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A common feature of contemporary policymaking is the sharing and adaptation of policies from other countries. As neo-liberal globalisation continues to impact on the development of policy, such practices are increasingly commonplace. This article considers the current phenomenon of ‘policy borrowing’ with reference to the use of data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the 2010 Schools White Paper The Importance of Teaching. The article also traces the origins of policy borrowing and shows what philosophy of education can bring to its discourse.

Higher education operates in a quickly changing, progressively more globalized, cosmopolitan, and interconnected world (Bauman, 2000, Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press; Appiah, 2006, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co; Zuckerman, 2013, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. New York: W. W. Norton & Company). At the same time, substantive inequalities between people and places mean that this connectivity and knowledge is unevenly spread (Hallberg Adu, 2014, What is the opposite of a knowledge society? A critical reflection from Ghana. In Amoah, L. (ed.), Impacts of the Knowledge Society on Economic and Social Growth in Africa. IGI Global). For our students, the future leaders of this unequal world, critical reasoning becomes a key skill, and perhaps especially so for students in the Global South. This paper argues that digital humanities (DH) can provide both a theoretical framework for decolonizing the academy and technological solutions to hurdles in this process. The paper argues that assignments, their theoretical underpinnings, and implementation are key to decolonizing higher education. It describes three accessible technology-driven assignments with DH pedagogy created for diverse classrooms at Ashesi University in Ghana and discusses their outcomes.

This paper is part of a book symposium dedicated to Daphna Hacker's book "Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization". This paper focuses on chapter 3 of the book that discusses family agreements. While appreciating large parts of the argument, the paper questions the extent of Hacker's position and its implications.

We study the impact of international long-distance flights on the global spatial allocation of economic activity. To identify causal effects, we exploit variation due to regulatory and technological constraints which give rise to a discontinuity in connectedness between cities at a distance of 6000 miles. We show that these air links have a positive effect on local economic activity, as captured by satellite-measured night lights. To shed light on how air links shape economic outcomes, we first present evidence of positive externalities in the global network of air links: connections induce further connections. We then find that air links increase business links, showing that the movement of people fosters the movement of capital. In particular, this is driven mostly by capital flowing from high-income to middle-income (but not low-income) countries. Taken together, our results suggest that increasing interconnectedness generates economic activity at the local level by inducing links between businesses, but also gives rise to increased spatial inequality locally, and potentially globally.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

This paper examines the international exchange in surgery in the decades before World War I, a period of growing globalization in communication and transport. Focusing on Europe and North America, it looks first at the various means of exchange, especially surgical travel and the culture emerging around it and follows specific directions of exchange, from France and Britain, first to the German-speaking countries and finally to North America. Subsequently, the account turns to international organizations as an important means of exchange in this time period. The International Society of Surgery, in particular, provided a forum for a vivid internationalist discourse, which, however, stood in tension with simultaneous nationalist tendencies leading up to World War I. The paper finally discusses how the international exchange and communication at the time can be seen as an instance of modern surgeons claiming—and simultaneously trying to create—the global universality of surgical knowledge and practices, making sure that surgery is the same the world over.

This paper asks what insights the literature provides on divergence versus convergence of innovation paths in Europe and Asia. It contrasts the abundant literature on determinants of innovation paths with the scarcity of studies that are explicitly comparative across countries or continents. Implicit conclusions however emerge from several lines of work including evolutionary perspectives which stress differences in national conditions, and other perspectives which stress latecomer and globalisation effects. This paper distils and draws together the main conclusions on why innovation paths can be expected to diverge or converge. Its contribution lies in spelling out and bringing together implicit and explicit insights from a wide range of literatures. It also provides an analytical backdrop for some of the other papers in this special issue of Science and Public Policy which provide comparative empirical analyses of low carbon innovation paths.

