GEOG 123 Teacher Keywords

FISCAL POLICY

A bracket term for government budget policies and associated approaches to government spending and borrowing. It is generally used in juxtaposition with the term monetary policy.

OFFSHORING

A colloquial phrase used to describe the process in which both TNCs and smaller companies seek sourcing efficiency by moving production facilities out of high cost countries and into regions where labor and other costs of production are cheaper. Some of this offshoring is also simultaneously outsourcing, as in all the external supply chains providing commodities from overseas to big US retailers such as Wal-Mart and Costco. But just as often, offshored production is conducted within factories that are still actually owned by the big brand-name TNCs (e.g., Sony-owned factories in Indonesia, and GE-owned factories in Mexico). In the US in 2004 as George Bush faced the challenge of John Kerry for the presidency, offshoring became one of the big issues of the campaign year. Magazines and newspapers were full of articles and cartoons about the number of jobs, many of them in the service sector, being off-shored to places such as India and China. "Everybody's talking about offshoring and plenty of companies are doing it," noted an article in American Airlines' magazine, "but hype has swallowed a few key facts" (McGarvey, 2004). The author of the article went on to caution business managers (the presumed readership of the inflight magazine) about the risks of off-shoring: "Number one: It's no panacea. Number two: It doesn't always deliver the promised cost savings and efficiencies. Number three. If you're the manager in charge of work that's headed offshore, get some asbestos-soled shoes, because your feet will be held to the fire." By 2004 offshoring had developed to such an extent that there were a large number of business consultants available for an author like McGarvey to interview about the costs and benefits of sending the work overseas. By 2012, the issue was still a hot topic in the presidential race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, but by this time the whole off-shoring support industry was also already changing again: this time to support TNCs interested anew in 'in-shoring', or bringing back off-shored work to factories in wealthy countries now made more cost effective by the depressive effects of the global financial crisis on the price of labor, land and infrastructure.

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

A favourite term amongst advocates of neoliberalism, the metaphor of the 'level playing field' is frequently used to represent the ways in which globalization has torn down or needs to tear down barriers to business right around world. The only players imagined as playing on this flattened field are businesses and their CEOs plus occasionally, and in no particular order, nation-states, consumers, and, if only as obstacles to be overcome, unions and other opponents of neoliberal reform. There are three other key features that need to be noted about the metaphor and the ways in which it functions as a discourse about the so-called 'economy' (Gibson-Graham, 1996). The first is that the level-playing field clearly represents some sort of omniscient god's eye view of the world. It is a view from a position of mastery (Morris, 1992, 51), and it is therefore a view that also tends to reduce all of the diversity of the world to the cost calculus of business. It follows that the second key feature of the metaphor is that it is not just metaphorical, but rather a discourse about the world that is directly linked to real practices such as the implementation of free trade agreements, the reduction of transportation costs, and the development of the internet, practices which in one way of another reduce the friction of distance on business. The third feature of the level playing field as discourse, however, is that despite its repeated use as a common-sense neoliberal world-view with world-shaping consequences, it is also a fundamentally misleading representation of economic geography. It is a view that hides the vast asymmetries of wealth, poverty, power and vulnerability across the planet, and it is a view that, despite being developed in the US, systematically conceals the dominance of the US within the context of contemporary globalization (Sparke, 2003).

COMMODITY CHAINS

A commodity chain (or 'value chain' as it is sometimes described) is the name for the overall production process of commodities from the initial collection of raw materials through basic production and assembly through to transportation, retailing, sales and consumption. Geographers have been at the forefront of theorizing and mapping commodity chains globally (e.g. Coe, Dicken and Hess, 2008). However, perhaps the most well-known theorist of commodity chains is the economic sociologist Gary Gereffi who introduced the distinction discussed here in Chapter 3 between 'Producer-driven commodity chains' and 'Market-driven commodity chains'. More recent collaborative contributions to this analytical project have introduced a typology of five commodity chains sub-types (Gereffi, Sturgeon and Humphrey, 2005). Between the one extreme of producer-driven chains and the other extreme of market-mediated chains (which the three scholars rename 'hierarchical' and 'market' chains respectively), the new account allows for the formulation of three other sub-types called 'captive,' 'relational,' and 'modular'. Beyond economic sociology, there is also now a larger and still growing collection of work that uses particular commodities as a lens through which to explore globalization more generally. Sugar, chocolate, coffee, tea, water, tobacco, marijuana, cotton, oil, coal, diamonds, and even the potato have in this way become the basis of studies of how commodities both connect and divide us globally (see the readings listed below). Using commodity histories to examine global geographies of trade, these studies often aim at exploring where everyday commodities come from and who they connect through global networks of production and distribution. In this sense they offer a critique of commodity fetishism, and at their best, they thereby also follow the path-breaking example of Sydney Mintz (1985) whose work on sugar sourced from Caribbean slave plantations documented global power relations of domination and exploitation too. But, as the literary critic Bruce Robbins argues in an excellent essay on commodity histories as a genre, the authors of these works can sometimes claim so much world historical significance for their particular commodity chain that they also in some sense re-fetishize the commodities too (Robbins, 2005). The focus on goods at the center of global commodity chains may in this way also unfortunately obscure the bads of global injustice.

DERIVATIVES

A derivative is a financial instrument that derives its value from the trading and price movements of other underlying assets. It is traded in a way that puts a market price on the financial risk associated with the future price fluctuation of these other underlying financial instruments (including stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities). The main three types of derivatives are called futures, options and swaps, and collectively they are used to put prices on the risks associated with the future values of various traded instruments ranging from currencies and basic commodities such as coffee and pork bellies, to ordinary stocks and bonds, to much more complex instruments with exotic names like 'dual currency bonds' and 'synthetic noncallable debt'. Whether simple or complex, the way derivatives put a price on risk enables market agents to either speculate on risk (e.g. bet that the price of coffee next year will be much higher) or conduct risk management by effectively selling risk to speculators (e.g. fix a price of a future delivery of coffee despite not knowing what climatological and transportation challenges may be faced in the year ahead). Interestingly from the perspective of the history of globalization, the development of futures, options and swaps can be examined in terms of how they have enabled capitalists to deal with the risks of doing business at a distance (Leyshon and Thrift, 1997). Futures, for example, can be traced to the opening of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848 when traders established forward contract calls for the exchange of certain commodities (such as cattle) at a future date for cash. Buyers and sellers could thereby use the futures market to manage all the risks associated with the colonization of the American west, with communicating long distance by telegraph and railway, with moving cattle vast distances and turning them into refrigerated meat, with transforming the prairies into gigantic grain growing farms, and with dispossessing the native inhabitants (Cronon, 1991). Options perhaps go back even further as simple agreements between individual market actors to reserve a choice to buy or sell in the future. However, the development of institutionalized option exchanges represents a much more recent revolution in financial affairs, and allows securitized long distance risk trading between parties that are often on opposite sides of the world. It has created two types of options: put options and call options. The latter give their owners the right to buy an underlying financial instrument (e.g. a bond) at specific price until a specific date. Reciprocally, put options allow their owners to reserve the right to sell a financial instrument at a specific price up to a specific date. These rights are then traded by options traders who offer them at a price (while retaining a premium for the service). Swaps are a still more complex kind of derivative that have come to be associated with the speculation and risk management generated by global trading in currencies and bonds between parts of the world with varied interest rates. Swaps take the form of an agreement between the trading counterparties to exchange certain sequences of cash flow over a specified future period. Commonly, for example, swaps are used to trade fixed rates of interest for floating rates of interest. Such swaps allow the sellers to speculate that future interest rates will generate higher payments, while meanwhile allowing the buyers of the fixed rate payments to reduce their exposure to the risks associated with interest rate volatility. More exotic 'accreting swaps', 'amortizing swaps,' 'seasonal swaps', 'roller coaster swaps', 'off-market swaps', 'yield curve swaps', 'rate differential swaps', 'flavored currency swaps', 'CIRCUS swaps' and so-called 'swaptions' allow market players to hedge all kinds of additional risk factors in financial markets (Kolb, 2000). An ironic outcome of the related explosion of hedge fund trading in derivatives in recent years, however, have been the increasing system-wide risks and instabilities associated with trading risk - the 2008-2012 global financial crisis and risk bankers being a case in point (Tett, 2009). Even if one thinks such risks are exaggerated, there can be no doubt that derivative trading has become a defining feature of today's global financial system: a system that has swapped monetary control by individual nation-states for a kind of transnational 'phantom state' whose unending money movements continue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, shaping life right across the planet.

ANTI-GLOBALIZATION

A term generally used by pro-market commentators and advocates of neoliberalism to describe the outlook of their critics. The term is quite misleading because most of the activists, NGOs and other groups involved in the struggles against neoliberal policies and ideas remain nevertheless committed to forging global links of resistance (George, 2004). Developments such as the World Social Forum are testament to this, as too are all the globalized ties on the internet that critics use to organise public protests such as the Battle in Seattle or, more recently, the Occupy and Indignado encampments. What such critics demand is a different, more democratic, more environmentally-sustainable and much more socially just kind of globalization. In this respect the term alter-mondialisation used by French activist groups such as ATTAC is more appropriate because most of the critics seek to develop alternative forms of globalization (ATTAC, 2006). It is important to remember though that from the perspective of advocates of neoliberalism such critics still seem to be 'anti-globalization' because the only kind of globalization that neoliberals can conceive of is one organized by markets and pro-business regulation. For this reason they tend to see all critics as supporters of national economic protectionism and find it hard to conceive of a different kind of globalized protectionism based on a vision of protecting the global environment, workers and global standards of social and economic justice. It is true, however, that some critics of neoliberal globalization are protectionist in a simple economic sense. Both reactionary right wing critics of free trade such as Patrick Buchanan in the US and Le Pen in France, and a few traditionalist union groups subscribe to a defensive nationalism based on protecting national jobs. Yet this kind of nationalist protectionism is increasingly rare on the left. Even amongst American unions and the AFL-CIO where a nationalist outlook was quite longstanding, there is now a strong movement towards creating a transnational and therefore much more globalized network of resistance against neoliberalism. For this reasons, the simple binary of globalization versus anti-globalization is increasingly unstable (Held and McGrew, 2002).

AGRIBUSINESS

A name for any kind of commercialized agriculture run using business principles and profit-making goals to manage both upstream inputs and downstream food processing and marketing. Agribusinesses are key agents of economic globalization insofar as they tend to market their products transnationally as well as reply upon global suppliers of synthetic pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers for inputs. Typically agribusiness involves either highly mechanized monocropping (e.g. Brazilian soybeans) or labor intensive work using transnational workers (e.g. Californian strawberries). It includes the production of both non-food and food products from farms (beverages, ethanol, tobacco, paper, textiles, and leather for example) as well highly processed products - such as high fructose corn syrup, ketchup and hydrogenated oils - that are hard to classify. One of the problematic features of pro-market globalization from the perspective of critics has been the increasing global encroachment of agribusiness on more traditional forms of farming for local consumption. Via Campesina and other organizations advocating for farming communities organize in this way against the loss of local food sovereignty (http://viacampesina.org/en/). Such loss has been dramatized recently in the form of massive land grabs for agribusiness in poor countries, including the plains of eastern Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and even the prairies of Eastern Europe (Pearce, 2012). At a general level the global encroachments of agribusiness are undeniable. They include not just the buying-up of public lands and family farms, but also micro-practices such as the use of more commercial pesticides and genetically modified seeds. On closer inspection, investigations of such changing farming practices make it increasingly hard to distinguish between traditional farming and agribusiness. In one way or another, farmers throughout the world have become interdependently linked to commercial farming processes whether it is in terms of the inputs they use for farming (the seeds, fertilisers and equipment) or the ways in which they market their produce or their labor practices. Even organic farming which is generally understood as an alternative to agribusiness is part of a larger global trend towards the commercialization of agriculture, just as 'fresh' food has continued to be commodified and packaged in ways that obscure its agribusiness basis (Jarosz, 2008; Freidberg, 2009). In this respect it should be remembered that when organic farmers avoid all commercial inputs on the production side, they still rely on the sales side on access to very small niche markets (such as wealthy educated urban consumers) that only exist because of highly developed consumer education that is responding to agribusiness.

