SOCY340: Globalization's Winners and Losers Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering historical trade regimes, international organizations, inequality, and theories of development.

Globalization

The rapid acceleration of global trade since the $1980\text{s}$, building upon historical long-distance trade networks dating back to the $1300\text{s}$ Islamic Empire trade routes.

Corn Laws

A set of British grain tariffs whose abolition in $1846$ followed popular uproar, pitting British industrialists against agriculturalists and ushering in several decades of economic prosperity in Britain.

Mercantilism

An economic system under which states operated chartered trading companies—the predecessors to colonial states—which served as the primary vehicle for nineteenth-century globalization.

Gold Standard

An international monetary system active from $1870$ to $1914$ in which participating nations fixed their currencies to gold, facilitating international trade and investment until its suspension during World War I.

Bretton Woods Agreement

A $1944$ agreement established at the UN Monetary and Financial Conference in New Hampshire that created the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and GATT, allowing nations policy flexibility to customize domestic development.

World Trade Organization (WTO)

An international body established in $1995$ to enforce global free trade, replacing GATT and converting previous flexible development guidelines into strict, legally binding multilateral requirements.

Relative Winners and Losers of Globalization

Branko Milanovic's framing showing that emerging Asian middle classes gained the highest relative percentage income increases, while lower- and middle-class households in rich nations (e.g., bottom $50\%$ in the U.S. and Germany) experienced minimal relative gains.

Washington Consensus

A set of free-market policy prescriptions—including fiscal austerity, tariff reduction, and privatization—promoted in the $1980\text{s}$ by the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury in response to Latin American debt crises.

Developmental State

A state structure, prominent in East Asia, that actively intervenes in the domestic economy by selecting, subsidizing, and cultivating infant industries for global export competitiveness.

Export-Oriented Industrialization

An economic development strategy pursued by East Asian nations focused on leveraging low-cost labor and targeted state subsidies to manufacture goods for foreign export markets.

Smiling Curve of Value

A graph illustrating that the highest profitability in global production occurs at the pre-production (R&D, design) and post-production (branding, marketing, customer service) stages, while middle fabrication/manufacturing stages yield the lowest profitability.

Shareholder Value Ideology

A corporate governance doctrine analyzed by Karen Ho that emerged in the $1970\text{s}$ and $1980\text{s}$, prioritizing short-term stock price growth and corporate owner returns over long-term employee stability and wages.

First Opium War

An $1839–1842$ military conflict between Britain and China triggered by Chinese efforts to suppress the British illicit opium trade, resulting in China's defeat and forced economic concessions.

Settler Colonies

Colonial territories where European populations established permanent settlements and introduced functioning legal systems, property rights, and infrastructure, receiving capital infusions from Europe.

Extractive Colonialism

A colonial structure focused primarily on extracting natural resources and forced labor without establishing stable legal-bureaucratic institutions, property rights, or domestic market infrastructure.

De-industrialization of the Periphery

The process between $1750$ and $1913$ wherein peripheral regions in Asia and Latin America lost two-thirds of their industrial capacity due to European industrial competitors flooding their markets with cheap manufactured goods.

Meiji Restoration

An $1868$ political movement in Japan that instituted rapid state-led modernization, unifying currency, building railways, establishing banking systems, raising tariffs, and creating state-owned industrial enterprises.

Dual-Track System

China's post-socialist reform strategy coexisting state-owned enterprises in strategic sectors (energy, steel, banking) with a privatized market sector in manufacturing and services.

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)

A $1950\text{s}$ international trade agreement focused on liberalizing manufactured goods trade among member nations through the Most Favored Nation principle without forcing developing countries to open their domestic markets.

Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA)

A framework of export quotas on textiles from developing nations established under the GATT era to protect textile manufacturers in developed nations from lower-cost foreign competition.

Anti-Dumping Duties

Protectionist trade tariffs levied against foreign goods deemed to be priced below production costs, often calculated using artificial surrogate country production costs.

Hyper-globalization

The post-$1994$ WTO trade regime characterized by strict international enforcement of global free trade, limiting the ability of nation-states to implement domestic tariffs, quotas, or regulatory protections.

Grand Bargain

The asymmetric outcome of the $1986–1994$ Uruguay Round where developing nations reduced tariffs and accepted intellectual property rules in exchange for promised, but unevenly delivered, developed-world agricultural and textile trade liberalization.

Agricultural Subsidies

Financial support provided by wealthy nations (e.g., Norway, Switzerland, Japan, the U.S., and EU states) to domestic farmers, which depresses global agricultural prices and disadvantages unsubsidized farmers in developing nations.

Modernization Theory

A development paradigm formulated by W. W. Rostow asserting that all societies progress through five linear stages of economic development toward mass production and consumption.

Five Stages of Economic Growth

W. W. Rostow's sequence comprising traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and the age of mass consumption.

Dependency Theory

A development paradigm developed by Latin American scholars contending that Global North economic progress relies on the systemic extraction of resources from the Global South, creating sustained underdevelopment.

Underdevelopment

An active, ongoing condition generated by colonial exploitation and the structural extraction of economic surplus from peripheral nations to metropolitan centers, rather than a natural state of pre-development.

World-Systems Theory

Immanuel Wallerstein's framework analyzing global socio-economic history as an integrated world-economy structured into core, semi-periphery, and periphery zones driven by the extraction of surplus value.

Core

The dominant zone in World-Systems Theory characterized by advanced, capital-intensive, high-skill production, strong state militaries, and the extraction of surplus value from other global regions.

Periphery

The subordinate zone in World-Systems Theory specialized in raw material extraction, cash crops, and low-skill labor, possessing weaker state structures subjected to economic exploitation.

Semi-Periphery

The intermediate zone in World-Systems Theory that engages in mixed production activities, serving as a structural buffer between the core and the periphery within the global economy.

Populism

A broad political and social movement focused on reclaiming domestic control over national borders, immigration, and trade sovereignty from international institutions and globalist policies.

Asian Development Bank (ADB)

A regional development bank backed by China that competes with the World Bank and IMF by providing alternative development loans to nations in Latin America and Africa.

Development Paradigm Comparison

An analytical matrix evaluating Modernization Theory, Dependency Theory, and World-Systems Theory across criteria such as capitalism as a driving force, universality of developmental paths, political influence, and unit of analysis.