This paper analyses the evolution of regional innovation policy into the mainstream of public policy. The paper examines the empirical and theoretical developments which have shifted much of the focus on innovation-related issues to matters of economic geography. As well as academic material we also review the literature on the subject produced by the international development institutions. In terms of policy, special attention is devoted to the role of local market failures and local institutions in explaining the importance and need for regional innovation policies, and the advent of the smart specialisation agenda is discussed. Finally, the paper discusses the current regional innovation policy tools and interventions observed around the world, which are seen by international institutions as examples of best practice. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.

Much time is spent asking questions during parliamentary debates. To what extent are they answered? This paper investigates this question by examining budget debates in post-1945 France, Sweden, and the UK as well as in the European Parliament from 1996 to 2001. The purpose is to introduce an empirical approach to a theoretical discussion of whether globalisation weakens deliberative democracy within nations while strengthening it between them. It is found that deliberative reciprocity was unexpectedly stable within nations in the course of post-1945 Western globalisation, and that questions are more often answered in national parliaments than in the European Parliament. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these findings for competing visions of political debate as a means for reaching consensus or as an expression of irresolvable conflict.

Over the last two decades, two new trajectories have taken hold in criminology--the study of masculinity and crime, after a century of neglect, and the geography of crime. This article brings both those fields together to analyse the impact of globalization in the resources sector on frontier cultures of violence. This paper approaches this issue through a case study of frontier masculinities and violence in communities at the forefront of generating resource extraction for global economies. This paper argues that the high rates of violence among men living in work camps in these socio-spatial contexts cannot simply be understood as individualized expressions of psycho-pathological deficit or social disorganization. Explanations for these patterns of violence must also consider a number of key subterranean convergences between globalizing processes and the social dynamics of male-on-male violence in such settings.

This paper investigates the principal competing visions of global politics that are currently advanced in the public discourse about globalization in opposition to the traditional state-centered perspective. The first part of the paper develops an analysis of ideal models as cultural resources that grounds the different reading of human bonds. The second part applies the notion of ideal models to the new scenario of globalization, and identifies four alternative interpretations of the notion of global politics: namely Neo-liberalism, Cosmopolitanism, Alter-globalism, and Dialogue among Civilizations. The principal characteristics of these four notions are presented in order to map the current debate on the future of global politics.

Contemporary approaches to varieties to capitalism are often criticized for neglecting issues of institutional change. This paper develops an approach to institutional change more extended than the one provided in Hall and Soskice (in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001) but congruent with its varieties-of-capitalism perspective. It begins by outlining an approach to institutional stability, which suggests that the persistence of institutions depends not only on their aggregate welfare effects but also on the distributive benefits that they provide to the underlying social or political coalitions; and not only on the Pareto-optimal quality of such equilibria but also on continuous processes of mobilization through which the actors test the limits of the existing institutions. It then develops an analysis of institutional change that emphasizes the ways in which defection, reinterpretation and reform emerge out of such contestation and assesses the accuracy of this account against recent developments in the political economies of Europe. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this perspective for contemporary analyses of liberalization in the political economy.

