reimagining the spaces and scales of trade union praxis within a global economy Andrew Herod 3. The agency of peripheral actors: small state tax havens and international regimes as weapons of the weak J. C. Sharman 4. Southern sites of female agency: informal regimes and female migrant labour resistance in East Asia Michele Ford and Nicola Piper Part II. Global Economic Change From Below: 5. The everyday social sources of imperial and hegemonic financial orders Leonard Seabrooke 6. Everyday investor subjects and global financial change: the rise of Anglo-American mass investment Paul Langley 7. Peasants as subaltern agents in Latin America: neoliberalism, resistance, and the power of the powerless Adam David Morton Part III. Bringing Eastern Agents In: 8. Eastern agents of globalisation: oriental globalisation in the rise of Western capitalism John M. Hobson 9. Diasporic agents and trans-Asian flows in the making of Asian modernity: the case of Thailand Ara Wilson 10. The agency of subordinate polities: Western hegemony in the East Asian mirror Shogo Suzuki 11. Conclusion: everyday IPE research, teaching and policy agendas John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke.

Seeing like an International Organisation

International organisations (IOs) often serve as the ‘engine room’ of ideas for structural reforms at the national level, but how do IOs construct cognitive authority over the forms, processes and prescriptions for institutional change in their member states? Exploring the analytic institutions created by IOs provides insights into how they make their member states ‘legible’ and how greater legibility enables them to construct cognitive authority in specific policy areas, which, in turn, enhances their capacity to influence changes in national frameworks for economic and social governance. Studying the indirect influence that IOs can exert over the design of national policies has, until recently, often been neglected in accounts of the contemporary roles that IOs play and the evolution of global economic governance. By ‘seeing like an IO’, we can increase our understanding of the cognitive and organisational environment that guides an IOs actions and informs its policy advice to states, which enables a more comprehensive picture of how the everyday business of global governance works in practice. Instead of ‘black boxing’ IOs, the contributors to this special issue demonstrate how studying IOs from the inside out expands our understanding both of the policy dialogue between IOs and their member states and how IOs and states learn from each other over time.

Powering ideas through expertise: professionals in global tax battles

ABSTRACT This contribution discusses how ideas are powered through expertise and moral authority. Professionals compete with each other to power ideas by linking claims to expertise, how things best work, to moral claims about how things should be. To show how, we draw on a case of battles over global tax policy. Corporate reporting for tax purposes is an area where the European Union, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations, large global accountancy firms and non-governmental organizations have been active. The point of contention here is what form of financial reporting multinational corporations should provide to ensure they pay their fair share of tax. Ideas powered by expertise contain shared causal beliefs, as well as principled beliefs about value systems. We demonstrate that professionals can contest the established order when demonstrations of expertise can be fused with claims to moral authority. Such a constellation is more likely when political conditions are favourable.

Global wealth chains in the international political economy

As this special issue demonstrates, the literature on Global Value Chains (GVCs), Global Production Networks, and Global Commodity Chains continues to provide important insights into the governance and organization of production and distribution networks. The continuing promise of these investigations is that knowledge about processes of information sharing enables developing countries to compete in the world economy, and that the wealth arising from production can better reflect where value is created. This commentary piece suggests that GVCs (hereafter ‘value chains’) co-exist with what we call Global Wealth Chains (GWCs or ‘wealth chains’). This co-existence undermines many of the development objectives articulated in research on value chains. We define Global Wealth Chains as linked forms of capital seeking to avoid accountability during processes of pecuniary wealth creation. By accountability we mean fiscal claims, legal obligations, or regulatory oversight. Global Wealth Chains are commonly located in offshore jurisdictions, but these places are not only the Caribbean islands we imagine as ‘tax havens’, but also include London, Amsterdam, and Singapore, among many others. Further, wealth chains are articulated not only through cartographic and sovereign spaces but also within financial products such as hybrids and derivatives. We suggest that wealth chains are the yin to the yang of value chains. While actors in value chains share an interest in transparency and coordination, those in wealth chains thrive on rendering movements through the chain opaque. Wealth chains hide, obscure and relocate wealth to the extent that they break loose from the location of value creation and heighten inequality. This commentary piece suggests that investigating the relationship between value chains and wealth chains is a much needed research agenda that is not currently being adequately addressed by scholars and policymakers.

