Global trade

Focusing mainly on the United States and Latin America, we aimed to identify the constructions of social reality held by the major stakeholders participating in policy debates about global trade, public health, and health services. In a multi-method, qualitative design, we used three sources of data: research and archival literature, 1980-2004; interviews with key informants who represented major organizations participating in these debates, 2002-2004; and organizational reports, 1980-2004. We targeted several types of organizations: government agencies, international financial institutions (IFIs) and trade organizations, international health organizations, multinational corporations, and advocacy groups. Many governments in Latin America define health as a right and health services as a public good. Thus, the government bears responsibility for that right. In contrast, the US government's philosophy of free trade and promoting a market economy assumes that by expanding the private sector, improved economic conditions will improve overall health with a minimum government provision of health care. US government agencies also view promotion of global health as a means to serve US interests. IFIs have emphasized reforms that include reduction and privatization of public sector services. International health organizations have tended to adopt the policy perspectives of IFIs and trade organizations. Advocacy groups have emphasized the deleterious effects of international trade agreements on public health and health services. Organizational stakeholders hold widely divergent constructions of reality regarding trade, public health, and health services. Social constructions concerning trade and health reflect broad ideologies concerning the impacts of market processes. Such constructions manifest features of ''creed,'' regarding the role of the market in advancing human purposes and meeting human needs. Differences in constructions of trade and health constrain policies to address the profound changes generated by global trade.

usiness success is increasingly linked to effectively managing international logistics. Growing low-cost country sourcing and rising sales to international customers are triggering companies to seek new ways to manage the costs, complexities, and uncertainties of moving goods across borders.

This article examines the history of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important exporters of Indian raw cotton and one of the biggest trading firms in South Asia during the colonial period. The study allows for a fresh look at Indian economic history by putting forth two main arguments. First, it charts the history of a continental European firm that was active in South Asia to offer a better understanding of the economic entanglements of the subcontinent with the wider world, which often had a reach beyond the empire. This ties in with recent research initiatives that aim to examine the history of imperialism from a transnational perspective. Second, the history of a private company helps in developing a micro-perspective on the often ambiguous relation between the business goals of individual enterprises and colonial rule. The article argues that this may be evidence of the fact that capitalism and imperialism were two different, although sometimes converging, spatial structures, each with a distinct logic of its own. What is more, the positive interactions between European and Indian businessmen, fostered by a cosmopolitan attitude among business elites, point to the fact that even in the age of empire, the class background of actors could be more important for the establishing of cooperative ventures than the colour of their skin or their geographical origin. It is argued that this offers the possibility of examining the history of world trade in terms of global social history. * I would like to thank Margret Frenz, Moritz von Brescius, and the two anonymous readers of Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The article relies mostly on those unpublished records from the Volkart Archives in Winterthur that could be accessed for the first time for scholarly study. They have only recently been transferred to the Winterthur Municipal Archives and made accessible to the public.

On March 23, the Suez Canal, one of the world’s busiest transport arteries, became blocked in both directions when the ultra-large Golden-class container ship Ever Given (operated by the firm Evergreen), en route from Malaysia to the Netherlands, ran aground cross-ways. For nearly a week, the massive vessels remained lodged along both embankments of the man-made waterway. According to various estimates, every day of blockage was costing the global economy approximately $9.6 billion

