This chapter focuses on the rise and fall of growth and the incidence of recessions in centrally planned socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union. It studies the period of rapid growth and socialist industrialization in the 1950s and 1960s, the socialist stagnation of the 1970s, and the terminal decade of the 1980s. It discusses the rapid accumulation of foreign debt in convertible currencies in some socialist countries as an attempt to revert symptoms of stagnation and the effect of the debt crises of the early 1980s, with responses ranging from full repayment under extreme self-imposed austerity (in Romania) and attempted rescheduling in other countries. It examines the causes for deep contractions in several CEE countries, Russia, and Ukraine in the early 1990s and the impact of the crisis of 2008–09.

Chapter 4 documents the worldwide intensity and duration of the Great Depression and focuses on the causes and consequences of the Depression in center and periphery economies. It examines the role played by the gold exchange standard, the lack of an international hegemonic power to coordinate and guide an effective international response to the shock, the response of monetary and fiscal policies, the timing of leaving the gold standard, and other factors. The chapter discusses the role of price deflation in exacerbating/ameliorating economic decline and the effects of war preparation in the United States, Germany, and other countries to put these economies back in a growth track.

Introduction: Borderless World or a World of Borders?

The optimistic globalist accounts of the 1990s that painted the rise of a ‘borderless’ world (for example, Ohmae, 1990; for a critique see Yeung, 1998) are faded myths today. The second decade of the twenty-first century seems to be more adequately characterized by the instigation of new borders and/or the fortification of existing ones. The rise of populist governments around the world, the shift towards protectionist policies in the USA under Trump, the vote of the UK electorate to exit the European Union, and the migration ‘crisis’ that has emerged in Europe following violent conflicts in close geographic proximity have brought the fortification of borders, fences, and walls back on the agenda of governments and in the broader public view. These borders are generally discussed at the level of the (nation) state. The aim of this chapter is to engage with a less-noticed undercurrent of the multi-scalar process of bordering, often at the subnational level, that is equally structuring a non-borderless world: the enclosure of territories with specific and differential impacts on capital and labour, designed in many ways with the aim to increase the mobilities of one while regulating those of the other. The enclosed territories, or offshore spaces, take the shape of special economic zones (SEZs), tax havens, or cruise ships.

The central argument advanced in this chapter is that the spatial form of globalization is expressed as an archipelago economy that consists of networked offshore spaces, or transnational enclave spaces. These depend on territorial zoning strategies that operate through mechanisms of bordering/enclosure, which are necessary for capital accumulation. The cross-border mobilities of capital and labour do not operate in isolation from each other, but are indeed closely related and intertwined. Intensifying globalization, however, has had a differential impact on these mobilities, generally privileging capital mobility while allowing only regulated and restricted movements of labour. The mobilities of capital and labour should be seen as an intertwined and interdependent process. Offshore spaces for capital accumulation depend on various forms of transnational labour, though labour is integrated in highly uneven and segmented terms.

Introduction

How do capital and labour mobilities interact in the context of Indian nurse training and migration, and what kind of institutional actors facilitate the multiscalar mobility of this labour? This chapter will address this question using the example of the global mobility of nurses. Nurses represent the largest, most internationalized and feminized section of the health profession, and developed regions of world have demanded well-trained nurses because of demographic and health care delivery changes. These changes are connecting regions of the world through increasingly globally oriented models of nursing training, skills development, and labour and related capital mobility. The nature of historic and new migration corridors marks the evolving spatiality of this labour mobility and associated capital flows. Novel state–market interactions structure these processes of labour mobility and mark new institutional forms of governance related to nurse training and deployment of migrant labour. Nursing is a specifically gendered occupation, and the cultural context allows us to understand the particular embodied nature of nursing—how this contributes to the disciplining and controlling of workers, and how their skills and capabilities are constructed and utilized. This chapter makes explicit connection between labour and capital mobility by drawing upon research conducted in India and Canada to highlight how labour and capital mobilities interact in global nursing labour circulation.

The health care services industry is one of the most significant and growing parts of the global economy. The United Nations’ International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) categorizes the health care industry as hospital activities, medical and dental practice activities, and other human health activities that occur under the supervision of health professionals in various areas. In terms of value, a 2017 health care outlook report by Deloitte (2017) indicated that health care spending represents 10.4 per cent of global GDP in 2015 (US$7 trillion in 2015) and is expected to rise over the next 5 years, especially in low-income nations. Health care is witnessing neoliberal industrialization in terms of the division, standardization, deskilling of health care labour, and rise of managerial superstructures (Rastegar, 2004), including widespread but differentiated engagement with New Public Management approaches to increase efficiency and enhance innovation (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017).

