Part three: The Frontiers of IPE

Question 1

Specify the essential features of the current era of globalisation, particularly with regard to the mechanisms that have driven it forward and those that resist its advance now

Answer 1

Drivers:
- communications revolution
- integration of financial markets
Resistance:
- political actors
- war

Question 2

Discuss, using empirical examples, the social, political and cultural consequences of the current era of globalisation

Answer 2

Social: offshoring of manufacturing in large parts of the west along with new urban migrant class
Political: backlash through rise of populism
Cultural: cultural interconnectedness through telecommunications

Question 3

Analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments made by the anti-globalists today

Answer 3

Distribution of wealth and inequality:
+ true in the short term
- Likely untrue in the long term

Loss of national autonomy:
+ some degree of openness is required in order to remain competitive
-

Environmental costs:
+ the globalization of investment flows is speeding the destruction of natural forests (Schmidheiny and Zorraquin, 1996)
- global insurance sector lobbying for action on climate change (Paterson 2001)

Question 4

Outline the tensions between global market forces and the welfare state

Answer 4

Efficiency Hypothesis: welfare states are cost-intensive, thus require redistributive taxes, but in a globalised world, owners of capital enjoy plenty of exit options

Compensation Hypothesis: “winners” of glob. use welfare state to compensate “losers”

The period of (supposedly) most intensive globalization has been associated with the consolidation—not the retrenchment—of the most generous welfare states the world has ever known (Hay, Wincott, 2012)

Question 5

Use IPE approaches to explain how states navigate the trade-offs
between global integration and policy autonomy

Answer 5

“Race to the bottom” to liberalise to court global capital

Question 6

Outline the nature of the tension between MNCs and the state, both in previous centuries and in the twenty-first century

Answer 6

Strange (1996): power shift away from the state and towards MNCs

Question 7

Compare the strengths and weaknesses of the argument that states have been eclipsed by MNCs

Question 8

Compare the strengths and weaknesses of the argument that states continue to prevail over MNCs

Question 9

Analyse these debates in specific national contexts, especially those where state-owned enterprises predominate and those where they do not