Ecosystems are degrading rapidly due to human activities and expensive investments are needed to prevent further degradation and meet regulation targets. However, the effectiveness of these investments is contested. The concept of ecosystem services (ES) is widely accepted to link ecology and society which can help to quantify and value the impact of environmental policy and evaluate the effectiveness of investments. An ecosystem services (ES) assessment has the ability to demonstrate and compare the impact of human actions on nature and to translate scientific language into a common language for policy and the public. However, many challenges still exist in fully integrating the ES-concept in decision making processes. The overall objective of this thesis is to improve the evaluation of the impact of human activities and environmental policy actions on nature and the consequences for society.
Part 1 shows the large variety of methods that are being used to assess ES and reveals knowledge gaps in the ES field in general and the quantification of ES in particular. Part 2 demonstrates the possibilities and challenges in incorporating an ES assessment into a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the ecological and socio-economic consequences of a diverse set of human activities (e.g. global soybean trade, mowing to manage rivers, tidal marsh restoration). The analysis of three very different cases enabled the evaluation and improvement of this method with a special focus on global flows, the distribution of costs and benefits among different stakeholders, and the impact of ecological succession on ecosystem functioning and ES delivery. Part 3 illustrates how an ES assessment can be combined with a cost-effectiveness approach to select an optimal set of management measures which are ecologically effective and cost-efficient in managing an ecosystem. This method contributes to the development of a holistic approach that enables integrated management for multiple targets and stakeholder interests.
This thesis contributes to the operationalisation of the ES tool by reviewing current methods and assessing the usability of this method for the evaluation of human activities and improvement of integrated environmental management. Remaining challenges and concerns for a successful application of an ES assessment are recognised and discussed. The applicability of the outcome of an ES assessment is discussed from the perspective of policy makers, project managers and researchers. Overall, this thesis shows that the application of ES enables the evaluation of human activities and environmental policy decisions in a balanced and integrated way with respect to ecological, social and economic interests.

In the crisp dawn of Friday, May 10, 1861, sailing ships and steamers from across the world waited to dock in Liverpool harbor. The bustling English port had once been a center of the slave trade, its merchants made rich by dispatching their vessels to rendezvous with slave traders at forts that dotted the West African coastline. Now it prospered by importing cotton picked by slaves on plantations in the American South that was trans-formed into cloth in the factories of Lancashire. Weeks after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor signaled the beginning of the Civil War, many in Liverpool expected soon to be doing business with the Confederate States of America. If they had known who was aboard one of the ships that arrived that day, the stevedores in this port city where pro-southern sentiment ran high may have given this inconspicuous passenger a hero’s welcome. After disembarking, Caleb Huse was in no mood to tarry. His circuitous voyage had taken three weeks. The thirty-year-old West Point graduate, freshly commissioned a captain in the newly established Confederate army, had been dispatched on a clandestine mission. He was on his way to Lon-don, carrying on his young shoulders the knowledge that the task that awaited him might determine the fate of the Confederacy.

Keywords: textile and clothing industry quota WTO MFA Opportunities threats The textile and clothing industry in Karnataka is concentrated in Bangalore, which houses some of the largest Indian export houses. The abolition of the quota regime under the WTO in 2005 has opened up the global textiles and clothing arena for exporters in Karnataka, with its adequate raw material base complemented with state-of-the-art infrastructure facilities and skilled manpower supply. The paper studies the perceptions of exporters in Bangalore towards the opportunities and threats in the post-MFA global textile and clothing trade. The data for the study is collected from a sample of one hundred export-oriented textile and clothing units based in Bangalore through a structured questionnaire.

While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across borders. This paper focuses on how costly those anti-poor trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to reduce remaining distortions. Two opportunities in particular are addressed: completing the Doha Development Agenda process at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and freeing up the international movement of workers. A review of the economic benefits and adjustment costs associated with these opportunities provides the foundation to undertake benefit/cost analysis required to rank this set of opportunities against those aimed at addressing the world's other key challenges as part of the Copenhagen Consensus project. The paper concludes with key caveats and suggests that taking up these opportunities could generate huge social benefit/cost ratios that are considerably higher than the direct economic ones quantified in this study, even without factoring in their contribution to alleviating several of the other challenges identified by that project, including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution.

E-commerce is extensively used in all types of business, including manufacturing companies, retail stores, and service firms. This paper reviews prior research, examines the origins of e-commerce, identifies e-risks, describes retail trade on the Internet, defines virtual business, identifies aspects of website design, and describes types of cybercrime that hamper e-commerce. E-commerce has made business processes more reliable and efficient. Participating in e-commerce is essential for businesses to be able to market their products and services in the global marketplace.