TINA

An acronym based on the UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's claim 'There Is No Alternative' and her associated argument that the reforms of neoliberalism were demanded by global economic necessity. Repeated in various other venues throughout the 80s and 90s by various other TINA touts, the argument has served to naturalize a single market-based discourse about Globalization while simultaneously normalizing neoliberalism as the politically correct policy response.

WTO

Although the idea of an international trade organization was formulated in 1944 at Bretton Woods, today's World Trade Organization was only founded in 1994 at the close of the Uruguay Round (1986-94) of the GATT talks in Marakesh. Its purpose is to liberalize international trade by enforcing free trade rules, arbitrating international trade disputes and working to forge new global agreements on the removal of tariffs and so-called non-tariff barriers to trade (the latter including all sorts of national rules on health and environmental protections). Unlike the IMF and the World Bank—which were set up at Bretton Woods to run on a 'one dollar, one vote' principle—the WTO operates on an ostensibly more inclusive model in which the voices of individual member states are all meant to count. However, because the ground rules for inclusion are fixed as free trade rules, because the basic goal of the organization is to remove frictions on the movement of commodities, and because the organization's disputes resolution mechanism works on the assumption that it is intrinsically good to reduce both tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade, the WTO serves institutionally to expand and entrench neoliberalism on a global scale (Harvey, 2005; Peet et al, 2003). Everywhere its rules apply the WTO enables the privatization of formerly public goods and common property resources whether they be medicines, government-provided health services, shared forests or clean water. WTO rules also simultaneously undercut democratic governance insofar as they provide a powerful lever through which businesses can reduce or eliminate democratic law-making (including, for example, legislation banning carcinogenic chemicals and pesticides) by coding the resulting public interest laws as non-tariff barriers to trade (Wallach and Woodall, 2004). Another neoliberal aspect of the WTO is that there is very little possibility under its free trade rules to permit non-neoliberal development strategies such as the production of cheap generic drugs or state assistance to new industries facing competition from developed producers elsewhere. As a result, the WTO has been criticized for 'pulling up the ladder' for the world's poorer countries, preventing them from following a path once taken by countries such as the US and Japan that used industrial protectionism in their early approach to development. It has been this basic injustice, combined with the WTO's democracy-eroding complicity in processes of dispossession that has led so many critics to take to the streets from Seattle in 1999 through to Hong Kong in 2006. Ironically, however, it has been yet another injustice noted by the protestors that has ultimately proved most damaging to the WTO's own attempts to expand free trade since the 'Battle in Seattle'. This additional injustice is the disproportionate power still wielded by the US government in negotiations because of the importance of the US market in global trade. The irony is that because the US has been unwilling to fully implement free trade itself, and, most notably, because (like the EU) it has been unwilling to give-up the huge subsidies given each year to domestic agribusiness, US officials have been moving increasingly away from the mulitalteralism of WTO negotiations where they face growing demands from developing countries to eliminate such practices and actually implement free trade in farmed goods. As a result, American trade negotiators have preferred more recently to develop bilateral trade deals with particular countries such as Singapore, and, meanwhile, the WTO's failing attempts to expand free trade remain an important reminder that globalization is not so inevitable after all.

COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE

David Ricardo reportedly became interested in economics after reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations while on holiday at the English spa town of Bath in 1799. Subsequently his theory of comparative advantage sought to explain how trade could increase the wealth of nations by allowing specialization. The basic argument is very simple: namely that even if country 'x' can produce everything more efficiently than country 'y', both countries can still reap economic gains when country x specializes in what it is best at producing and trading freely - without tariffs - with country 'y'. While this theory is still widely taught in economics classes around the world and on the website of the Wold Bank, it is less often noted that there was a historical context that made Ricardo's arguments make sense to him and the leaders of British industry in the 19th century (but see Hobsbawm, 1964). They wanted to open new markets for the commodities being made in their new factories. Likewise, they had an economic interest in food being cheaper for their workers (so they did not have to pay them so much to feed themselves). As a result of these two major economic imperatives, they wanted Britain to have free-trade with other countries by repealing the Corn Laws that imposed import tariffs on cheap foreign grain. From the perspective of Ricardo and the business class to whom his arguments appealed, these Corn Laws were economically irrational because they only increased the profits of British landowners - an older feudal class of aristocratic elites - who 'wasted' their wealth on personal extravagances that did little to expand the industrial economy. Ricardo died in 1823, and it was not until 23 years later that the Anti Corn Law League finally succeeded in having the import tariffs repealed with the 1846 Importation Act (in the meantime, the League had also founded The Economist magazine in 1843 as a way of popularizing its pro-free trade arguments). Too late for Ricardo himself, the repeal of the Corn Laws nevertheless went on to have many of the effects that he and Britain's business leaders had envisioned. It made it possible to import cheap foreign grain, allowing, amongst other things, for the importation via steamboat of the new and especially cheap American prairie corn. It moved Britain's governing elites towards a wider commitment to free trade. And along the way, it had another useful economic effect in that it made farming more marginal land in Britain unprofitable, leading to increasing unemployment of the agricultural labor force and their steady migration to the industrial cities where their demand for work helped to keep wages down and profits up for business.

FDI

Foreign direct investment is what happens when a company invests abroad by building a new plant or directly acquiring new facilities and operations. It is distinguished from foreign portfolio investment (FPI) in which companies, fund managers and individuals purchase the stock of foreign companies. There are two main types of FDI. The first involves establishing brand new factories or retail facilities on the ground. The second involves buying-up, merging with or otherwise acquiring a foreign company. These two types are known respectively as Greenfield FDI and Mergers and Acquisitions FDI. Greenfield investment simply means new investment in new facilities, infrastructure and equipment. It does not have to happen literally in a green field, and can take place in sites as varied as former housing zones and former rainforests. Mergers and Acquisitions, can be very varied too, but they are all usually investments made specifically with the purpose of exercising executive control over foreign companies.

DEBT

In its simplest sense, debt is just money which is owed. However, in the world of finance it comes in a wide array of increasingly complex forms including credit card borrowing, bank loans, mortgages, diverse bonds, swaps, options, swaptions and many other still more complex derivatives. All these forms of debt represent value but, like money itself, they are not a source of value. Instead they represent a capitalist bet on the likely production of new profits from new investments. Such bets effectively put a monetary valuation on future value generation before it has happened. They therefore also represent a monetary valuation of the risks involved in securing ongoing capitalist processes of profit generation. This means that risk assessment lies at the core of most financial dealings over debt. Loans to supposedly stable financial entities such as large companies or governments are often termed "risk free" or "low risk" and made at a so-called "risk free interest rate". This is because the debt and interest are expected to be repaid without fail. This does not always happen, of course, and other risks also affect the value of debt, including the risk that the currency in which the debt is owed loses value. Given these uncertainties, lenders often rely on credit rating agencies as well as a number of international institutions to anticipate and manage the risks involved. Alongside the IMF, a key institution in this regard is the Bank for International Settlements which sets rules to define what loans qualify as "risk free" or not. In absolute terms, the US owes more than any other country in the world. However, because of the historic importance of the dollar as a global currency of last result, and because of the dependency of producers in Japan, China, and Europe on the ongoing capacity of Americans to consume their exports, lenders continue to lend money to the US by buying US government and corporate bonds. Some commentators believe that this lending and the cheap credit it provides for American companies and consumers is likely to become increasingly harder to maintain as lenders come to terms with the declining value of the dollar. However, for the moment, the US continues to be able to borrow more, and the countries who are suffering the most from indebtedness are countries in the Global South (and increasingly southern Europe) where debt causes a vast array of problems ranging from malnutrition and miserable educational services to widespread political instability. While in 1997 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) stated that 21 million children's lives could be saved if the money used for debt service was put into health and education, in 2002 the same agency reported that among 50 African countries, 29 spent more on debt service than on health. In Zambia, the per capita debt load is such that each citizen effectively US$790 - more than twice the average annual income, and in Mozambique, the cost of debt servicing in 1994 equalled the budgets for health, education, police, and judicial systems combined. These kinds of debt-crises have led to a huge political effort to reduce and relieve the debt of the 41 states that are classified as heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs). The main objective of the HIPC initiative is to reduce debt in these countries to a sustainable level, thereby releasing extra budgetary resources for poverty-reducing expenditure, including expenditure on health. However, the politics and economics of debt forgiveness are complex and commonly rely on the governments of wealthy countries taking over the risks of the remaining loans from the private commercial banks that saddled the HIPCs with the huge debts in the first place.

INFLATION

Inflation is a condition of rising average prices within an economy. Rising prices equate directly with the falling value of money, but the actual causes of inflated prices and the falling value money are much more complex and contested. The economists most closely associated with neoliberalism such as Milton Friedman (1969) tend to explain inflation primarily in terms of money supply dynamics. This so-called monetarist explanation is based on the argument that inflation is primarily caused by governments that borrow or print too much money, pumping it into national economies in ways that create an oversupply and hence a falling value of money. For other economists including both Keynesians and Marxists, the causes of inflation are understood to run deeper than this. They generally focus instead on the increasing costs of factors of production including the cost of labor as an economy expands and the supply of labor and other inputs has to be shared between more and more producers. In addition to these more demand-side explanations, non-neoliberal economists also tend to point more to geopolitical dynamics and exogenous price shocks such as the 1973 oil price rises (associated with the creation of OPEC) as further factors explaining inflationary increases in the costs of production. Monetarists have acknowledged such factors too but have preferred to focus on monetary interventions by governments as a target for reform (particularly because they also blame stagflation - rising prices and decreasing growth - on government infusions of money too). Keynesians, by contrast, have viewed deflation (lowered prices, lack of demand and an increase in the purchasing power of money) as a more debilitating economic problem than inflation because of its association with increased unemployment and economic depression. For the same reason, they have tended to view government demand management (and the government borrowing and increased money supply it created) as the lesser of two evils. Keynes himself put it like this: "Thus inflation is unjust and deflation is inexpedient. Of the two perhaps deflation is ... worse; because it is worse, in an impoverished world, to provoke unemployment than to disappoint the rentier" (Keynes, 1972: 75). Here Keynes clearly expresses an ethical and political concern with workers facing unemployment. For neoliberal monetarists, it is instead, the rentiers, the large owners and loaners of money who take pride of place. By keeping prices stable and ensuring that the interest payments on loaned money do not therefore fall in value, monetarist policy-making ensures that banks, bond-holders and other big lenders do not see falling returns on their loans. Instead of aiming at zero-unemployment neoliberal economists speak instead about maintaining something called NAIRU, the 'Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment'. They believe that trying to reduce unemployment below this level increases inflation and that therefore it is necessary to maintain a reserve workforce of unemployed workers in order to keep prices (especially labor costs) down. They also argue that free markets should set prices for all other commodities except money itself which should only be managed in careful conjunction with market forces by independent central banks committed to price stability. Ironically with the entrenchment of neoliberalism globally and the related rise in influence of global financial markets over national governments, simple explanations of inflation that treat national economies in geographical isolation from one another are increasingly out of date (Corbridge, 1994). Considered from a more adequate transnational perspective, inflation is also caused by three other factors in addition to rising costs in a domestic economy. In the global arena it is caused by either: a) forces that increase international prices (like a war in the Middle East increasing oil prices); b) factors that reduce the value of a national currency vis-à-vis other currencies (such as national indebtedness); or c) the so-called exporting of inflation from countries (most notably the US) that create artificial levels of global demand based on precarious forms of credit. In considering these complex factors it is worth remembering that national currencies usually tend to be pushed downwards in value when countries operate a large fiscal deficit or large current account deficit. Such downward movements in currency values in turn create rising prices. This is what has happened in many indebted countries such as Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Indonesia in the contexts of their various debt crises. In each case, steep spikes in inflation have resulted and massive devaluations of national currencies have ensued. Ever since the great depression the US dollar has been the big exception to this rule, however, and the US in the late 90s saw a strong dollar and low inflation despite huge fiscal and trade deficits. This was the result of both historical reasons that made the dollar a global currency of last resort, and also because of contemporary reasons associated with the needs of Japan and China to prop up the dollar (so that Americans would keep being able to afford their exports) and the loss of other seemingly safe places to put savings and reserves in global markets. When these underpinnings of the strong dollar change (as they started to do in 2003 and after 2008) the US also risks inducing inflation as the dollar declines in value, and the costs of imports go up.