Business Power in Global Governance. By Fuchs Doris. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007. 233 pp., $55.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1588264923). The Enclave Economy: Foreign Investment and Sustainable Development in Mexico's Silicon Valley. By P. Gallagher Kevin, Zarsky Lyuba. MA: The MIT Press, 2007. 232 pp., $21.00 paper (ISBN-13: 978-0262572422). Textures of Struggle: the Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand. By Pangsapa Piya. Ithaca, NY: IRL/Cornell University Press, 2007. 217 pp., $18.95 paper (ISBN-13: 978-0801473760). Globalization and Labor: Democratizing Global Governance. By Dimitris Stevis, Terry Boswell. UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008. $27.95 (ISBN: 0-7425-3785-4 978-0-7425-3785-9). These books explicitly underline the necessity to revive and continue the “global governance” debate that has dominated both academic and policy relevant circles since the Commission on Global Governance in the 1990s. Technological developments, increase of foreign direct investment into and in some instances the subsequent abandonment of particular industries, increasing tensions of global and national union politics, and the questionable fate of workers, are issues that inform and fuel a number of debates whilst globalizing capitalism continues its omniscient advance. The four texts I review in this piece ask crucial questions about the impact of the expansion of neoliberal capitalism on societies and on people and fundamentally question the utility of the idea of “global governance” that does not take into account corporate power and workers' struggle. Each book gives useful and well informed answers in the context of increasing social antagonism against globalizing strategies still operating at the level of intergovernmental and corporate organization, as well as the domestic arena. Each text challenges mainstream assumptions regarding the impact of globalisation at the popular level, and also challenges widely accepted ideas coming out of business and academic discourses for the advantages of a global free market economy. Each volume also revokes the idea that globalization has reduced the role of the state, and outlines clear state activities in the management of global capitalism, rendering unfounded the allusions made by ideas of global governance for its potential to reduce national governments' involvement. “Governance” is a post-Cold War concept and was discussed in the early 1990s at a meeting in Konigswinter at which time the Commission on Global Governance was born. Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson and Guiana statesman Shridath Ramphal co-chaired this meeting and created perhaps the first definition of global governance: Governance is the sum of the many ways …

Bringing together perspectives from economic sociology and cultural sociology, this paper proposes that because economic phenomena are imbued with meaning they can be studied as cultural objects. This approach includes first identifying the content of people's understanding of economic phenomena and then tracing out what is it that structures their interpretations. The paper applies the cultural objects analysis to the public debates surrounding foreign investment in post-socialist Slovenia. Actors interpret economic phenomena so they can provide justifications for the positions they adopt in public debates and assess possible strategies of action. The content analysis of newspaper texts shows that foreign globalization pressures are mostly framed in a binary relation to national interests. But because economic consequences are uncertain, the particular understandings of how foreign investment affects national interests are multiple, even contradictory. They are shaped by the social identities of actors and historical and macro-structural conditions of post-socialism that make salient different, often contradictory, institutional orders.

The overall thrust of this paper is that policy learning is enhanced by the participation of private business. It is assumed that business involvement would suggest abundant opportunities for policy learning and transfer. The empirical part of this paper investigates private sector involvement in science, technology and innovation (STI) policy-making in a transition economy (Hungary). Private sector involvement in Hungarian STI policy-making is investigated in terms of the stages and types of involvement. The involvement of the private sector is essential for learning policy-making and achieving adaptability, which in turn is also crucial for the overall success of the innovation policy. This is particularly important for transition economies facing important reforms in a context of accelerated globalisation and international competition. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The geographical strategies of transnational corporations have received extensive attention from economic geographers. A particularly important line of study has focused upon the diverse national institutions that create geographically heterogeneous cultures of work. Yet none of these studies place questions about how global firms act as ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ at the centre of their analysis. This paper, therefore, uses the case of transnational law firms to extend theoretical debates about the geographies of learning and best practice through new micro-scale consideration of the way managers in TNCs act as cultural entrepreneurs, driving change in institutionalised cultures of work through strategies that alter the cognitive frames of workers. Drawing primarily on data from interviews, the paper reveals how the strategies used by influential partners in transnational law firms to drive changes in cultures of work do not lead to forms of global strong convergence in practice but converging divergences as cultures change in subtle, often unpredicted ways. It is argued that economic geographers need to pay more attention to the mechanisms of such changes in culture, and the processes of change in national business systems more widely, so as to contribute to debates about corporate culture but also the varieties of capitalism.

Does international trade in cultural products threaten cultural diversity in the developing world? This article seeks to question the implied correlation by exploring the intellectual and empirical bases of the claims. Conceptually, I argue that cultural diversity viewed from the perspective of the nation-state is problematic. Politically, of course, nation-states make this claim themselves in protecting their self-interest globally. Empirically, this paper shows that nation-states at the forefront of the movement protecting cultural diversity are, in fact, top exporters of cultural products, something that is not apparent in the mercantilist position taken by these states with respect to international trade in cultural products. The paper then explores the position of developing countries explicitly taking advantage of globalization of culture to promote both their cultural distinctiveness as well as their exports. These “cultural voices,” I conclude, are growing economically and socially and cannot be dismissed as playing second fiddle to those from the developed world.