This article explores the social biographies of sea cucumbers
and whales' teeth, challenging a prevalent tendency among
scholars to endow objects with abstract essences. It focuses
on encounters of value in which the meanings of material
possessions fluctuated across cultural and ethnic boundaries.
Such moments of contradiction and coalescence had profound
environmental and social consequences and suggest
new ways that environmental historians might understand
the roles of cultural arbitrage and expropriation in the making
of the world system. To illustrate these crucial issues, this
article discusses the experiences of David Whippy and William
Cary, two Nantucket castaways in nineteenth-century Fiji, and
it investigates long-term connections that emerged among
Nantucket, Fiji, and the broader ecosystems and cultures of the Pacific Ocean region during the 1800s. Both men were involved
in the export of sea cucumbers (genus Holothuria) from Fiji to China and the importation of sperm whales' teeth to Fiji from various parts of the Pacific. The histories of these two commodities offer potent testimonials about cultural and ecological changes during the nineteenth century.

The objective of this paper is to examine the possible role of external agencies in promoting good governance. To achieve this objective, it is first necessary to clarify what we mean by the term 'good governance', recognizing that the concept is a highly complex one and is surrounded by intense controversy. The paper also attempts to clarify the basis for external agencies to intervene in such a politically sensitive area as governance. The paper is intended as a contribution to the debate on the possible efficacies and modalities of different external interventions; there is no a prior presumption that such interventions are either desirable or effective.

While claiming to learn from the Chinese way of handling the crisis, there is no on-ground action in Pakistan that supports the claim. The Prime Minister denies national lock down despite the fact that without proper lock-down the virus spread trajectory can be rapid resulting in collapse of national health facilities which can bring the national economy to a halt.

This conceptual article argues that the well-established sociological concept of cosmopolitanism has been inadequately applied to organised labour, and specifically to international activities of trade unions. Taking a Marxian perspective, it sets these subjects side-by-side, considering firstly what the experience of international trade unionism can reveal about cosmopolitanism, and secondly theorising the forms cosmopolitanism may take in international trade union activity. In answer to the first question, it seeks to show how the development of cosmopolitanism assumes radically different forms among union members and managerial elites. In answer to the second question, it typologises international trade unionism using two categories termed ‘managerial’ and ‘mobilising’ internationalisms. These categories have material determinants, and in each the interaction between material interest representation and cosmopolitan normativity assumes different forms.

The moral justification of intellectual property is often called into question when placed in the context of pharmaceutical patents and global health concerns. The theoretical accounts of both John Rawls and Robert Nozick provide an excellent ethical framework from which such questions can be clarified. While Nozick upholds an individual's right to intellectual property, based upon its conformation with Lockean notions of property and Nozick's ideas of just acquisition and transfer, Rawls emphasizes the importance of basic liberties, such as an individual's right to health, superceding such secondary rights as intellectual property rights. From a policy perspective, patent protection for pharmaceutical products necessarily entails the balancing of corporate intellectual property interests and public interests in healthcare. The moral dilemma that occurs when these two interests clash is not easily resolved. Aside from corporate and public interests, the state maintains an interest in creating and preserving policies that regulate the moral dilemma itself. This paper analyzes the economic and ethical factors surrounding the production and distribution of the anti-HIV medication, AZT. Potential policy implications and recommendations are also discussed.

This chapter attempts to assess the impact that the current Covid-19 pandemic can exert on the globalization process. The pandemic crisis, which fully unfolded worldwide in March 2020, had dramatic consequences for the world population, some of which are of economic character. As some of the global value chains and international trade and investment relationships were destabilized or suspended, a legitimate question arises as to the possible progress of the globalization process. The authors commence with a multidimensional concept of globalization and its critical evaluation. Subsequently, three possible scenarios of pandemic-induced development are identified and explored: disrupted globalization, de-globalization, and finally rebalanced globalization. The discussion of these scenarios also includes implications for economic policy.

Intellectual Property has become a rich topic of interdisciplinary inquiry in the past 15 years, attracting the interest of anthropologists, communications and cultural studies scholars, economists, geographers, historians, traditional legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Not all of this scholarship addresses the role of intellectual property in actual social contexts, however, and a great deal of it is both hypothetical and abstract. Scholarship on intellectual property that represents a "law and society" approach is explored here through dominant themes in the literature. Briefly, these include the effect of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in shaping communication, the exercise of IPRs as a new form of social power, the spatial politics of branded environments, the cultural power of fame afforded to celebrities, global inequities occasioned by the emergence of trade-based intellectual property protection for informational goods, and a concern with the fate of the public domain in this new information economy.