MERCOSUR

Mercado Comun del Cono Sur (or the Common Market of the Southern Cone) is a free trade block and customs union made up of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. It was formed in 1991 as a regional common market agreement between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay with Chile and Bolivia as associate members. More like the European Union and less like NAFTA, Mercosur is a common market that includes consensus agreements on common immigration, labor and other policies, as well as special trade and investment preferences.

NTB

NON-TARIFF BARRIERS (NTBs): This is how NAFTA and WTO legalese characterizes any policy or government regulation that is not a tariff, but has the effect of limiting trade. Many of these laws are designed to protect the environment, workers and consumers, but this does not stop the trade lawyers from calling them protectionist in terms of trade. For instance, a law that prohibits imports of strawberries containing carcinogenic pesticide residues could be considered a non-tariff barrier to trade, as it restricts trade in strawberries. The WTO and NAFTA set very narrow rules for which non-tariff barriers are permitted, and this is how trade law can end up trumping national and state laws.

CHAPTER 11

Not to be confused with the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for US firms who seek 'reorganization' by a bankruptcy court, Chapter 11 is more famous in globalization debates as a key chapter dealing with foreign investment in the NAFTA free trade agreement. The provisions of Chapter 11 were primarily designed to protect US and Canadian corporations who feared that future Mexican governments might want to roll-back neoliberalism in Mexico and nationalize (i.e. transfer back to public ownership) things like water supply and public land that were privatized in the 1980's and 1990's. The business lobbyists demanded legal protections that would mean that governments would have to compensate corporations who suffered lost profits as a result of government intervention. This is what Chapter 11 provided. However, it was written using terminology that has allowed for extraordinarily far-reaching corporate lawsuits against a wide array of democratic efforts at regulation. Under Chapter 11 the signatory nations are prevented from "directly or indirectly nationaliz[ing] an investment" or taking measures "tantamount to nationalization or expropriation," and it is with the latter phrase in particular that the door has been opened to the direct attacks on regulation by democratically elected governments. Most infamously there have been two cases involving carcinogenic gasoline (petrol) additives. In 1997 a US company, the Ethyl Corporation, sued the Canadian government under Chapter 11 demanding damages because the Canadian authorities had implemented a ban on an Ethyl product, the gasoline additive MMT. The NAFTA arbitration tribunal hearing the case found for Ethyl, and Canada was forced to pay the company US$13 million and subsequently had to withdraw its ban of MMT. Such cases show that NAFTA created a new set of rights for corporations that enable them not only to side-step government regulations by moving factories, but also, through Chapter 11, actually enable corporate challenges to the legislative authority of democratically elected governments. For up to date critical analysis of these corporate efforts to sue governments see the Public Citizen Trade Watch website at http://www.citizen.org/trade/

WORLD BANK

Originally established in 1944 at Bretton Woods as the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the World Bank has grown now to become a multi-faceted global governance institution of enormous influence. Today, the IBRD is just one of the 5 agencies comprising what is formally known as the 'World Bank Group' (http://www.worldbank.org/). The other 4 agencies are: the International Development Association, (which focuses on credits and grants to the world's poorest countries); the International Finance Corporation (which provides loans and consulting designed to stimulate private sector investment in poor countries); the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (which offers insurance against losses caused by non-commercial risks to investors in poor countries); and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (which works to arbitrate international investment disputes). Together the 5 agencies are governed by Boards of Directors drawn from member countries. While this allows for multi-country representation, the directors can only vote using a weighted system based on bank capital share quotas, and these quotas are in turn based on the size of a country's capital subscription to the IMF. All 188 countries that have qualified for World Bank membership (and who are therefore able to participate in its programs) are thus also obliged to have already joined the IMF as a condition of membership. The membership and voting quota arrangement is just one example of how the two agencies were set up jointly by US leaders at Bretton Woods to work in tandem to enforce a post-war peace based on American leadership and market interests. Back in 1944 the US was the owner much of the world's capital, was the biggest global lender, and thus held the majority quotas. The World Bank, like the IMF, has effectively institutionalized this historic US hegemony and allowed it to persist into the present. In these US-centric arrangements the IMF was designed to address short term balance of payments emergencies, while what became the World Bank was envisioned as an agency that would deal with longer term developmental challenges. The underlying idea was that the two agencies would help secure cooperative global economic integration and crisis management on US-centric and pro-market terms. This enduring US influence continues to be marked in other ways too: including very practically in the location of the World Bank headquarters (on H Street in Washington DC), and in the tradition of always appointing an American to serve as the World Bank President, as well as in the less obvious ways through which the Bank's practices of hiring, rule-making, and even data-collection remain tied to American academic institutions and pro-market paradigms (Broad, 2006; Wade, 2002). However, one of the big questions being raised today by China, India and other fast-developing countries concerns whether the US should continue to wield so much influence in and through the World Bank when it has become the world's biggest borrower. Back at Bretton Woods the World Bank was principally designed to address the needs of post-war reconstruction in Europe. Up until the 1970's, its developmental efforts were therefore largely concentrated on countries that were rebuilding war-torn economies rather than initiating postcolonial economic recovery. The focus of the World Bank really only switched to development in the global south after the austere conditionalities it imposed on the UK in 1976. These scared-off other wealthier western countries, and shortly thereafter the debt crises of the 1980s suddenly brought many poor countries to the doors of the Bank instead. It was in negotiating the debt rescheduling for these countries (i.e. paying-off private lenders and making new loans to be paid back over longer periods of time) that the World Bank worked in conjunction with the IMF to impose structural adjustment programs (SAPs). It has been chiefly through these programs, including all the associated 'technical advice' and 'surveillance', that the World Bank has been able to impose neoliberalism on poor countries. The advice is always to immediately adopt the same set of policy reforms recommended by neoliberal economists, and the surveillance is always about subjecting this reform process and its economic outcomes to rigorous scrutiny (constantly monitoring everything from interest rates and tax codes to whether or not bank demands to liberalize trade and deregulate capital flows have been met). More recently, as a result of criticism of this 'one-size-fits-all' approach to imposing neoliberalism, there has been much more talk at the World Bank about the need for tailoring programs to local contingencies such as health problems and allowing for so-called country ownership. But even this economic language of 'ownership' illustrates the way in which banking principles continue to structure the replacement programs for SAPs. These replacement programs are now known as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), and they are supposed to be authored by individual countries themselves. However, most PRSPs look just the same as each other and this means that the local ownership largely amounts to each country dutifully writing its own timetable for the same old neoliberal reforms (Joseph, 2010; Weber, 2006). Thus while there has been much talk about the so-called Washington Consensus breaking down - with the IMF upholding more traditional neoliberal austerity and the World Bank supposedly adopting newer more pro-poor policies - many of the Bank's day to day practices continue to end up imposing neoliberalism and simply modifying its modes of enforcement and accountability (Ruckert, 2006). Given the immense policy-making influence and oversight exercised through SAPs and PRSPs it is sometimes hard to understand how the World Bank has come to have so much power. Why do sovereign governments submit themselves to the Bank's demands for neoliberalization? The answer is that they have few other choices. Facing sovereign debt crises and major cash flow problems, they have to turn somewhere for new money when private lenders stop lending (or charge exorbitant interest rates). It is therefore market forces that make governments to go to the World Bank in the first place. And in the same way, it is also market forces that then set the conditionalities of the new loans. The World Bank's SAPs and PRSP conditions thereby effectively turn financial market pressures into political and governmental pressures. In short, they transform the economic force of debt into the political enforcement of neoliberalism, and the result has been a remarkably consistent top down global application of pro-market policy reforms (Peet, 2003). It is crucial, therefore, to understand that the bank is not an aid agency or development fund or philanthropy - even though many of these other sorts of organization now follow the Bank's neoliberal approach to imagining and implementing new development initiatives (Fine, 2009). The World Bank remains a bank. While the webpage slogan reads "Working for a World Free of Poverty", this slogan still only appears in small type under the larger font and all capitals name: "THE WORLD BANK." It is much easier to understand the way the Bank works, then, if one remembers that it was designed to function as a bank using banking principles. From the start it was set up in a way that made it dependent on Wall Street and market lending to raise capital for its loans. This meant that right from the beginning it also functioned as an institution that relayed market pressures, issuing the regulatory requirements of market discipline at the same time as issuing loans for development (Benjamin, 2007). Rather than an aid organization, it has always entered into the business of aid (where 'business' is increasingly the operative term thanks to the Bank) as a market intermediary At least within the global market of ideas the World Bank's disciplinary vision of neoliberalism has been subject to criticism. From 'Spank the Bank' protests in DC in 2000 to brilliant intellectual decodings of World Bank literature, its influence on both popular debate and expert knowledge about global governance has faced tough opposition (Goldman, 2005; Kumar, 2003; Lawson, 2010; Watts, 2012). Critical websites such as the Bretton Woods Project (http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/) and the Whirled Bank (http://www.whirledbank.org/) also continue to scrutinize and satirize the online outpourings of official World Bank analysis. This is important because the Bank itself remains a moving target. Most recently, Barack Obama's appointment of Jim Yong Kim as the new president has given hope that a new and genuinely caring commitment to social justice will start to reshape the Bank's pro-growth agenda, not least of all because Kim once co-edited a book (entitled Dying for Growth) that was very critical of the impact of neoliberalism on health (Kim, 2000). Unlike Robert Zoellick and Paul Wolfowitz (the neoconservatives who immediately preceded Kim and who had previously pushed for the Iraq war), and also unlike Robert McNamara (who is commonly thought to have seen his 1970's work as Bank president as a form of expiation for his preceding role in the Vietnam war), Kim comes to the job as a physician famous for prior work with Paul Farmer in establishing Partners in Health. But early signs nevertheless suggest that the Bank will shape Kim more than the other way round (Bond, 2012). And if this turns out to be the case, it will reflect the way in which the Bank continues to function as an intermediary that turns market forces into innovations in political influence that in turn expand and entrench market forces globally.

