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Contents |
| 1. |
Great Surges in economic development: Recurrence and uniqueness
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4 |
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| 2. |
The ruthless role of the major technology bubbles |
11 |
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| 3. |
The legacy of the bubble: three tensions at the Turning Point |
13 |
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| 4. |
The need for institutional recomposition to favor production over finance |
15 |
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| 5. |
Why globalization? |
17 |
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| 6. |
Some thoughts on the possibility of a positive-sum globalization |
18 |
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| 7. |
The Institutional Challenge |
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List of tables and figures |
| Table 1 |
The five great surges of development: Technological Revolutions and Techno-economic paradigms |
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| Figure 1 |
The double nature of technological revolutions |
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| Table 2 |
A different techno-economic paradigm for each great surge of development |
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| Figure 2 |
The life cycle of a technological revolution |
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| Figure 3 |
The social assimilation of technological revolutions breaks each great surge of development in half |
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| Figure 4 |
Parallel surges with major bubbles, Golden Ages and approximate dates of Turning Points |
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| Figure 5 |
Income polarization as one of the negative legacies of the Installation Period |
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| Introduction |
The present understanding of globalization is inextricably tied to the free market ideology for both proponents and opponents. This paper will argue that globalization has many potential forms of which the neo-liberal recipe, applied up to now, is only one.
The need to recognize the whole planet as the economic space is an inherent feature of the present technological revolution and its techno-economic paradigm. However, just as national State intervention in the economy took several different forms in the previous mass production (or “Fordist”) paradigm, so globalization can be socially and politically shaped in order to favor truly global development and support the full deployment of the current flexible production (or Information technology) paradigm.
Simply put: globalization need not be neo-liberal. A pro-development version of globalization has not yet been designed or defended as such (1). It will be argued that, without it, not only would it be very difficult to relaunch development in the South but also to overcome the present instabilities, imbalances and recessionary trends in the economies of the North.
These propositions stem from an historically-based model of the way in which successive technological revolutions are assimilated in the economic and social system, generating great surges of development that follow a recurring sequence and involve major readjustments in both the economic and the socio-institutional spheres (2).
In terms of this model, the present period, after the collapse of the major technology bubble, would be at the mid-point of the current great surge, right when the structural tensions that underlie the ensuing instability and recessionary trends require a fundamental institutional recomposition. Among other tasks, income needs to be re-channeled towards new layers of consumers in order to help overcome the premature market saturation that results from the polarization of income in the top band of the spectrum in each country and in the world. This paper will argue that the present is, for that reason, the most appropriate time to put forth bold proposals for a profound redesign of global regulation and institutions.
The argument is developed beginning with a general summary of the model, in section 1. Then, Section 2 focuses on the recurrence of great financial bubbles, a decade or two after the irruption of each technological revolution, and examines their role in facilitating paradigm shifts and in concentrating investment in the installation of the new infrastructures. Section 3 analyzes the post-bubble recessions and the structural distortions inherited from the “casino” economy, while Section 4 discusses the need to overcome those tensions by means of appropriate regulation and institutional changes. Section 5 analyzes the globalizing nature of the Information Technology paradigm followed in section 6 by a discussion of the features of that paradigm that could lead to a positive-sum game between North and South. Finally, section 7 looks at the institutional challenges involved in such a post-neo-liberal form of globalization taking into account some of the present world trends and their possible outcomes. |
1 Though it could be held that the European Union has some important features of such a version
2 This paper is largely based on Perez (2002) [Spanish edition 2004] |
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GreatSurges_and_Globalization.pdf (295 kb)