•China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was launched by President Xi in 2013 and has since been viewed by many leaders of developing economies as a great step-like change forward for their national development prospects. China was to provide easy-to-get bilateral loans for their sorely desired, infrastructure-related economic development projects. The BRI was to end decades later in 2049, the 100th anniversary of the establishment of People’s Republic of China, at which time the country would be “a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.” (Yana 2021)*
•There are various structures one might think of, when attempting to describe the scores of China’s worldwide bilateral trade and infrastructure-related Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) development projects.** However, one could argue that BRI has no overarching structure, as far as the public is concerned. It appears to be a cluster of scores of widely dispersed bilateral arrangements linked to a common hub, China. By analogy, it is graphically like individual spokes of a bicycle wheel sharing a common hub for momentum.
•Making BRI’s institutional structure clear to the world could achieve at least two objectives: (1) make China’s strategic motivations for developing the BRI (it was originally named the One Belt One Road initiative) transparent, e.g., to fast-track economic development prospects for developing economies and (2) make a sustainable international foundation for achieving China’s as well as BRI’s long term goals.
•Here, I first introduces the BRI and then present the idea that the structure of China’s BRI could be viewed as a “functional archipelago” in the making. The BRI network is not a geographically defined archipelago based on territorial propinquity but a functional one, based on its activities such as trade, aid and infrastructure development assistance for developing economies, as noted some of the following “slides.”  As with traditionally identified archipelagos, functional ones also come with their rights and responsibilities.

Borders are the geographical demarcation of a sovereign nation. They are respected and recognized by the nations, organizations and people across the world. It is the responsibility of the government of the nation to protect the borders from external enemies and to protect the citizens. Since the early days of human civilization, protection of the borders is regarded as the prime importance for the rulers. Traditionally, the rulers of the nations have the defense forces in the form of armies, navies and air forces to protect the borders. Over the time that concept has been changed. Borders have been relaxed, and getting more and more irrelevant. Due to the increase in trade and the proliferation of businesses, borders are losing their traditional roles of the past. In this paper, we provide several aspects of globalization, and the irrelevance of the borders of the nations due to the growth of trade and commerce. The world becomes flatter with the increasing volume of trade. The world is also shrinking in terms of travel time and communications, while simultaneously it is expanding in terms of trades and commerce. With national borders becoming increasingly irrelevant. Though globalization has not been completely transparent for all the nations, it has shown its effect in last two and half decades. It is now playing vital roles in almost every aspect of human lives across the world, even affecting the choice of foods, clothes, life-styles, cultural habits and preferences.

The United States and the European Union include several environmental clauses in their respective preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Building on an exhaustive and fine-grained dataset of PTAs’ environmental clauses, this article makes two contributions. First, it shows that the United States and the European Union have initially favored different approaches to environmental protection in their PTAs. The United States’ concerns over regulatory sovereignty and level playing field have led to a legalistic and adversarial approach, while the European Union's concerns for policy coherence have led to a more procedural and cooperative approach. Second, this article provides evidence that European and American trade negotiators have gradually converged on a shared set of environmental norms. Although the United States and the European Union initially pursued different objectives, they learned from each other and drew similar lessons. As a result, recent American agreements have become more European-like, and European agreements have become more Americanized. This article concludes that U.S. and E.U. approaches, far from being incompatible, can usefully be combined and reinforce each other.

This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period.

Cosmopolitanism is not only a philosophical ideal: for many centuries it has also been an everyday practice across the globe. The early modern era saw hitherto unprecedented levels of economic interconnectedness. States, societies, and individuals reacted with a mixture of commercial idealism and commercial anxiety, seeking at once to exploit new opportunities for growth whilst limiting its disruptive effects. In highlighting the range of commercial cosmopolitan practices that grew out of early modern globalisation, the book demonstrates that it provided robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, the kind of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that Ulrich Beck has called for, chapters provide agency-centred evaluations of the risks and opportunities inherent in the ambiguous role of the cosmopolitan, who, often playing on and mobilising a number of identities, operated in between and outside of different established legal, social, and cultural systems.