TARIFFS

Tariffs are the duty or tax usually paid by exporters in order to move their products across a national border into a foreign market. One of the central goals of the push for free trade around the world has been to reduce and eventually eliminate such tariffs. The reasons why governments impose tariffs on foreign made imports are multiple. They may be designed to protect domestic producers from foreign competition, or to correct a trade deficit, or to give preference to imports from certain countries over others, or, contrarily, to retaliate against another country's preferential tariff regime. Preferential tariffs designed to privilege or punish particular exporting countries have a history that goes back to imperial trading practices that tended to be organized within networks of imperial preference. But it was also in the context of nineteenth century imperialism that the rhetorical inflation of free trade and the political struggle to reduce tariffs began. British industrialists at the time wanted to be able to export their products to foreign as well as domestic markets and, meanwhile, they also saw the benefits of having foreign-made foodstuffs enter Britain tariff-free so that their workers could be fed and therefore maintained more cheaply. Early economists such as David Ricardo helped the industrialists make their case with academic arguments about the so-called gains from trade, and until the 1930s the cause of free trade and tariff reduction advanced around the world, albeit within limits created by inter-imperial struggles (including the immense upheaval of World War I). During the Great Depression, however, as governments rushed to protect their domestic capitalists from the global crisis, steep tariffs were imposed on foreign imports creating 'tariff walls' that drastically reduced world trade. These walls created much more self-contained national economies, and it was this territorialization of something called 'the economy' that set the geographical pattern for the distinctively national Fordism that characterized the mid-twentieth century The Fordist pattern of economic nationalization was also influenced by global politics, the rise of communism, and, most notably, the national mobilizations forced by World War II. However, it was also as the war drew to a close, that the cause of free trade was launched again with the American-led meetings at Bretton Woods. The US had emerged from the war with its economy unscathed and eager to expand markets for its products worldwide. American negotiators pushed for a more open global free trade system that could absorb the US trade surplus, and slowly but surely they prevailed: the crowning achievement being the establishment of the WTO in 1994. However, by the 1990s the US trade surplus had turned into a large and fast-growing deficit, and thus in the years since its inception the WTO has had to deal with increasing complaints by developing countries that the US is abandoning free trade and, ironically, albeit unsurprisingly, imposing tariffs on foreign products.

ICFTU

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions which has its headquarters in Brussels brings together workers from 221 national centers in 148 countries and territories. Collectively, 156 million members are represented (http://www.icftu.org/)

WASHINGTON CONSENSUS

The Washington Consensus (henceforth WC) was an early 1990's name for neoliberalism that usefully (albeit unintentionally) underlined the connections between the promotion of pro-market reforms and the confluence of interests linking the Federal Reserve, US Treasury, Wall Street lobbyists, the IMF, and the World Bank in Washington DC. The term remains a useful complement to neoliberalism insofar as it draws attention to how these Washington-based agencies have a hegemonic influence over and amidst market-based globalization. However, the initial articulation of the WC owed less to critics of American hegemony and more to pro-market academics operating within the 'Beltway' in Washington, DC. John Williamson, the economist who originally coined the term, has subsequently come to regret the way it has become a synonym for neoliberalism. He also says that the last thing he meant to do was attract attacks on the specific policies he was recommending by linking them with hegemonic US interests. Instead his own goal, he argues, was simply to recommend "10 specific policy reforms that most influential people in a certain city [DC] agreed would be good for a specific region of the world [Latin America] at a certain date in history [1990]" (Williamson, 2003). Nevertheless, reviewing those 10 specific reforms it is not hard to see multiple overlaps with the '10 commandments' of neoliberalism more generally. Williamson's 1990 wish list was as follows: 1) Introduce fiscal discipline 2) Redirect public spending 3) Broaden the tax base 4) Let markets set interest rates 5) Let markets set exchange rates 6) Liberalize trade 7) Encourage foreign direct investment 8) Privatize state enterprises 9) Deregulate business 10) Establish legal security for property rights The only reform on Williamson's list that is slightly anomalous with other neoliberal wish-lists is number 2: namely the call to redirect public spending into funding for primary education and primary health care (and away from subsidies to industry). This may, as he argues, distinguish Williamson's WC reforms from the more austere 'anti-public-spending' and minimalist government ideals of Von Hayek, Friedman and the Mont Pelerin purists. But this one item does not differentiate the list all that much, and Williamson's post hoc attempt to distinguish himself from what he calls "the ideology" of neoliberalism ignores the ways in which Von Hayek and Friedman themselves urged pragmatism over purism in their promotion of neoliberal ideals. Given the cracks in the consensus that subsequently emerged in the 1990's it is easy to understand why Williamson may have wanted to nuance his earlier position. Most notably splits between the World Bank and the IMF over how to handle the Asian financial crises of 1997-98 started to index disagreement between hardliners and pragmatists rather than consensus. While the Bank increasingly noted the need for local 'ownership' and the tailoring of reform to longer term local needs, the IMF tended to stick with more draconian demands for more deregulation and more austerity with no concern about long term sustainability and developmental stability. Gillian Hart notes thus that: "As the financial crisis deepened, there were key defections from the WC. For example, Jeffrey Sachs (until then, a prominent IMF consultant) alleged that 'instead of dousing the flames, the IMF screamed fire in the theater'. At around the same time Joseph Stiglitz (then senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank) delivered his famous 'post-Washington consensus' speech to the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki in which he asserted that financial market liberalization had contributed to instability, and called for a reversal of neoliberal orthodoxy" (Hart, 2001: 653). Thus by 2000, the crisis had developed so far that The Economist magazine even spoke of a 'Washington Dissensus'. Subsequently, Joseph Stiglitz's book Globalization and its Discontents, took the argument further and made a case for a post-Washington consensus (Stiglitz, 2002). But it is not yet clear whether one is forming - at least not in Washington DC. Clearly, the World Bank is making many more noises about the need for social investment, state aid, global health and sustainable development. But the IMF continues with the old WC rules, even after the financial problems that started in 2007 brought its new (and more pragmatic) European director - Christine Lagarde - face to face with debt crises back in Europe. Potentially the Geneva-based WTO holds some potential for fostering a post-Washington consensus insofar as it is has proved an important venue for poor country complaints about US farm subsidies. These complaints may yet have some affect in displacing Washington's ability to uphold huge global asymmetries in world trade. But even if they do, the new consensus will still be neoliberal, and many of its leading thinkers and promoters will still be based in Washington. A new Washington State consensus may also be emerging as a novel suite of responses to market failure led by the philanthropic experiments of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. If so, it too is still also broadly pro-business in practice even if it has moved on from the macroeconomics of the WC to a series micro-interventions (microbiological research, microsavings, and so on) in global health and development. Meanwhile, outside of the US, where there is talk of a Bangladesh Consensus (on microfinance), a Kerala Consensus (on socialist investment in education and health) and a Mumbai Consensus (on Asian-centered globalization) bigger breaks with the old WC seem possible. But all of them still have to be created in a world that has been remade on the basis of the 10 (or so) policies at the heart of the old consensus.

COSMOPOLITANISM

The outcome of increased commitments to being 'cosmopolitan', which is to say worldly and transnationally-oriented as opposed to parochial and nationally-restricted. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, the new transnational ties being developed by capitalist merchants and industrialists were often perceived to be leading to more feelings of cosmopolitanism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (2008) waxed lyrical over these changes with some of their highest praise for capitalism. The business class, they famously argued in the Communist Manifesto, "has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country." Marx and Engels saw in this cosmopolitanism the demise of older national forms of social organization and the rise of new consciousness about global interdependency. "All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed," they said. "In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations." For Marx and Engels this eclipse of older traditional and national modes of being was something to celebrate because they saw it as a prelude to the spread of socialism globally. Capitalism would in this vision wipe away all the old fixed traditions, and by creating transnational ties of free trade, prepare the way for transnational solidarities of workers. However, as the development of capitalism since the mid-nineteenth century has shown, local traditions have not so much been eclipsed as transformed by global economic interdependency. This has led more contemporary scholars to rethink what exactly cosmopolitanism might mean. If it is not the complete eclipse of local feelings by global feelings, what is it? Many commentators argue that we need to think instead about increasingly hybrid feelings and commitments, some of them re-worked by progressive movements such as environmentalism and feminism and others transformed by other more traditionalist kinds of transnational identity including the bonds across borders created by religious systems (Cheah and Robbins, 1998). In either case, however, the transnationalizing imperatives of capitalism - the consumerism it breeds, the instabilities it unleashes, and the shared fates it creates between workers and consumers everywhere - all contribute to the ongoing destabilization of the nation-state as the principal container of political and ethical belonging. In response to such destabilization, some more idealistic scholars have argued for newly inclusive kinds of cosmopolitan democracy and constitutionalism on a world scale. Such utopian initiatives, however, would seem to be vulnerable to at least two countervailing characteristics of actually existing cosmopolitanism. On the one side today's dominant cosmopolitan spaces - multicultural business boardrooms, international food courts, frequent flier lounges and so on - are so overwhelmingly shaped by capitalist forces that they tend to uphold and enforce norms of competitive individualism that are likely to block any more substantive articulations of collective social rights and social justice at a global level (Sparke, 2006). On the other side, the fact that these capitalist constructions of cosmopolitanism are also interwoven with the creation of so many subordinated cosmopolitans (prisoners subject to extraordinary rendition, for example, or sex workers smuggled across borders) means that too many people are simply excluded from the possibility of cosmopolitan democracy even as they experience high-speed cross-border movement. Despite its long existence in world cities and market centers going back to Greek and Roman times, and notwithstanding a long lineages in philosophical thought, cosmopolitanism as a singular global constitutional project would therefore seem to face a bleak future. However, considered in a less idealistic and more critical way (Harvey, 2009), the restrictions on actually existing cosmopolitanism can be better considered as spurs to examine what constituencies and identities are left out of institutions of global governance - organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO - institutions which could all be much more inclusively cosmopolitan than they actually are.

LIBERALIZATION

The process of freeing-up international trade and investments: including the removal of both tariffs and non-tariff barriers (NTBs). Liberalization is therefore only about liberty (its etymological root) in a very narrow economic sense of liberating the movement of capital. In terms of personal choice, liberalization is often not about freedom at all. Instead it often involves both restrictions on the ability of democratic governments to make rules and the privatization of public goods such as clean water.

BONDS

These are contracts to pay back borrowed money with interest. They are sold by governments and corporations to investors who, by buying bond contracts, become lenders. Bonds usually provide fixed-income yields (interest payments) to bond-holders, assuring them of a set of repayments over a set time period. The price of a bond reflects market demand from investors. The more demand there is, the higher the price, and, reciprocally, less demand for a bond means it is priced lower. Also reflecting demand and supply, bonds are auctioned with an interest rate as well as a price, and the interest rate or 'yield' is generally seen by investors as an indication of the level of risk associated with the bond. More risky bonds have higher yields, and less risky bonds have lower yields. This is because bigger risks have to be compensated for by larger yields in order to persuade investors that buying the bond is worth the risk (a risk premium above the so-called risk free bonds that receive AAA ratings). In 2007 and 2008 it became clear that a great many complex bond instruments sold as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) with low risk premiums were based on mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) that included extremely risky subprime loans to American home buyers. When these buyers began to default on their mortgage payments the real risks became clear and it set off a global financial crisis. Many global investors who had purchased the CDOs thinking that they were low risk lost money, and suddenly risk premiums spiked globally on a wide range of bond contracts. The increased borrowing costs caused by the decreased demand for high risk bonds globally went to affect what were previously seen as the 'risk free' bonds issued by sovereign governments. Most notably in 2011-12, the low demand, low prices and high yields on European sovereign debt, and on Greek, Spanish, Irish and Portuguese government bonds in particular, led to deeper economic crises in all the affected countries. Throughout the crisis US and Japanese bonds have generally benefitted from enduring market demand, fetching higher prices and lower yields despite historically high levels of national debt to GDP. Whether these government bonds will continue to enjoy this 'risk free' status in the future nevertheless remains a matter of great controversy in the context of 'quantitative-easing' (i.e. money creation) by the US Federal Reserve and the Japanese central bank. What is not in doubt, however, is that the spectre of the globalized bond trading system will continue to be used to discipline political leaders who stray from the norms of neoliberalism. When we was told about this by advisors, President Bill Clinton asked a very good question about the binding power of the bond market: "You mean to tell me that the success of [my economic] program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f*cking bond traders?" (quoted in Peck, 2010: 237). Answers to this sort of question look set to remain affirmative until and unless deeper questions can be asked about how bonds bind everyday life right across the planet (Konings, 2009).