This paper examines trends in the unit prices of manufactured imports into the European Union (EU) in the period 1988-2002. This is undertaken at a high level of disaggregation, and it is this decomposition which we believe has important implications both for a range of bodies of economic analysis and for policy. The analyses undertaken in this paper confirm that disaggregation matters in helping to identify unit-price trends. We have also shown that unit-price trends vary with the type of economy exporting into Europe and the type of product being exported, and that these results are robust at high levels of disaggregation.

This paper discusses some changes in the economic ‘landscape’ (policy cultures, institutions, infrastructures, regulations, and economic processes) within which the European Framework Programmes are formed and implemented. The main changes are: the domestic reform agenda of liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation; and the changed globalisation environment. The paper argues that these reforms have transformed the infrastructural conditions underlying technological change in ways that require attention from policymakers. In particular, the domestic reform agendas have had an unintended side-effect — the diminution or closure of large-scale technological and engineering capabilities in formerly publicly-owned industries. Changing concepts of, and approaches to, R&D and innovation necessitate shifts in policy approaches and instruments towards a greater focus on knowledge infrastructures: this is a major challenge facing the Framework Programmes. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The key analytical and policy question examined in this paper is whether multinational companies and their overseas investment need to be regulated at the national and/or at the international level, in order to address market failures, and to enhance their potential contribution to world welfare. The paper examines, from a developing country perspective, two kinds of regulatory regimes: first, the current regime and second, a new regime proposed by the European community and Japan at the WTO (ECJ) to institute fresh global rules of the game which will effectively allow multinationals unfettered freedom to invest where they like, whenever they like, how much and in what products. The central conclusions of the paper are, first, that ECJ, despite its important concession of confining itself to only one source of external finance namely FDI, is a flawed proposal from the perspective of both developing and developed countries. Its shortcomings are particularly serious with respect to developing countries as it essentially ignores the developmental dimension altogether. Secondly, it is emphasised that although the current post-Uruguay Round FDI regime is to be preferred in relation to the ECJ, the former has, nevertheless, severe deficits from a developmental perspective. Thirdly, the paper suggests that instead of laissez faire, globalisation and integration of the world economy is more likely to be promoted on a sustainable basis by suitable national and international regulation of MNC activities and the incentive structure facing their executives. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

This paper revisits the issue of intra-industry foreign direct investment (FDI). This issue was considered in Stephen Hymer's early work, but was not subsequently developed, and was largely ignored in the literature for some time. Using the example of the UK, this paper traces the patterns of intra-industry FDI, both across countries and industries, for both the manufacturing and service sectors. Despite the undoubted increase in the integration of goods and factor markets since the time of Hymer's writing, the analysis presented here shows that the pattern has changed little in the last 40 years. The paper then goes on to discuss the motives for intra-industry FDI, relating it to technology flows and factor cost differentials. Finally, we present some analysis relating intra-industry FDI to uneven development, both between developed and developing countries, and between regions of a developed country. It is clear that intra-industry FDI is still very much a developed country phenomenon, as Hymer suggested, with both developing countries and poorer regions of developed countries unlikely to reap any of the benefits. In this context, one-way and two-way FDI must be seen as different phenomena within the debate on globalisation. © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.

