6 - Structure of The World Economy

ucla | GEOG 4 | 2023-10-22 23:57

Table of Contents

Background

  • From late 1700’s (Industrial Revolution) to present day - large world economy
  • Features of the World Economy
    • Single world market
    • politically fragmented world of states
    • Geographic tiers - core, periphery, semi-periphery
    • Since 1960s: Competitive -> Organized (Fordist) -> Disorganized (Post-Fordist) Capitalism
    • Variety of “National” Capitalism
    • Temporal trends & cyclical expansion/contraction

      Single World Market

  • WTO

    Economic Competition

  • Green=most -> Brown=least

  • Geographic Tiers

  • 3 Eras of Global Capitalism

  • 1500-1840: Competitive Capitalism
  • 1840-1970: Organized Capitalism (Fordism)
    • assembly line, monopolization, anti-trust
    • labor unions, mass strikes, rail innovations
  • 1970-Present: Disorganized Capitalism (Post Fordist)
    • nature of trade, labor representation (diversity)
    • work organization, role of govts, role of finance

Variety of Capitalism

| World Economies: | American | Japanese | European | British | | —————- | ————– | ———– | —————- | ————– | | Dominant Factors | Capital | Labor | Partners | Capital | | Stock Market: | Very Important | Unimportant | Unimportant | Very Important | | Welfare System: | Liberal | Corporatist | Social Democracy | Mixed |

  • Time-Space Compression
  • Business Cycle
  • Price Cycle - Kondratieff Wave
  • Technology -> Creative Destruction
  • Moore’s Law
  • Technological Peak -> Coming of Robots

Summary

  1. The modern world economy has had a number of common persistent features
    1. increasingly a single worldwide market
    2. politically fragmented
    3. threefold geographical tiers
    4. cyclical trend in prices driven by technological innovation
  2. But also some important trends that have not been persistent
    1. from competitive to organized to disorganized capitalism
    2. “national capitalisms” adapting differently to global trends
    3. shortening business cycle
    4. technology impacts lessening leading to weakening of long-wave cycle
  3. The rest of the course will examine how these varied features have played out across the world with some attention to late 1700s-1970 but mainly with a focus on the period since 1970.
    1. Examining the importance of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and then in the United States and Japan to the expansion of the modern world economy lays the foundation for the rest of the course.