FORDISM / POST-FORDISM

These terms are used by political theorists to distinguish between the general organization of capitalist societies in the mid-twentieth century (Fordism) and the later period, from the early 1970s to today (post-Fordism). The theory is that these periods have been characterized by distinctive regimes (systems) of capitalist regulation in which different kinds of political, economic and societal ordering came together in distinctive ways. Following Antonio Gramsci's pioneering discussion of Henry Ford's concerns with his workers' ability to consume and buy his cars, regulation theorists argue that Fordism was characterized by the macro-economic balancing of mass production and mass-consumption (Gramsci, 1992). Taking Gramsci's attention to Ford's labor practices further, the regulation theorists also argue that Fordism as a general, society-wide system was also characterized by careful attention by political elites to the management of sociological crises (Ford had instituted social worker visits at his big factory complex in Dearborn Michigan in order to make sure his workers were not distracted by non-economic pressures in their homes). At a society-wide level, these social aspects of Fordism included government investment in national welfare, healthcare and education systems; the idea being that looking after workers in downturns, making sure that they remain healthy and educated, became a way for the state to ensure that the workers would be ready and willing to return to work after a business cycle started up again. Of course, another contextual factor that enabled the development of Fordism in this way was the existence of an alternative to capitalism in the Communist bloc countries. Perhaps still more important, though, was the firm belief amongst governing elites that national governments had a strong role to play in maintaining economic stability. This kind of commitment also led both to the widespread adoption of Keynesianism, and the common involvement by governments in attempting to arbitrate industrial disputes between workers' unions and business owners. All of these modes of governance - developing a social safety net, deficit spending for pump-priming, balancing mass-production and mass-consumption within national economies etc. - constituted the regime called Fordism, and all of them started to become challenged and weakened in the context of post-Fordism after the mid 1970's. Post-Fordism is characterized fundamentally by a break-down in the balancing of national mass-consumption with national mass production. What might once have been good for General Motors is no longer necessarily good for America. General Motors and many other TNCs no longer depend on either producing goods domestically or just selling them domestically. They employ people all over the planet and sell products everywhere too. Thus their Fordist self-interest in maintaining a specifically national pool of decently paid workers who can also double as customers has been destroyed. They seek out customers where-ever they can find them. Equally they use labor of different sorts (educated for R and D in some places, ill-paid, ill-educated and oftentimes just plain ill in other places for the low-skill labor intensive parts of their commodity chains). In this context, TNCs have great flexibility and so some writers, like David Harvey (1989), have described post-Fordism as the era of 'Flexible Accumulation'. Post-Fordism has also witnessed the erosive impact of neoliberalism on national government capacity for macro-economic management, and this has led other scholars to refer to the period as 'The End of Organized Capitalism' (Lash and Urry, 1987). Yet another feature noted by regulation theorists themselves is that post-Fordism has seen the fast erosion of national welfare systems and the end, as President Clinton called it in the US, of 'welfare as we know it'. The replacement vision of a 'workfare state' has been spread around the richer countries as the new model for the post-Fordist period, and while during the 90s it reduced welfare rolls it did nothing to reduce poverty and related forms of suffering (Peck, 2002).

SOURCING EFFICIENCY

This term is used in the project descriptions in this book as a catch-all term to describe all the ways in which TNCs attempt to reduce the costs of production. It therefore includes all the practices that lead to the downward pressures on wages and environmental standards such as finding cheaper labor inputs, less rigorous or less rigorously enforced environmental standards, and less expensive taxation regimes. But at the same time, sourcing efficiency can include more organizational sorts of cost cutting such as maintaining a particularly well synchronized network of subcomponent producers. Thinking about the organization of global capitalism in terms of efficiency is a useful way of putting yourself in the shoes of managers and imagining how they think. It therefore makes it possible to see how business leaders often act in inhuman ways (e.g., by driving wages down below the poverty line) without necessarily seeing their inhuman consequences. Instead, of pollution, ill-health, hunger, stress and overwork, they see bottom-line efficiency.

GLOBAL UNION FEDERATIONS

Until recently known as 'International Trade Secretariats' or ITSs, these were the original pioneers of international co-operation amongst individual unions in particular economic sectors. In conjunction with ICFTU, federations such as UNI (Union Network International) have established dialogue with a number of TNCs in their sectors. These discussions have led to various 'framework agreements'. Each of these agreements is negotiated between a global union federation and a TNC and concerns the conflict management in the international activities of the company. For more information on the GUFs and global framework agreements see http://www.global-unions.org/.

NEOLIBERALISM

Variously referred to as 'market fundamentalism', 'free market capitalism' and the 'Washington Consensus', neoliberalism names an approach to governing capitalism that emphasizes liberalizing markets and making market forces the basis of economic coordination, social distribution, and personal motivation. It recalls the 18th and 19th century liberal market ideals of economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, as well as earlier French advocacy of 'laissez-faire'. And yet it is new - hence the 'neo' - insofar as it comes after and actively repudiates the interventionist state and redistributive ideals of welfare-state liberalism in the 20th century. Despite this clear historical rationale for referring to neoliberalism, it remains a confusing term, especially in the US where (unlike in Europe and Latin America) the word 'liberal' is widely assumed to refer to just welfare-state liberalism. For related reasons, references to neoliberalism tend to be made more often by its global critics, than by its American advocates: the latter generally preferring to use alternatives such as the 'free market', 'small government', or the 'limited' or 'minimalist' state. Whatever term is used to describe and prescribe neoliberalism, processes of neoliberalization have now been set in motion all over the globe - including in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as in the US itself. Moreover, these processes have become so closely tied to globalized trade and finance that for many commentators the all-in-one synonym and argument for neoliberalism is simply Globalization. In other words, because they believe big 'G' Globalization is inevitable they also think neoliberalization is necessary and natural as well. Liberalizing markets is vital, goes the argument, because it is the only way to adapt to the competitive borderless economy of Globalization. Making this case repeatedly in multiple countries, pro-market advocates have successfully expanded and entrenched the top ten policies of neoliberalism right around the world. In the process, this disciplinary rule set for neoliberalism's market constitution has come to sound like a contemporary political equivalent of the biblical ten commandments: 1) liberalize trade; 2) privatize public services; 3) deregulate business and finance; 4) shrink big government; 5) reduce taxes on business; 6) encourage foreign investment; 7) marginalize unions; 8) expand exports; 9) reduce inflation; and 10) enforce property rights. And so far, despite the obvious connections between these policies and the economic crises that have rocked the world from 2007 onwards, and despite the statements by various global leaders about the need to rein in markets, neoliberalism is showing no signs of dying soon (Crouch, 2011). Something that advocates of neoliberalism do not say so much but something that is nevertheless betrayed by all their pro-market activism is the fact that none of the neoliberal policies are themselves either natural, or inevitable. TINA touts may well argue that there is no alternative to neoliberalism amidst Globalization, but the very fact that they have to make the case so often reflects a global reality in which many alternatives exist and inspire communities (especially those that have already experienced the distress and dispossession of market rule). In the same way, neoliberalism is never automatic in practice either. The anti-state state requires all sorts of active pro-market re-regulation. Defining and defending the practical details of these regulations also remains a constant challenge, and whether they are actually implemented with sustained political support hinges in turn on historical and geographical circumstances. A good example of all this non-natural contextual contingency is the work of the Austrian Friedrich Von Hayek. Von Hayek published what many consider the original argument for neoliberalism - a polemic against state planning entitled The Road to Serfdom - back during World War II (Hayek, 1944). Despite his move to the US, this was not a propitious time or space to promote neoliberal ideas. Instead western policy-makers, including US leaders, considered welfare-state liberalism a common sense capitalist alternative to communism and fascism. In the wake of the Great Depression, the European financial crises and the subsequent war, Keynesian ideas about government demand management were also seen as a common sense response to market volatility. Thus Hayek's neoliberal arguments had no immediate influence on policy, and he was obliged instead to help foster intellectual institutions that would keep the ideas afloat to such a time that they might gain policy-making traction (Peck, 2010). He worked in this way to develop the Mont Pelerin Society and contribute to the pro-market theorizing of the Chicago School of Economics. But as successful and influential as these institutions have subsequently become as bastions of pro-market orthodoxy, it was not till the 1970s that their ideational work began to bear policy-making fruit. With simultaneous economic stagnation and inflation (so-called stagflation) creating a crisis of Keynesianism, Fordism and the national balancing of national mass production with national mass consumption, the times had changed in the US. The opportunity was now right for other Chicago intellectuals such as Milton Friedman to take-up the baton from Von Hayek, and help political leaders such as Ronald Reagan make the public case that government intervention in the economy was the problem, not the solution. Von Hayek had been saying similar things for decades (and in 1974 he finally received his Nobel prize for doing so), but it was the changed real-world circumstances that made all the difference in terms of the wider acceptance and translation of the ideas into policy (e.g. 'Reaganomics') in the 1980s. Global economic integration was undoubtedly the major backstory behind the crisis of welfare-state liberalism in the 1970s, and to this extent the argument that a form of post-Fordist globalization precipitated the implementation of neoliberalism is convincing (Harvey, 2005). But as David Harvey also emphasizes, the context contingent rise and spread of neoliberalism has also meant that it is very uneven geographically. As a set of simple pro-market ideals it inspires the one-size-fits-all edicts of the ten neoliberal commandments. But as a set of real world practices it has been variegated and experimental, both in the original moments of implementation as well as in subsequent episodes of failure, correction and adaptation (Peck, 2010). Sometimes it has been introduced with military force by far right authoritarians - as happened in Chile in 1973 when the coup d'etat of an army general Augusto Pinochet open the door to a forced experiment in overnight neoliberalization led by Chicago trained economists (Klein, 2007). But in other more privileged times and places it has been developed as so-called social democratic or Third Way or New Labor policy by western political leaders pulling traditionally left-leaning and centrist parties in more conservative pro-market directions. Then again, in many poor countries in the 1980s and 1990s, it has been imposed from the outside through the policy conditionalities of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs. More recently still it has been further globalized by two new sets of neoliberal experiments: the first involving the use of military force again, but this time in Iraq by the US in the name of spreading freedom (Pieterse, 2005; Sparke, 2005, chapter 5); and the second, much more globally, by promoters of microfinance as a solution for global poverty (Roy, 2010). What all the examples of implementation share is also something that microfinance makes most obvious, namely that the variegated experiments in neoliberalization also represent attempts to articulate transformations in macro-economic policy-making (including various re-mixes of the ten commandments) with much more individualized approaches to inducing entrepreneurial behavior. Social theorists call this personal inculcation of market imperatives 'neoliberal governmentality' (Dean, 2010). They suggest it involves forms of 'responsibilization' in which individuals start to see their personal lives as investment projects in which they must act as accountable investors. However, given that the articulation of such micro neoliberal governmentality with macro neoliberal governance remains context contingent, and given that contemporary economic crises are undermining the ability of many people to invest in entrepreneurialism in this way, alternative responses - such as the 2011 Occupy movement - remain real possibilities too. Thus just as neoliberalism had to be kept alive intellectually before being implemented, thinking about alternatives remains a non-neoliberal response-ability for the 21st century.