In recent years, stimulated by globalization, technological innovation and intensifying international competition, there has been a growing trend towards the increasing institutional and geographical concentration of financial systems and markets. At the same time, there has been mounting academic and policy interest in the financing problems faced by new and small firms, which are widely considered to suffer from a ‘funding gap’. These twin developments provide the motivation for this paper, which seeks to throw some theoretical and empirical light on the question of whether the spatial organization of the financial system impacts on the flows of capital to small firms across regions. Is it the case that a heavily spatially-centralized financial system, like that in the UK, militates against the ready access to capital by new and small firms in peripheral regions, while a more decentralized financial system, like that in Germany, results in a more even regional distribution? The paper first discusses this question theoretically in the context of the regional finance literature. It then compares capital market structures and the regional distribution of equity for SMEs in the UK and Germany. This comparison lends some support to the view that capital markets do not function in a space-neutral way, and that a highly centralized system like that in the UK may well introduce spatial bias in the flows of capital to SMEs. It also shows, though, as the case of Germany illustrates, that the actual impact of the geographical organization of capital markets depends on, and is mitigated by, other institutional and regulatory conditions. Our analysis suggests while a geographically decentralized financial system with sizable and well-embedded regional/ local clusters of institutions, networks, agents, and markets could be advantageous in various ways, regional/local capital markets also face a number of major challenges and problems. The paper indicates the need for more research in this somewhat neglected area.

This paper has two main aims. Firstly to conceptualize the production networks of the video games industry through an examination of its evolution into a multi-million dollar industry. Secondly, to use the video games industry to demonstrate the utility of Global Production Network approaches to understanding the geographically uneven impacts of globalization processes. In particular, three key notions of value, power and embeddedness are used to reveal the most powerful actors in the production network, how they maintain and exercise their power, and how the organization of production is manipulated as a result. It is argued that while hardware production is organized by console manufacturers using truly global sourcing strategies, the production of software is far more complex. In fact, software production networks are bounded within three major economic regions: Western Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. This paper seeks to explain how and why this has occurred. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

This paper presents systematic empirical evidence for the financialization of the US economy in the post-1970s period. While numerous researchers have noted the increasing salience of finance, there have been few systematic attempts to consider what this shift means for the nature of the economy, considered broadly. In large part, this omission reflects the considerable methodological difficulties associated with using national economic data to assess the rise of finance as a macro-level phenomenon shaping patterns of accumulation in the US economy. The paper develops two discrete measures of financialization and applies these measures to postwar US economic data in order to determine if, and to what extent, the US economy is becoming financialized. The paper concludes by considering some of the implications of financialization for two areas of ongoing debate in the social sciences: (1) the question of who controls the modern corporation; and (2) the controversy surrounding the extent to which globalization has eroded the autonomy of the state.

This paper compares and contrasts capacity utilisation in the manufacturing sectors of the US, UK and other EU countries over three decades. It argues that corporate governance and the pressures of globalisation have led to a tighter capacity stance in the UK but not generally in the US or Europe. The paper further explores the nature of the UK experience, in particular, the rival theories that efficiency in capital use has increased versus the view that firms have simply tightened their capacity stance in line with higher hurdle rates of return. The evidence of the paper supports the view that UK firms adopted a 'submissive' response to the pressures of globalisation by shutting capacity and retreating from new investment. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Background Epidemiology in Latin America, as in the rest of the world, has been developed for the purpose of contributing towards understanding the causes and determinants of the phenomena of health and disease in specific contexts. However, in that continent it has specific characteristics. Methods The paper explores epidemiology in the Latin American continent, emphasizing on the one hand epidemiology as a knowledge-producing, scientific discipline, and on the other hand, epidemiology in praxis, with its firm commitment to contributing towards transforming the health of the population. Results It has been possible to identify at least eight idiosyncrasies that characterize epidemiology in Latin America. It is being forged with a strong connection to the evolution of the discipline in an international context; however, it has its feet firmly planted in reality, seeking to extract from that reality elements that may contribute towards diminishing the serious health problems in that society. Conclusions This paper presents a picture of the development of epidemiology in Latin America. It is very clear that as well as a lively, intense, intellectual debate, there is a frantic search for alternatives that will increase Latin American populations' possibilities of survival. However, one important aspect is that these two elements-theory and praxis-present consistent dialectic relationships and feedback; this is the main wealth of Latin American epidemiology.