This article examines an aspect of the globalization of commodity production, exchange, and consumption in the interwar years: the differential impact of protectionism on primary producers in the context of the Great Depression. Focusing on West African oilseeds, especially Nigerian palm produce, it highlights the dilemma of imperial Britain in the synchronic interplay of forces that operated in the north and south, and globally in the two-dimensional inter-product competition of the late 1920s and 1930s. Imperial Britain was caught in intricate and interlocking facets of inter-product competition on the world market, both north-south (palm produce versus whale oil), and south-south (West African palm produce, Indian groundnuts, and Dutch East Indies palm produce). The article highlights the implications and consequences of the extensive interchangeability of these products, the dilemmas of the colonial and imperial governments, reactions to protectionist policies, and the differential impact of the interwar depression upon the growth and freedom of commodity flows within the global economy.

This study argues that the effect of third-party trade on dyadic conflicts is conditional on the naval power of both the potential conflict initiator and its target state. This conditional effect occurs mainly because naval power allows trade-integrated initiators to reduce their trade dependence on a given trade partner and its allies more easily. At the same time, the target’s naval power increases the costs that conflict inflict on the initiator’s trade. As maritime trade accounts for about 80 percent of world trade volume, naval capability has an important effect on combatant states’ ability to substitute trading partners during a conflict and to mitigate trade-related costs, thereby affecting the relationship between third-party trade and conflict. The findings of our statistical analyses support our theoretical expectation that the pacifying effect of third-party trade diminishes as the initiator’s naval power increases, yet increases as the naval power of the potential target...

What are the underlying rationales for industrial policy? Does empirical evidence support the use of industrial policy for correcting market failures that plague the process of industrialization? This article addresses these questions through a critical survey of the analytical literature on industrial policy. It also reviews some recent industry successes and argues that public interventions have played only a limited role. Moreover, the recent ascendance and dominance of international production networks in the sectors in which developing countries once had considerable success implies a further limitation on the potential role of industrial policies as traditionally understood. Overall, there appears to be little empirical support for an activist government policy even though market failures exist that can, in principle, justify the use of industrial policy.

The accession of the Communist China to the neoliberal World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001 was an event of pivotal significance to both China and the global economy. Against this backdrop, this article examines and evaluates China's approach to the WTO rules by analyzing a range of its practices, including handling of the trade disputes as a respondent. It argues and attempts to demonstrate that even though an amalgam of realism, liberalism, rational choice institutionalism and constructivism reflects in China's behaviour and practices, it is realism that reigns supreme, based on the national interest articulated by the Chinese leadership. The article concludes that unless challenged by prudent countermeasures , China will continue to be guided supremely by its narrowly-defined national interest, rather than strictly adhering to the well-established WTO rules, with implications for foreign traders and investors.

The purpose of this research paper is to prove that China's policy towards the South China Sea represents a preemptive measure based on reducing China's energetic security threat concerning a potential blockade of the Malacca Strait by the US or India, in case of conlict escalation. By proving so, researchers will better understand the issues concerning the South China Sea and give insight into a perspective that is not largely debated. The strategy that was approached in this research and the methodology used was descriptive, analytical deductive. We followed to analyze a wide range of books and articles that are references in the domain. The results seem to prove that China's policy towards the South China Sea is directed towards multiple goals, such as avoiding containment, ighting for resources, protection of its energy security in the Malacca Strait and establishing itself as hegemon in the region. In those aspects, China's action in the South China Sea can be explained on the basis of achieving the means of attaining those certain goals. The hypothesis seems to stand to the degree in which a war would break out. Achieving sovereignty over the region, would endanger the passage of essential energetic inputs for relevant regionals actors and for the US, and can be used as a backup plan of blackmailing those actors in the situation in which China's oil ship imports would be blocked in the Malacca Strait. Until then, China's actions in the South China Sea can be seen as the necessary steps to achieve this leverage in their position with the US and other regional powers. Therefore, we can state that China's policy towards the South China Sea can represent a preemptive measure based on reducing China's energetic security threat concerning a potential blockade of the Malacca Strait by the US or India, in case of conlict escalation.

Last year Eritrea's leader, Isaias Afwerki, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed signed a historic peace deal For decades, the Eritrean economy has struggled because of a combination of war, authoritarian rule and the impact of United Nations sanctions.