AAA

'Triple A' is the highest credit rating given by credit rating agencies to issuers of bonds. It indicates that the issuer is considered to have an extremely strong capacity to meet the financial commitments of the loans it is taking out by selling bonds. Wealthy sovereign governments and other issuers with the prized AAA rating typically find it easy to auction their bonds with very low interest rates. This is because their borrowing is considered almost risk free from the point of view of the bond traders. However, if their risks of default go up and the high ratings go down, then (as has happened to a number of European countries amidst the financial crises following the 'sub-prime' crash of 2007) increasingly large interest rate 'risk premiums' are attached to the bonds in global market trading. As the interest rates on the bonds go up, it costs much more for governments to borrow and service their existing debts, and this can unleash a damaging spiral of further financial crises. The threat that this might happen is also often used to discipline policy-makers that consider adopting alternative policies to the low inflation, pro-market norms of neoliberalism (Sinclair, 2005). And despite the fact that the credit ratings agencies mistakenly gave high ratings to the mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the sub-prime fiasco, their ratings still continue to regulate how governments are disciplined by global market rankings.

ATTAC

A French group organized to contest global neoliberalism and offer alternatives. Its acronym stands for Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières pour l'Aide aux Citoyens (Association for a Tax on Financial Transations in order to Aid Citizens). Having dedicated itself from the start (in the1990s) to the development of some sort of global Tobin tax (or Robin Hood tax) on financial transactions, and having simultaneously sought to develop plans for aiding citizens of the world, ATTAC has become critically involved in all kinds of global struggles against neoliberalism (George, 2002) . It played an important role, for example, in leading the fight against the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) in the 1990's, and having succeeded in scuttling this initial attempt to entrench the rights of corporations to sue democratically elected governments, ATTAC has continued to be a voice of protest against similar Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMs) within the WTO (Ancelovici, 2002). The organization has also more recently dedicated itself to the struggle against genetically modified (GM) foods. On the global stage, one of ATTAC's leaders Bernard Cassen (2003) has also been centrally involved in bringing French involvement into the creation and development of the World Social Forum. It is through these sorts of transnational engagements that ATTAC is seeking to develop a clearer picture of what aid for global citizens might look like.

IMPORT SUBSTITUTION

A policy of industrial and national economic development taken-up by post-colonial countries after World War II. Newly independent countries such as India and Indonesia sought to substitute domestically-manufactured goods for the imports formally foisted on them by the imperial powers. The hope was that such a policy would nurture a strong domestic industry and make the new nation-states economically independent. However, after the debt crises of the 1980s, the lender countries - the former colonial powers - used the pressure of debt-rescheduling negotiations through the World Bank and IMF to force SAPs on the debtor nations. Such structural economic changes centrally involved abandoning policies of import substitution and adopting new export-led development policies based on selling raw materials and manufactured goods on the world market. One notable problem with this new approach in addition to the growth in sweat shops, huge inequalities, and the eclipse of food sovereignty by agribusiness, is that it is has led to much more unbalanced and unpredictable national economic development patterns that are vulnerable to shocks from currency disturbances and changes in global market demand. It is true that some developing countries such as China have been able to continue import substitution policies much longer. As a result, China like Singapore before it, is now well-placed to create a more coordinated national development policy in conjunction with its export-led growth. Nevertheless, even China as big as it is, remains vulnerable to external demand changes and consequently has spent much of its profits from exports on buying dollars in order to support the dollar and thereby protect as long as possible an American market for Chinese goods. This kind of financial intervention abroad would seem to represent the very opposite of the old domestically-oriented import substitution policies that were widespread in the 50's and 60's.

RACE-TO-THE-BOTTOM

A term often used by critics of neoliberalism to describe the net effect of new free trade regimes such as NAFTA. When countries enter into free trade agreements with one another and begin to reduce tariffs, it becomes easier for TNCs to produce goods in locations that provide for the maximum degree of sourcing efficiency. They can move to any of the signatory countries that have joined the free trade agreement and yet they can still export back their products to their original 'home' markets. They can therefore freely move to a country where workers are paid much less, or to a country where environmental regulations are much lower, or to a country where workers are not protected by health and safety rights. Once a company has moved to such a country it can still export back its produce to its former markets because the free trade agreement eliminates any tariffs on imported goods from countries that have signed on. As more and more companies move production to such low cost areas the net result is a widespread competition to cut costs. This forces companies who remain behind in better paying and better protected areas to consider how they too can cut costs. Sometimes they will do so by moving. But in other cases they stay and force wage and other concessions from their workers by arguing that they cannot otherwise compete. The free trade agreement allows businesses to threaten to move even if they do not actually do so. As a result, workers and their unions often give in because they want to retain their jobs. The net result of all these tendencies is the race to the bottom as wages, protections and regulations all fall to the lowest common denominator. A less polemical term for the same process is downward harmonization.

GLOBAL SOUTH

A term used as a kind of catch-all to describe all the countries and communities of the world that are poorer than the richer countries of the so-called 'North'. The Global South is thus generally said to include all of Africa, South and South-East Asia, Latin America, and Central America. The Global South and the North are effectively successors to the terms 'Less Developed World' and 'Developed World', and, before these, 'Third World' and 'First World'. A common set of problems of assumption and overgeneralization tend to haunt all these meta-geographical categories. Obviously, there are many poor people living in rich countries like the UK, Australia and the US. Equally there are many wealthy elites in poorer countries such as India. Historically, there were problems with the terminology of Less Developed and Developed because it tended to support the inaccurate assumption that all aspects of life (including cultural life and ethical norms) were less developed in poor countries. In a different way, the terminology of the Third World and First World also seemed to rest on assumptions about the rich western countries moving first and fastest up some singular road to progress. This was despite the fact that the 'Third World' idea was actually fashioned in the Cold War by post-colonial countries that did not want to become aligned with either the Soviets (the supposed 'Second World') or the US-led capitalist countries. Now the Cold War is over, 'Third World' has lost much of that 'non-aligned' resonance. So in its place has come the Global South - although it by no means captures many other post-colonial remappings of the world that persist (Young, 2001). A clear geographical problem with the Global South as a term is that many of the poorest countries globally are actually in the northern hemisphere. At the same time, there are some very wealthy countries in the southern hemisphere. Nevertheless, many commentators still find the categories useful. For example, the geographers Eric Sheppard and Richa Nagar (2004) define the global north as "constituted through a network of political and economic elites spanning privileged localities across the globe," and proceed from this dis-located definition to argue that the global South is similarly "to be found everywhere: foraging the forests of South Asia, undertaking the double burden of house and paid work, toiling in sweatshops within the United States, and living in urban quasi-ghettoes worldwide." This does not mean the end of geography at all, as a key aspect behind efforts to articulate the Global South has been to offer a counter-mapping of globalization that, unlike flat-world and borderless-world visions, is attuned to uneven development and inequality (Sparke, 2007).

McDONALDIZATION

A term used by the sociologist George Ritzer (2000) to describe a wide array of production and consumption processes for which the Americanized, standardized, routinized, and franchized operations of the McDonalds fast food chain serve as a model. In this sense, the model's defining concerns with efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control have spread from the restaurant business to many other areas of global life ranging from offices and factories to education, health-care and the family. Despite the advantages accruing to such an approach to management and governance in an age of neoliberalism, the irrationalities of McDonaldization (including its links with unhealthy diets and illness) have inspired all kinds of resistance (Smart, 1999).

BALANCE OF PAYMENTS

A term used to describe the total financial transactions between the residents of one country and the rest of the world. The balance of payments 'accounts' are divided into a 'capital account' (which includes the sum of flows of capital assets such as stocks, bonds, and derivatives) and a 'current account' (which includes all the flows of goods and services). As a simple equation of all these types of flows, the balance of payments is always in 'balance'. However, the big concerns about 'balance of payments deficits' relate to disequilibria between the 'capital account' and 'current account'. For example, the 'current account deficit' that has been a growing feature of the US economy since the mid 1970's has been paralleled by a big 'capital account surplus' (Brenner, 2002). In other words, the US has been importing more goods and services than it has been exporting (the current account deficit) and to pay for these unbalanced import flows it has also had to borrow money from abroad (the capital account surplus). This is a concern for the US because ultimately it makes the country dependent on the ongoing supply of capital from foreign lenders (i.e. foreign investors into the US). When these lenders develop concerns about the likely future value of US capital assets (for example, when they think the dollar will no longer hold its value) they are likely to be less inclined to invest in the US which will reduce the demand for US assets (including US treasury bonds and mortgage backed securities) which will eventually increase interest rates in the US (because of the need to attract new lenders by paying out greater rates of interest). For the same reasons, the disequilibrium for the foreign countries with current account surpluses and capital account deficits also creates concerns (Wolf, 2010). Countries like Japan and China are investing their profits back into US capital markets, but they risk loosing the value they have invested in these assets if the dollar starts to fall or if the US government refuses to pay the interest payments on US treasury bonds.

CAPITAL FLIGHT

A term used to describe the very rapid removal of investments from a particular country or region. The money that leaves quickest tends to take the form of investments in highly liquid stock and bond funds. However, capital flight can also take the form of sell-offs of residential and commercial property too. Sometimes the governments of country's experiencing capital flight seek to slow or block the herd like rush to disinvest by closing certain markets temporarily and reducing the ability of financial institutions to move currency in and out of the country. This is what the Malaysian government did during the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis. Other countries in the region fell victim to ongoing capital flight because they followed IMF advice about keeping the markets open. Malaysia, by contrast, refused the IMF rulings and retained a degree of control over the crisis. As a result, it suffered much less damage than neighboring Indonesia and Thailand and enjoyed one of the quickest economic recoveries in the region (Stiglitz, 2002).

TNC

A transnational corporation is a company which has the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country, even if it does not own the foreign factories and pay the foreign workers directly. Some commentators have a narrower definition that contrasts TNCs with MNCs or Multi-National Corporations. The slight terminological difference is meant to recognize how for a certain time in the mid-twentieth century many large companies operated in multiple countries yet without functionally integrating their whole sourcing and production system on a global scale. In other words, they operated multi-nationally, but not by creating commodity chains across national boundaries: not, in other words, trans-nationally. Instead the main aim of MNCs was to avoid high-tariff walls around big foreign markets by making goods within the countries that constituted the largest of such markets. With the rise today of companies that coordinate their global operations as a single whole, and with the rise of intracorporate transnational trade, the TNC term is increasingly more appropriate.

