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This concluding chapter reflects on the evolving pathways of economic development in East Asia by revisiting the politics of industrial policy and the changing role of the state. It argues for a new global political economy of development that takes into account both the state and nonstate institutions in the challenging context of global capitalism by proposing a mechanism theory of strategic coupling in order to consolidate the key findings identified in the book. The study allows for a clearer appreciation of the book's potential contribution as a theoretically grounded empirical analysis of the new development opportunities emerging from national-global articulations in different industries. The approach here also situates the rapid growth and transformation of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore in the wider literature on the changing configuration of the international political economy.

This chapter outlines a framework for exploring the global political economy of beauty through gender lenses. Outlining four main analytical entry points—the quince años, or “sweet fifteen” celebration for female adolescents (quinceañeras); youth beautification practices; feminist global political economy; and ethnographic inquiry—this chapter establishes the empirical and theoretical tools used throughout the book to understand the global political economy of beauty and how it is shaped by and shapes beautification on the ground. This chapter also provides an introduction to the major sociohistorical events influencing the economic, political, and cultural environment in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the demographics of the participants in the ethnographic inquiry.

The politics of livelihood and sustainability in Third World cities has become the archetypal challenge of twenty-first-century governance. Facing this challenge requires a clear set of ideas regarding the actors that shape cities, their interests, and their ability to realize those interests. Confronting urban livability requires broaching fundamental debates on the dynamics of the contemporary global political economy. The fact remains that markets and the corporations which dominate them must play a fundamental role in urban solutions. The possibility of “green growth machines” or even “urban livability machines” cannot be ruled out, even in the Third World. An overview of the chapters included in this book is presented. These chapters point toward the possibility of constructing a general framework for understanding a politics of livelihood and sustainability that works both in Asia and in Latin America and even makes sense in an industrialized but transitional society such as Hungary.

In the three eras identified in the previous chapters, the evolution of Islamic finance was paradoxical. The creation of the first Islamic banks could be seen, especially in the context of oil crisis and the calls for a New International Economic Order, as a challenge to the existing political-economic order. In reality, the first Islamic banks were firmly rooted within the existing Western financial system. By the same token, the age of globalisation allowed a financial system rooted in the Middle Ages to survive and to thrive. What is more striking is that even amid the Islamaphobia spurred by the September 11 events and the ‘Global War on Terror’, Islamic finance experienced its most dramatic growth in the first years of the twenty-first century. These paradoxes can be understood only in connection with the evolution of the global political economy during those three periods. The first section of this chapter discusses the political and economic context of the birth of modern Islamic finance, as well as the emergence of pan-Islamism, petrodollar windfall and relations with the West. The second section discusses Islamic finance and the global economy, as well as the transformation of banking and the rise of Islamism.

This chapter argues that the production of feminine beauty is both shaping and being shaped by the global political economy of beauty. Through the lenses of the quinceañera ball gown, dance performance, and cosmetics, this chapter explores how specific beautification processes are tied to global economies. The chapter employs Peterson’s reproductive, productive, and virtual (RPV) framing of global political economy to demonstrate the diversity of dimensions to the quince beautification economy. The chapter finds that increasing individualization and commercialization of the tradition enables and encourages diverse approaches to the celebration of the fifteen-year milestone. And yet the channels of production and reproduction in the celebration continue to reinforce religious- and patriarchal family-based norms of hierarchy. The beautification of the quinceañera also sheds light on the gendered processes of globalization. The globalization of the beautifying industries is successful in large part due to gendered production, reproduction, and consumption.

This chapter introduces the key axes of contestation over the rules of the game in the cotton trade and outlines a theoretical framework to understand them. A new approach to governance in the global economy is proposed: a theory of institutional change within the global capitalist system. This framework builds on recent variants of institutionalism by Djelic, Quack, Carruthers, Halliday, Mahoney, Thelen, Streeck, and others that focus on incremental yet transformational institutional change but demonstrates the limits of these accounts in their treatment of power and conflict. Drawing on the institutional political economic approaches of Polanyi, Wallerstein, Arrighi, and others, the chapter argues that institutional change must be understood in relation to historically specific institutional and systemic power relations. As coalitions of powerful firms and states create institutions to expand the scale and scope of the global economy, they unleash new competitive dynamics that both give rise to new rivals that seek to wrest control of these institutions and generate marginalized actors that seek to challenge their destructive effects. Rivals, marginalized actors, and dominant actors develop distinct strategies to reconstitute existing institutions given their particular positions within broader patterns of capital accumulation. This conflict-driven process generates incremental change and hybrid institutions.