Capitalist development has always, and everywhere, been characterized by the restless mobility of both capital and labour. While these two forms of mobility are fundamentally related, it is unusual to combine the study of both or seek connections between them. In an effort to make these connections more than three decades ago, Saskia Sassen commented that the two processes of capital and labour mobility ‘have been constructed into unrelated categories’ (1988: 12). This assessment still largely holds true. The objective of this book is to explore the links between these forms of mobility with a particular focus on Asia.

While the imperative to be mobile is well established as a systemic feature of capital, it is usually studied through frameworks that try to understand the behaviour of firms, conglomerates, production networks, or investors. An extensive body of literature addresses corporate structures and strategies of capital accumulation. For example, in the field of international business, attention has traditionally focused on the mobility of capital, primarily through foreign direct investment (FDI) (for example, Dunning, 1988). The underlying assumption is the immobility of labour. The multinational corporation, with its proprietary capital and know-how (ownership advantage) and governance within a hierarchical organization (internalization advantage), facilitates the mobility of capital in order to take advantage of location-bound factors of production (including labour). Other approaches have addressed the networks and supply chains in which firms are situated. There have been, for example, significant efforts at understanding the spatial structures of production through the lenses of global commodity chains and global production networks. These bodies of literature point out that significant levels of spatial flexibility and mobility in production capital have been created through non-ownership modes of control such as subcontracting (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994; Coe and Yeung, 2015). Complementing this work are studies that focus on corporate international expansion trajectories and governance structures to manage globally dispersed investments (for example, Cuervo-Cazurra and Ramamurti, 2014; Ramamurti and Singh, 2009). Labour seldom features centrally in such accounts, except as an in situ characteristic of a particular place, valued for its skills, affordability, or docility. At the human scale, it is usually the investor or manager who is assumed to be mobile, but mostly it is the spatial configuration of capital itself (through FDI, corporate structures, commodity trade, debt, and so on) that receives attention.

This chapter dons political economy glasses to review Madagascar’s economic and political history from precolonial times to the present day, drawing on the theories developed by North and his co-authors (2009 and 2012b), Acemoglu and Robinson (2005 and 2012) and Khan (2010), and applies the concepts they have fashioned (institutions, social orders, control of violence and rents, elite coalitions, etc.) to the Malagasy case. Significant changes have taken place and we have seen the gradual expansion of the elite political and economic circle. At the same time, democratic aspirations have surfaced and found a voice to speak out against the different regimes’ abuses and precipitate their fall. Yet the fact remains that the system and practices at the highest levels of the state have barely changed. Each regime has systematically sought to increase its power by concentrating it, personalising it and securing the support of a small group of influential players. Unable to think outside of the short-term box, none has sought the support of the masses by trying to meet popular aspirations.

Introduction

Global circuits strategically organize production processes across new sites through the conjoint actions of a set of actors such as firms, cities, states, and other sectors (Beaverstock et al., 2002). These actors perform important functions in production circuits and shape the geographies of capital and labour at global, national, and subnational scales. A city centre becomes a critical node in the circuits of production by facilitating an environment for the consolidation of hyper-mobile capital and for the provisioning of skilled labour, depending on its strategic positioning and its partnership with other actors. The highly specialized cross-border circuits corresponding to specific industries, more precisely those components of industries that are operating across national borders, connect a series of cities embedded within a nation to the global city network (Sassen, 2001). Therefore, the opening up of economies to the global market and the increasingly interconnected space of flows of labour, capital, knowledge, and goods have secondary consequences within a nation. At the same time, the relentless search for new sites of production and service activities across borders by the new transnational lead firms reproduces more globally integrated and sophisticated production networks by consolidating capital and labour for value creation under different systems of production and by promoting regional development through strategic partnerships between actors (Coe et al., 2010; Coe and Hess, 2013).

Therefore, the global production networks framework calls for a dynamic approach to understand the complex and evolutionary nature of the relationship between state and firm as well as the relationship between fluidity and fixity of both labour and capital (Rainnie, Herod, and McGrath-Champ, 2011; Yeung, 2013). This framework also recognizes the inevitable linkages of households, enterprises, and states to one another in the circuits of production (Gereffi, Korzeniewicz, and Korzeniewicz, 1994; Coe and Yeung, 2015) and provides helpful insights into investigating the capital–labour dynamics and the spatialities of new sites of production within a nation. In this context, this chapter attempts to integrate the study of the concentration of capital in urban spaces and the mobility of labour from rural to urban areas in India. The chapter illustrates how the garment production circuit connects a series of urban spaces with their rural counterparts by examining the consolidation of capital and mobilities of labour, with a particular focus on the institutional governance and the socio-economic and cultural forces influencing labour mobility within India.