CONDITIONALITIES

Conditionalities are another name for the structural reforms generally demanded of indebted countries by the IMF, World Bank and other lenders as the conditions for new loans, debt rescheduling, debt relief and aid. As such, conditionalities generally consist of the Washington Consensus policy norms of neoliberalism: including most notably, budget-balancing austerity, price-stability, public sector wage controls, privatization, trade liberalization and financial deregulation. Although conditionalities have also hit the headlines in recent years due to anti-austerity protests in Greece and other parts of southern Europe, and while the practice of imposing neoliberalism this way goes back to the IMF's dictates to the UK in the 1970s, it has been the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the IMF and World Bank on the global south in the 1980's and 1990's that have spread neoliberal conditionalities most forcefully and globally (Corbridge, 1992; Payer, 1974; Peet et al, 2003). As a result of the widespread suffering and criticism generated by these policies - illustrated very well in the brilliant film Life and Debt (directed by Stephanie Black) - there has been increasing disagreement between the World Bank and IMF over the merits of traditional SAP conditionalities (Stiglitz, 2002). This Washington dissensus means that while the IMF continues with the old 'one-size-fits-all' structural reform orthodoxy, World Bank programs tend instead to emphasize more tailored programs of country-specific conditions, some of them also being increasingly focused on individuals rather than governments through so-called conditional cash transfers (CCTs). The latter programs seek to change personal behaviour by incentivizing individuals with direct cash transfers. They may still rely on neoliberal nostrums about the social coordination capacity of market forces, but they also represent a response in many cases to the market failures and social neglect associated with traditional SAPs. In examples such as Oportunidades in Mexico and Bolsa Família in Brazil we therefore see new conditionalities focused on encouraging poor families to enrol their children in education and health programs. Applauded and emulated as they may be in the US, these kinds of conditionalized programs are clearly quite different to the original Washington Consensus conditionalities that ended up closing down schools and imposing user fees for health services in poor countries in the 1980s and 1990s (Peck and Theodore, 2010).

IMF

Headquartered in Washington DC, and connected to the World Bank by an underground tunnel, the International Monetary Fund or 'Fund' is an international organization of 188 member countries. Along with the IBRD, it was set up at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. At the time it was charged with ensuring the stability of the world financial system, and, in particular, with dealing with the short term financing crises experienced by countries with big balance of payments imbalances. The Fund further claims on its website that it has a mission "to foster international monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world" (www.imf.org/). From the beginning, however, its bias has been towards the protection of the world's big lenders (wealthy countries, big banks and their shareholders). Over time it has also come to take on more and more of a managerial role in the world economic system, and since the 1970s has been an integral agent in expanding and entrenching the policies of neoliberalism globally. It exercises this managerial role most directly by defining the conditionalities countries should follow in order to secure loans or loan rescheduling arrangements. Due to the desperate financial emergencies that lead countries to seek such help with loans, the Fund has enormous leverage in imposing its conditions, and has therefore been very successful in enforcing structural adjustment programs (SAPs) of financial deregulation, privatization, and deflation around the world. Nevertheless, in the wake of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008, these enduring aspects of IMF influence have come in for renewed criticism and revaluation - not least of all in Europe (from where the Fund's presidents have traditionally been recruited). Most notably, a report published by the IMF itself (but prepared by a watchdog agency charged with reviewing the performance of the Fund in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008) was extremely critical (IEO, 2011). It highlighted how the IMF had continued to offer upbeat assessments for the global economy in the months preceding the crash. And it underlined the basic point that the IMF had failed to issue any meaningful warning about the systemic risks being created in the global financial system because of its market fundamentalist 'groupthink' and 'intellectual capture'. This was a huge acknowledgement of institutional failure from within the institution, and confirmed what critics on the outside had been saying for decades (e.g. http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/).

G8

Officially established in 1985 as the G7 or Group of Seven, The Group of Eight now includes Russia and continues to function as international that provides for dialogue over economic policy amongst its member nations. Historically it has been dominated by the US, but the other nation-states that belong are Canada, France, Germany, the UK, Italy, and Japan. Whether with eight members or seven, the organization has proved ineffective at pursuing any common policies accept the free market reforms of neoliberalism. Non-western leaders have asked why a country such as Canada is a member when much bigger economies such as China and India are not. The G8 is nevertheless presented by its leaders and the media as a global leadership group, its very narrow version (and vision) of globalization notwithstanding. The Indian social and environmental activist Vandana Shiva uses the G7 in this way to exemplify the 'global' is ultimately a political construction in which a dominant 'local' seeks global control. "The 'global'," she says, "does not represent any universal human interest; it represents a particular local and parochial interest that has been globalized through its reach and control. The Group of Seven most powerful countries may dictate global affairs, but they remain narrow, local and parochial in the interests that guide them" (Shiva, 2004: 196).

MARKET-ACCESS

One of the main forces pushing companies to globalize is the need to reach and sell their products in larger markets. This need for market-access has sometimes (particularly in the 1950s and 60s) forced companies into moving production sites too in order to get around high tariffs. It has also forced them into joint ventures with local producers in foreign market areas (e.g., Boeing's joint ventures with Chinese aircraft manufacturers in order to gain access to China's market). Other times the need for market-access simply means that TNCs lobby hard for free trade agreements that reduce tariffs and enable them to export into foreign markets. Even then, however, considerable planning and investment still has to go into setting up supply chains, maintenance, and retailing operations in the foreign market.

SERVICES

Services consist of every type of commodity that can be bought and sold in the market but which you cannot drop on your foot. In other words, services include all the intangible products from accounting, banking and insurance as well as the output of more obviously service-oriented sectors such as nursing, cleaning and car repair. All of these services produce things that capitalism needs in order for traditional industrial production to proceed. Amidst such diversity in the services sector, it is useful to make distinction between business services (such as banking and management consultancy) and what can be broadly defined as the human services (such as hair-cutting and nursing care) that enable everyday social life to continue. Considered as a whole, though, services can be understood as creating, supporting and reproducing the enabling contexts in which capitalist production, distribution and consumption can be successfully reproduced. As a consequence of the new international division of labor (NIDL) that led to the increasing deindustrialization of richer economies, services have come to represent by far the largest area of employment in most wealthy countries. Achieving such a services-dependent economy has been regarded as a way of finding economic security in the context of globalization. Originally this was partly because services were less prone to offshoring. No one, for example, has yet found a way to offshore haircuts. However, economic globalization is now beginning to transform services employment in much the same way it has already changed industrial employment patterns. For business services in particular the internet has been especially important in enabling new forms of outsourcing that also enable offshoring too. While in the past, business services such as call-center development and accounting have been seen as so-called 'non-tradeables', they are now, courtesy of real-time e-based connectivity, extremely tradeable. More and more business services, including increasingly high-value added services such as programming, engineering design, and data management services, can be transferred anywhere instantaneously to places where pay and benefits are less expensive for TNCs. The most-discussed outcome of this trend has been the development of India's IT-enabled services sector. It has become one of the fastest growing economic developments of the last few years. The impact on rich countries is still evolving but will likely include more 'job-less recoveries' in which business productivity and profits for TNCs are increased, but with no parallel expansion in employment in formerly rich countries

OUTSOURCING

Sourcing components, sub-components, services and other diverse commodities into a company's supply chain from external suppliers. These external suppliers need not necessarily be located overseas, and so outsourcing is not always the same as off-shoring. Particularly in integrated regional economies, diverse forms of outsourcing account for the close ties between firms that co-locate in the same area. Nevertheless, in many cases offshoring and outsourcing do come together, and, as such are commonly seen as the most marketized form of commodity-chain globalization.

STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT

Structural adjustment programs (e.g., SAPS ) are the main way neoliberalism that has been imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on poor countries. They consist of neoliberal reforms packaged and presented as the conditionalities for new loans or debt rescheduling. The supposed purpose of such programs is to make states more 'competitive' and therefore better able to pay-off their debt with the revenue generated by economic growth. Being more 'competitive' in this neoliberal sense also means sharply cutting various social programs, including all kinds of investments in education, health systems and even the infrastructural development of roads, running water and sewage treatment. In practice, this kind of overnight austerity has tended to undermine long term economic performance. All of the indebted countries have remained deeply indebted, with 41 of them now considered as HIPCs (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries).

SAPS

Structural adjustment programs are the main way neoliberalism that has been imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on poor countries. They consist of neoliberal reforms packaged and presented as the conditionalities for new loans or debt rescheduling. The supposed purpose of such programs is to make states more 'competitive' and therefore better able to pay-off their debt with the revenue generated by economic growth. Being more 'competitive' in this neoliberal sense also means sharply cutting various social programs, including all kinds of investments in education, health systems and even the infrastructural development of roads, running water and sewage treatment. In practice, this kind of overnight austerity has tended to undermine long term economic performance. All of the indebted countries have remained deeply indebted, with 41 of them now considered as HIPCs (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries).

AFL-CIO

The American Federation of Labor and Confederation of Industrial Organizations is the main umbrella organization representing unions at a national level in the United States. Faced with the challenges of anti-unionism and global outsourcing in the context of neoliberalism, the AFL-CIO has been attempting to move away from the model of nationalistic organization it developed in the context of Fordism. ''Global companies begat global problems for workers," explained the AFL-CIO secretary treasurer Richard Trumka in 2006. "Global problems begat the need for global unions—and if global unions want to truly match the might and power of global corporations we have to undertake global research and global campaigns. (quoted in Bronfenbrenner, 2007: 1). Such calls for global organizing continue to intensify in the US union movement, and the AFL-CIO now seeks to work more closely with global union organizations such as ICFTU to develop transnational labor solidarity. These efforts are also in turn increasingly tied to moves away from old fashioned business unionism (Moody, 1997), and to the rise of what some refer to as 'social movement unionism' (Walsh, 2012) that includes community-based organizing and other outreach efforts to migrant worker communities in global cities (Wills et al, 2009), as well as corporate campaigns focused on labor rights across the global commodity chain networks of TNCs (Herod, 2009).

GATT

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was one of the 3 main institutional legacies of the Bretton Woods Agreement and was meant to coordinate global trade rules. Unlike the IMF and the World Bank, however, the GATT was never transformed into an International Trade Organization with a permanent office because the dominant world powers in the 50's and 60's could not agree to making coordinated cuts in tariffs. Instead, the GATT became the name for a set of ongoing and never finalized conferences, thereby living up to the nickname 'The General Agreement to Talk and Talk'. This pattern changed in the 1970's as commitments to neoliberal free trade policies gained in support and national economies around the world became less self-enclosed and autarchic. Building on the increasing momentum for free trade, the Uruguay Round of GATT talks led finally in 1995 to the formation of the (WTO).

GLOBAL COMPACT

The Global Compact was first launched by Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the UN, at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos in January 1999. He asked business to be socially responsible by 'demonstrating good global citizenship wherever it operates'. The compact invites business in this way to uphold 10 basic principles, derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labor Organization Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, the 1995 Copenhagen Social Summit, and the Rio Declaration of the Earth summit. See http://www.unglobalcompact.org/aboutthegc/thetenprinciples/index.html These 10 principles are listed as: 1. Support and respect the protection of international human rights within their sphere of influence. 2. Make sure their own corporations are not complicit in human rights abuses. 3. Freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining. 4. The elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labour. 5. The effective abolition of child labour. 6. The elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. 7. Support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges. 8. Undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility. 9. Encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies. 10. Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery. Despite the good intentions of the compact it remains like other codes of corporate social responsibility (CSR) an entirely voluntary system, and there is no way in which the UN, the ILO or any other body can at present oblige TNCs to follow its principles.