Everyday Politics of the World Economy: Everyday IPE: revealing everyday forms of change in the world economy

[T]he period of relative calm in the world political economy in the second half of the 1980s was used by many scholars as an opportunity for strengthening the scholastic rigor of IPE without questioning its, often unstated, foundations. Many of us have not been particularly open to rearranging the hierarchy of the substantive issues that IPE studies, nor have we been happy to muck about with the hierarchy of values attached to those issues. (Murphy and Tooze 1991b: 5) While the general method of analysis is well-established and widely accepted, this hardly means that IPE has exhausted its potential. In fact, it is surprising how narrow is the range of analytical and empirical problems that existing scholarship has tackled in earnest … It may be that a great deal of theoretical, analytical, and methodological brush needs to be cleared. (Frieden and Martin 2002: 146) Our everyday actions have important consequences for the constitution and transformation of the local, national, regional and global contexts. How, what and with whom we spend, save, invest, buy and produce in our ordinary lives shapes markets and how states choose to intervene in them. The political, economic and social networks with which we associate ourselves provide us not only with meaning about how we think economic policy is made, but also constitute vehicles for how economic policy, both at home and abroad, should be made.

The governance of global wealth chains

ABSTRACT This article offers a theoretical framework to explain how Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) are created, maintained, and governed. We draw upon different strands of literature, including scholarship in International Political Economy and Economic Geography on Global Value Chains, literature on finance and law in Institutional Economics, and work from Economic Sociology on network dynamics within markets. This scholarship assists us in highlighting three variables in how GWCs are articulated and change according to: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) regulatory liability, and (3) innovation capacities among suppliers of products used in wealth chains. We then differentiate five types of GWC governance – Market, Modular, Relational, Captive, and Hierarchy – which range from simple ‘off shelf’ products shielded from regulators by advantageous international tax laws to highly complex and flexible innovative financial products produced by large financial institutions and corporations. This article highlights how GWCs intersect with value chains, and provides brief case examples of wealth chains and how they interact.

Everyday Legitimacy and International Financial Orders: The Social Sources of Imperialism and Hegemony in Global Finance

It does so on the basis of the following proposition: that states that enable themajority of their citizens to access credit and build wealth are more able torecycle capital through the domestic system and, in so doing, improve their inter-national financial capacity to export and attract capital, as well as to have a regu-latoryandnormativeinfluenceonthecharacteroftheinternationalfinancialorder.It is perhaps not so surprising that states that exercise financial power within theinternational political economy need to ground it in a stronger basis than onlyelites. Indeed, the history of international financial orders speaks not only tohow elites build financial power, but also to how fragile their grasp upon it canbecome. This may especially be the case when there is a broad social perceptionthat finance is unstable because it is concentrated in the hands of the few andrequires state intervention.If a state’s financial power is not autonomous from broader society but isinstead drawn from society, then understanding its social sources requires us toascribe some role to non-elite actors. One way to address this aim would be totake the rationalist tack and argue that over the centuries liberal democraticstates can more easily build financial power because citizens can punish politicalrepresentatives at the ballot box,

Global Standards of Market Civilization

With the evolution of the modern states system there have existed “standards of civilization” to which states must measure up to and conform if they are to fully participate as legitimate and sovereign members of international society The capacity for a high level of social cooperation and self-government of any given society including economic governance, has long represented a hallmark of “civilization” (Bowden, 2004a). Historically a society required organizational capacity to enter into and uphold mutually binding contracts under the law of nations, the principle of reciprocity being a key demand of relations among the society of states. And though the idea of “uncivilized” societies is at odds with recent trends toward political correctness, today terms such as “good governance” imply a similar logic whereby states and societies are required to conform to contemporary global standards of civilization. At the same time, as in the past, the workings of markets continue to be thought of as having a civilizing effect on society; both internally amongst its members and in external relations with other societies. The latter, that is, the arena of international external relations is a particularly significant concern in an era of elevated globalization and ever-increasing economic and financial interdependence. But as Norbert Elias has observed, “if the reduction of mutual physical danger or increased pacification is considered a decisive criterion for determining the degree of civilization, then humankind can be said to have reached a higher level of civilization within domestic affairs than on the international plane.” For at the global “level

The Bank for International Settlements

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the proverbial ‘IT staff’ of the global economy. While other international economic institutions are highly visible, the BIS remains mostly out of the public eye while it weaves a set of rules, norms and decision-making procedures that establish governance structures for both public and private international banks. Without the BIS, information sharing among central banks and private financial institutions would be seriously troubled. These institutions would face severe information asymmetries, their assessments of creditworthiness would be harder to establish, and the effective management of currency crises would be more difficult to achieve. In an environment where average daily turnover in foreign exchange markets is now US

Varieties of economic constructivism in political economy: Uncertain times call for disparate measures

1.9 trillion, and the market for investment risk protection alone is worth US