Introduction

On 3 February 2018, over 500 university students assembled for a career fair in Singapore's Expo Centre. Singapore sees numerous career events every year, but what made this ‘ASEAN Career Fair with Japan’ 2018 stand out was that participating companies were nearly all Japanese and that most of these companies were looking to hire employees into their home operations in Japan. Job seekers came from further afield than just Singapore. The majority of students had travelled from other South East Asian countries, with the fair organizers subsidizing travel for many of the participants. The career event was being held for the sixth time and was competing with several other such events that have come to be regularly organized in Singapore and other countries in Asia to support Japanese companies seeking to recruit foreign personnel into their home operations. What explains this drive by Japanese companies to hire foreign university graduates for employment in Japan, and how can we approach this phenomenon theoretically?

In 1988, Saskia Sassen pointed to a link between investment and human mobility streams, arguing that ‘these patterns in the new immigration become particularly acute when we consider that the major immigrant-sending countries are among the leading recipients of the jobs lost in the U.S. and of U.S. direct foreign investment in labour-intensive manufacturing and service activities’ (1988: 13). Sassen pointed to Asia as the newly emerging primary source of migrants to the USA and to the existence of a combination of push and pull factors underlying this trend. Moreover, she pointed to the fact that investments, the internationalization of production, and other forms of engagement have created ‘linkages that contributed, directly or indirectly, to emigration’ (1988: 16). In a similar vein, Massey et al. (1993) have pointed to the importance of economic, cultural, and ideological links in determining the direction and nature of migration flows. The ability of developed core countries to channel migration streams towards themselves might well be linked to former colonial relationships that shape affinities in terms of language, education, and administrative systems. Moreover, the consequences of economic penetration are reinforced by the activities of media and advertising companies as well as the establishment of communication and transportation infrastructures.

The role of the elites in Madagascar's trajectory, especially in the formation and widening of inequalities as a known source of chronic socio-political instability, calls for a closer study of the elite group. This chapter establishes a sociography of the elites based on statistical surveys, including a unique representative survey focusing on the Red Island's elites. It provides insights into their strategies to attain and remain in power, but also their opinions on the running of society and especially their views of the obstacles to and the drivers of the country's long-term development. The majority of elites are from the old aristocracy. Social capital made up of a rich network in terms of its size, diversity and the intensity of the connections established within the elite circle and straddling is used as a strategy to access the highest hierarchical positions. This dominant class displays rather mixed attitudes to democratic principles. The main point of disagreement between elites and the rest of the population concerns the order of priorities on the political agenda. Although maintaining order counts the most for the elites, the rest of the population prioritises improved living conditions for the poor.

Introduction

The rise of China in the international arena is an indisputable fact (Shambaugh, 2013). The dynamics that made its advance and the whole economic reform process possible are well known to scholars, although the role played by 50 million overseas Chinese is the subject of limited discussion. They are probably the most extensive expatriate community in the world, with the potential to become an extended army for the hegemonic plans of the People's Republic of China (PRC), using soft power. Most times, researchers present a narrow view of the Chinese diaspora (or the spread and settlement of the overseas Chinese all over the globe); consequently, the contribution of the diaspora to the achievements of the PRC is still unclear. In our view, a primary goal of China is to gain leadership in global affairs through peaceful means (Mingjiang, 2008). Despite its military power and economic might, China is resorting to the promotion of its culture, leadership in multilateral organizations, and the use of the network formed by its citizens or descendants scattered around the world.

In this chapter, we explore the bonds between Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) and migration into Latin America as dual means to exercise and extend soft power. We analyse the linkages between the overseas Chinese and the motherland, within the context of the soft power theory of Joseph Nye. Thus, we bring a new perspective into how capital and labour may be interconnected across the Chinese communities while contributing to the strategic interest of the motherland. We selected this particular region because China ‘is getting closer to Latin America due to geopolitical reasons, market expansion, as well as for the need to secure agricultural commodities and raw materials for its industry’ (Valderrey and Montoya, 2016: 6). We focus on two Latin American countries that are as remote from one another as appears possible: Mexico and Peru. Thus, we can assess the importance of integration and transnationalism of overseas communities in the two nations as well as to what extent Chinese migratory flows have a relationship with Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and their investment choices in such contexts. We also evaluate whether or not soft power from the PRC and transnationalism affect capital and labour mobility in Chinese firms seeking business opportunities in the area.