This concluding chapter argues that transformations in the global political economy have shifted the bases of worker power. Unions are increasingly turning toward strategies that seek to alter the “rules of engagement” between capital and labor even before worker organizing begins. These different strategies are expressed as campaigns to win global framework agreements. The chapter also claims that reciprocity between the global and local spheres of action is a necessary condition for building global unionism. The case studies in the book show the intricate ways in which local struggles were woven into the global effort. For instance, the effort in the United States for global union was expanded with the support of unions in the Global South.

This chapter focuses on the universality of club standards, first by examining if voluntary clubs are truly a global phenomenon, or if Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) multinational firms have created a misconception among scholars of the global political economy. It provides a “tough test” of how powerful voluntary clubs are through examining the participation and compliance of firms located in Pacific Rim developing countries in relation to those in the United Nations Global Compact, the Free Burma campaign, and the ISO 14001 regime. The test reveals the similarities and differences of the Pacific Rim, and concludes that there is a suggestion that there is value in the club model for voluntary programs, and that firms are more adherent to “strong sword” programs, but that further research is necessary to come to a clear verdict.

This book explores how developers of modern intrauterine devices (IUDs) have adapted to different social interests. It details how they understood the political stakes of women’s bodies. It argues that scientific work organizes itself in response to the socially and geographically diverse demands around fertility control and acts on women’s bodies through its discourse. It shows an example of the global political economy of women’s bodies in the history of this contraceptive device. It believes that women’s social empowerment is a prerequisite to reproductive self-determination and well-being. This book describes how different modes of governance over women’s bodies are linked to one another. An overview of the chapters included in this book is finally given.

This chapter aims to advance feminist theorizing of military privatization by integrating a state-theoretical perspective with a feminist international relations (IR), including feminist global political economy (GPE), approach. Such an integrated perspective grasps the hybrid character of military privatization as both an aspect of gendered state transformations and of the gendered dynamics of global markets. For this purpose, the chapter widens the focus beyond the private military and security industry, its gendered practices, discourses, and effects and links scholarship on private security to transformations in global and local gender relations under neoliberalism. Additionally, it seeks to overcome the “decline of the state hypothesis” that dominates mainstream discourses on privatization of security and suggests that the allegedly more women-friendly state is eroding at the expense of a masculinized global market for force.

While Ireland in the mid 1950s was viewed by some indigenous geologists as a country with limited hydrocarbons, the visit of an Irish-American lawyer sparked hopes for potential oil and gas exploitation. This chapter documents the design of legal and policy frameworks to facilitate hydrocarbon exploration and production, highlighting how the Irish state implemented a licensing system (1959 Oil Agreement) which entailed the transfer of rights for all Ireland's onshore and offshore territory to one oil company, enabling the privatisation of produced resources in exchange for some fiscal returns. Providing an historical account of the early days of the Irish petroleum industry, this chapter makes a new contribution to knowledge on Irish state hydrocarbon management, contextualised with reference to occurrences in Irish political economy. Conditions internationally also impacted on Ireland and global trends in resource nationalisation in tandem with the discovery of Kinsale gas culminated in the 1975 licensing terms (Justin Keating's terms) which signified a fresh perspective on hydrocarbon management. Due to national and international forces, this ‘golden era’ would not last, as discussed in the next chapter.

This chapter reiterates the points made in the previous chapter regarding the environmental dynamics in Madagascar, offering recommendations that take into account the global political economy as well as the domestic politics of donor countries. It emphasizes that struggles over land and resources are intertwined with both, and considers the shifting relations of environmental governance under neoliberalism. From here, the chapter shifts the discussion into the possibility of a transformation in who travels through the corridors of power. It argues that policy is made not only through formal political agreements but also through informal interactions—hence it can be changed through multiple avenues.

The Afterword analyzes novel ways in which gender and finance were interwoven in political practices of representing the global financial crisis (GFC) and in the search for new stabilities. In her analysis of sexualized imaginations of the GFC, de Goede turns to popular films—The Wolf of Wall Street and The Inside Job—and combines them with the focus on obscure financial instrument such as ABACUS. She finds, along with many other authors in this volume, that in the aftermath of the GFC, gender is back—and with a vengeance. But de Goede also warns against easy refoundations of gender and values that scandals might have encouraged: instead, staying attuned to the complex politics of responsibility and to the critical voices both within and outside the financial industry she creates a way of seeing beyond the impoverished field of policy options and of thinking ethically about the global political economy.

In the chapter, Haq traces the evolution of the World Bank through the decade of the seventies. Since the time the Bank was established, the global political economy structure underwent considerable changes. The World Bank in the 1970s, under the dynamic leadership of Robert Mcnamara, tried to adjust to these changes. The World Bank of the 1980s faced problems of a weak resource base, poor intermediary role and a greater pressure for the Bank to bend its development philosophy towards the private sector. Haq proposes a few structural changes in the Bank that would enable it to overcome these problems.