There is a protracted stalemate between rich (the North) and poor (the South) countries over the question of minimum labour standards in developing economies. This paper is a sequel to Singh and Zammit (2000). It considers afresh key issues in the controversy. While fully recognizing the moral, political, and philosophical dimensions of this complex issue, the paper concentrates on the central economic question of the 'race to the bottom'. It emphasizes the difficulties of establishing labour standards in the vast informal sectors in developing countries and suggests that the ILO conventions 87 and 98 should be amended to reflect properly these concerns. It also argues that ILO core conventions should be broadened to include the right to a decent living. The overall conclusion is that labour standards are important indicators of economic development, but their promotion is best achieved in a non-coercive and supportive international environment such as that provided by the ILO. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

One of the most controversial aspects of globalization is capital-market liberalization--not so much the liberalization of rules governing foreign direct investment, but those affecting short-term capital flows, speculative hot capital that can come into and out of a country. In the 1980s and 1990s, the IMF and the US Treasury tried to push capital-market liberalization around the world, encountering enormous opposition, not only from developing countries, but from economists who were less enamoured of the doctrines of free and unfettered markets, of market fundamentalism, that were at that time being preached by the international economic institutions. The economic crises of the late 1990s and early years of the new millennium, which were partly, or even largely, attributable to capital-market liberalization, reinforced those reservations. This paper takes as its point of departure a recent IMF paper, to provide insights both into how the IMF could have gone so wrong in its advocacy of capital-market liberalization and into why capital-market liberalization has so often led to increased economic instability, not to economic growth. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

This paper examines the evidence about the extent of globalisation by focusing on some aspects of international trade flows. A reinterpretation of the existing evidence based on the analysis of tables and a range of indicators is provided in the first part of the paper. The focus is on whether the increase in trade flows has been predominantly a global or regional phenomenon. The analysis points to the tentative conclusion that the dominant tendency is the increase in trade within regional blocs (North America, the EU and the Asia-Japan blocs) rather than across them. To address the same question, a more formal analysis is undertaken in the second part of the paper, by focusing on the relative speed of the convergence in openness within and across regions of the world. Our results indicate that the degree of openness converges faster across the countries of a given region rather than at the global level, reinforcing the conclu sions from the first part of the paper. The results are consistent with the view that trade integration is more of a 'regional' phenomenon than a 'global' one.

The paper analyses the effect of widespread trade liberalisation on global income inequality. The analysis of the trend in global inequality during 1981--97, presented in the first part of the paper, shows that the apparent growth of income inequality among countries conceals a process of convergence. Some developing countries achieved significantly faster economic growth than the advanced industrialised countries and, though small in number, they actually account for a majority of the population of the developing world. Thus international inequality (i.e., the inequality of distribution of per capita incomes among the world's population) in fact declined even though the inter-country income inequality increased. The analysis in the second part of the paper shows (i) that while improved trade performance did have a stimulating effect on growth performance of countries, trade liberalisation had extremely varied effects on trade performance across countries, and (ii) that the distribution of benefits and costs of trade liberalisation across countries has been such as to reduce international inequality without affecting inter-country inequality. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

This paper analyses changing production organisation and new governance that contribute to productive upgrading in developing economies. It discusses research conducted in Chile and Nicaragua, focused on agroindustrial clusters. Recent analyses of small firms in developing countries highlight the important presence of clusters, and local factors in building global competitiveness. This paper argues for an approach that focuses on the institutional arrangements to coordinate decentralised production networks. It emphasises the role of learning-by-monitoring as the key to successful adjustment in the face of liberalisation and globalisation. It identifies the institutional reshaping of relations between firms, and between the state and the economy. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

The paper reviews changes in within-country income inequality over the last forty years, with particular attention to the years of 1980–2000, against the background of the inequality shifts intervened during the globalisation of 1870–1914. Withincountry inequality appears to have risen to different extents in two thirds of the 73 countries analysed, overturning in several cases prior trends towards lower inequality. For the majority of the countries analysed, the paper rejects the hypotheses that such rise is due to a worsening of the traditional causes of inequality, such as high land concentration and inequality in education, or to technological changes. Most of the recent surge in income polarisation would appear to be related to the policy drive towards domestic deregulation and external liberalisation, though the specific impact of each policy instrument appear to vary considerably. (JEL D31, F02)

In this paper, we develop an aggregation procedure using time-varying weights for constructing the common component of international economic fluctuations. The methodology for deriving time-varying weights is based on some stylised features of the data documented in the paper. The model allows for a unified treatment of cyclical and seasonal fluctuations and also accommodates the dynamic propagation of shocks across countries. We find evidence for a 'world business cycle' as well as evidence for a distinct European common component. We also find some evidence that macroeconomic fluctuations have become more closely linked across industrial economies in the period after 1973. The world economy has become more closely integrated in recent years due to increasing trade and financial flows across countries. This has spurred interest in the question of how the ongoing phenomenon of 'globalisation' has affected the transmission and propagation of business cycle fluctuations across national borders. An important question in this context is whether a substantial fraction of economic fluctuations are country-specific or if there exists a 'world business cycle' which might be defined as fluctuations that are common across all countries. More generally, the comovement of macroeconomic aggregates across different countries has become a topic of increasing interest in both academic and policy circles. These issues have implications in a number of dimensions. An empirical analysis of the relative importance of country-specific versus common international fluctuations is of relevance for determining the structure of certain classes of international business cycle models. From a policy perspective, strong comovement of output across countries at business cycle frequencies implies that external trade would be unlikely to play a significant role in dampening fluctuations. Domestic policies aimed at affecting the real exchange rate and thereby attempting to boost net exports in the short run would then tend to have limited impact. The degree of synchronisation of business cycles across countries also has important implications for short-run international policy coordination and for assessing the feasibility of monetary unions. Therefore, identifying and analysing the common component of international economic fluctuations is relevant from a number of different perspectives.

Our age is marked by two main trajectories: globalization and democratization–which are not readily compatible. While the move toward democracy requires a certain civic equality among all participants, globalization in its present form fosters or enhances social inequality. The paper concentrates on three main types of inequality: those of power, wealth and knowledge. In each of these domains the presentation follows a prominent mentor or set of mentors: in the first domain the political scientist Samuel Huntington; in the second the economist Amartya Sen; and in the last the philosophers Heidegger and Gadamer. By way of conclusion, the paper issues a plea for cosmopolitan or global democratic justice, as a counterpoise to prevailing modes of global inequality and inequity.

This paper provides empirical evidence for the microeconomic existence of distinctive national modes of organization for technology development. Evidence from the semiconductor industry shows that two forms of organization not only arose as the industry expanded, but that the differences were maintained, or expanded, with neither side ‘converging’ on the other, even as manufacturing-process development performance converged. Four propositions are tested statistically: (1) the organizational strategies employed by a sample of leading firms in the United States and Japan were significantly different, across a range of dimensions important to manufacturing process development; (2) these modes of organization did not converge during the 1980s and 1990s, even as technology markets globalized, rather they grew increasingly different; (3) these modes of organization can meaningfully be described as nationally specific; (4) process development performance converged over time. The paper suggests an explanation for the observed divergent organizational paths by placing these strategies into institutional and cultural context.

The paper derives world income or expenditure distribution of individuals for two years 1988 and 1993. It is the first paper to calculate world distribution for individuals based entirely on household survey data from 91 countries, and adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity between the countries. Measured by the Gini index, inequality increased from an already very high 63 in 1988 to 66 in 1993. The increase was driven more by rising differences in mean incomes between the countries than by rising inequalities within countries. The most important contributors were rising urban-rural differences in China, and slow growth of rural incomes in South Asia compared to several large developed market economies.