ICC

The International Criminal Court has developed out of a 50 year process of international human rights law development that began most conspicuously with the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II. Up until the foundation of the ICC in 2002, international war crimes tribunals were established in only an ad hoc fashion with uneven and far from global jurisdiction. The ICC is designed instead to be a permanent war crimes tribunal with global jurisdiction. However, this planetary scope crucially depends on a process of nation-by-nation ratification through which individual governments sign-on to the court's jurisdiction by ratifying the so-called 'Rome Statute' (the ICC's founding charter). On April 11 2002 there were 66 such ratifications, and by November 2004 there were 90. This expansion of the court's authority represented a major step towards creating a global legal regime for upholding the protection of human rights right around the world. However, over the course of this same time period, the US has gone from being a major supporter of the ICC to one of its most active opponents. While in 2000 the US signed the Rome Statute during the Clinton administration, in 2002 the Bush administration declared that the US signature was nullified. This turnaround took place during the so-called War on Terror. One of the main aims of the ICC, after all, is to prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and crimes of aggression. Yet even before the much publicized example of the use of cruel and unusual punishment at the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib, US critics of the ICC worried that the court might undermine American judicial sovereignty and lead to the prosecution of Americans. Against these concerns, US supporters of the ICC see it as a court of last resort, designed to prosecute individuals for genocide and crimes against humanity, but only when national courts have failed to do so themselves (Mayerfield, 2004). For more information on the ICC provided by students for students visit the website of the US-based Independent Student Coalition for the International Criminal Court http://www.isc-icc.org/aboutus.html.

NIDL

The New International Division of Labor was a name used by many scholars used in the 1980s and 90s to describe the ways in which old industrial areas of richer capitalist countries were becoming deindustrialized as low-wage employment moved increasingly to poorer parts of the global south. The process continues today, although after two decades it can hardly be called 'new' any more. It has two distinctive consequences. First, it leads to the development of low-wage employment, often in sweat shops, and volatile, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and sometimes non-existent economic growth in the global south. Second, it also leads at the same time to the expansion of the service sector as a predominant field of employment in the North. Such employment can be highly lucrative for the managerial class in such sectors as banking, business consulting, global logistics, and financial services. CEOs and others employed as decision-makers in these sectors extract a huge financial pay-out from working at the pinnacle of global business empires. However, the predominant form of service sector employment tends instead to be much less renumerative and much more insecure. Thus temporary workers in the clerical sector or burger flippers in the 'McJob' food services sectors receive far less benefit from the exploitation of low wage workers elsewhere. Economists point out that such workers at least enjoy access as consumers to the cheap products being made in distant sweat-shops. Yet insofar as this access is itself dependent on easy credit, and insofar as this credit is vulnerable to shifts in interest rates, it too is very insecure. It is not, however, as insecure as the lives of sweat shop factory workers themselves. Their position in the new international division of labor is the most precarious of all. Poorly paid and frequently subject to terrible working conditions, such workers often feel nervous about organizing against employers because of the possibility that their jobs may be moved to yet lower wage areas. In this sense new iterations of the international division of labor continue to discipline workers and perpetuate a global race to the bottom.

NAFTA

The North American Free Trade Agreement between the US., Canada and Mexico was signed in 1992, ratified in 1993 and finally implemented in January 1994. It built upon the system of free trade rules already agreed to by Canada and the US in the form of the Canada US Free trade Agreement (CUFTA), but extended the scope of the free trade area to include Mexico. Canada had not initially been invited into the process, but Canadian trade ministers were worried about US dominance and demanded that they also become full members of the negotiation process. Like CUFTA, NAFTA basically represented an agreement to reduce tariffs on all goods entering the signatory countries from the other signatory countries. One key goal was to thereby make it possible for businesses to maximize sourcing efficiency by locating their production facilities based purely on market costs. It was now going to be possible, for example, to locate a large production plant in central Mexico, exploit low-paid labor and lax environmental regulation there, and yet still export the products tariff-free into the US and Canada. In this sense, NAFTA can also be understood to have extended the prior maquiladora regime to the whole of Mexico. To do this, NAFTA was not so much deregulatory as re-regulatory. It introduced a whole new set of laws and codes in order to entrench neoliberalism across North America (McCarthy, 2004; Sparke, 2005). Relatedly, it also did more than CUFTA to reduce what trade negotiators call 'non-tariff barriers to trade', meanwhile providing new rights to business investors to sue the governments of the signatory countries for any act of regulation deemed to be an infringement on their right to buy, own and control property. These investor protection rights enshrined in Chapter 11 of NAFTA have become hotly contested in more recent years as they have been used by businesses to sue local and national governments for actions ranging from the passage of a law to ban the use of toxic additives in gasoline to refusal to grant a permit to a company that sought to develop a toxic waste dump next to a community.

GATS

The WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services was designed to liberalize global trade in services the same way the GATT worked through the 70's, 80's and 90's to liberalize trade in goods. Its implications are enormous, threatening to privatize wide areas of human activity related to service industries. GATS applies to trade in 4 key service areas: telecommunications, financial services, air transport, and maritime transport. Under GATS WTO members are obliged to allow foreign companies to: 1) establish a commercial presence, 2) provide services from one country to another, and 3) engage in travel between countries to supply services. Services were brought under GATT rules after intense lobbying by the US which is the world's largest exporter of services. Poor countries fear that GATS will allow foreign TNCs to overwhelm smaller, local companies. They also fear that a future, more comprehensive GATS agreement would give TNCs the kinds of rights they have under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, including rights to sue governments for policies that limit a TNC's ability to sell services.

TRADE DEFICIT

The condition that exists when a country is importing more than it is exporting. One of the general tendencies that ensues as a result of a long-term trade deficit is that the country in question has to keep selling its currency (using it to buy the foreign money needed to pay foreign producers). This tends to push the value of the country's currency down importing inflation into the country because of the increasing cost of imports. The US is an exceptional case in this regard because it has been able to maintain a huge trade deficit since the 90s without too much downward pressure on the US dollar. One reason for this is that the makers of all the goods that American consumers are buying (most notably the Chinese and Japanese) have been investing much of their profits in US dollar denominated savings, most especially US government and corporate debt. A significant result of these relations is that from the 90s onwards more and more of US debt has been owed to foreign investors. Technically this is called a capital account surplus. It ensures a short-term balance of payments, but remains precariously dependent on the willingness of foreign lenders to go on investing in an increasingly debt-burdened economy.

COMMODIFICATION

The transformation of something that is not necessarily bought and sold into a commodity that has a price in a market. It is often used in conjunction with criticisms of the privatization of public space, public assets and common property: turning water from rivers, for example, into something that is bottled and bought and sold for money (Barlow, 2008; Shiva, 2002). The commodification of social goods such as health-care, water provision, and transportation has been accelerated global by the policy-making norms of neoliberalism. Justified in the name of market rationality and profit-making, such commodification has nevertheless prompted critics to wonder what the profits really look like. Arundhati Roy puts these concerns in the form of a critical question. "When all the rivers and valleys and forests and hills of the world have been priced, packaged, bar-coded, and stacked in the local supermarket, when all the hay and coal and earth and wood and water have been turned to gold, what shall we do with all the gold?" (Roy, 2011: 42). Two years later she answered her own question with a still more bleak portrait of the lost values that seem to come with rampant commodification: "Meanwhile down at the mall there's a midseason sale, Everything's discounted - oceans, rivers, oil, gene pools, fig wasps, flowers, childhoods, aluminium factories, phone companies, wisdom, wilderness, civil rights, ecosystems, air - all 4.6 billion years of evolution. Its packed, sealed, tagged, valued and available off the rack (no returns). As for justice, I'm told its on offer too. You can get the best that money can buy" (Roy, 2003: 73-4).

CREDIT RATING AGENCIES

There are three main international credit rating agencies that are recognized worldwide: Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investor Service, and Fitch Ratings. Historically the main business of these private US-based companies was to provide financial information about American corporations. Over the course of the twentieth century they grew into huge globally-active ratings agencies, assessing risk and assigning ratings not just to corporate debt, but also to governmental debt ranging from US municipal bonds to the incredibly varied loans and securities used by sovereign governments around the world (Hackworth, 2007; and, Sinclair, 2005). Such ratings relate, or at least should relate, to the fundamental question of whether the borrowers being assessed (i.e. the corporations, or cities, or national governments) are in a position to make reliable ongoing payments on their debts. Those that are seen as very low risk then win AAA ratings. However, because of the huge stakes involved, because a low rating can destroy the ability of a company or city or country to acquire loans at competitive rates, and because the agencies are private for-profit corporations, there have been increasing questions about the objectivity of ratings that the agencies producing them. These have intensified still more amidst the 2008-12 crisis with various European governments as well as the US government asking ever more urgent questions about the enormous influence but often flawed analysis of the ratings of everything from mortgage backed securities to Greek, French, Irish, Spanish and Italian sovereign debt. Meanwhile, in business, universities and city administration buildings all over the world, credit rating agencies continue to exert disciplinary control in ways that expand and entrench neoliberalism.

NEOCOLONIALISM

This is a name for the ways in which long-distance control and domination over the Global South has continued to be exercised by the world's wealthy societies since the formal end of imperialism and its associated colonial practices. Neocolonialism is distinct from colonialism insofar as it is usually considered to be market-mediated rather than military-mediated. As such, it tends to involve armies of accountants and bankers rather than soldiers. Organized through the hidden hand of the free market it operates invisibly (more like radiation than old fashioned colonial control) having profound affects that are nonetheless hard to see and track. Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary once described neocolonialism in these ways, as "the most redoubtable form of imperialism - most redoubtable because of the disguises and deceits it involves" (quoted in Johnson 2004: 30). Nonetheless, the continuities with traditional colonialism are there for those who care to notice. In this sense, perhaps the best description of neocolonialism in the last few years has come from the Indian writer Arundhati Roy. "Our British colonizers stepped onto our shores a few centuries ago disguised as traders," she writes. "We all remember the East India Company. This time around the colonizer doesn't even need a token white presence in the colonies. The CEOs and their men don't need to go to the trouble of tramping through the tropics, risking malaria, diarrhea, sunstroke and an early death. They don't have to maintain an army or a police force, or worry about insurrections and mutinies. They can have their colonies and an easy conscience. 'Creating a good investment climate' is the new euphemism for third world repression. Besides, the responsibility for implementation rests with the local administration" (Roy, 2001:17).

DOWNWARD HARMONIZATION

This is the process whereby wages, environmental standards and health and safety standards are systematically reduced to the lowest common denominator in a free trade area or system. For proponents of neoliberalism such a process is merely about producing a so-called level-playing field for business. However, for ordinary workers and consumers the actual experience of downward harmonization is better understood as a race-to-the-bottom that enforces neoliberalism through competition. Real regulatory reforms are thereby imposed through market forces because countries and communities are so eager to avoid losing footloose business. The outcome of downward harmonization is therefore best understood thus as a form of 'disciplinary neoliberalism' (Gill, 1995).

COMMODITY FETISHISM

This is what happens in capitalism when products for sale on the market become invested by consumers with the same sorts of hopes, desires and dreams normally reserved for religious symbols and gods. For Marxist theorists the concept remains a way of coming to terms with how capitalism makes the symbolic and monetary values of commodities seem so important that they obscure all the social and economic relations (including diverse globe-spanning commodity chains) that go into producing commodities in the first place (Marx, 1965, chapter 1). A main aim of global justice movement activists in recent years has been to make this critique of commodity fetishism meaningful in the context of neoliberalism. Groups such as Behind the Label (http://www.behindthelabel.org/) and United Students Against Sweatshops (http://www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org/ ) have sought in this way to investigate the working conditions of workers producing commodities for big brand firms and retailers, revealing in this way the degree to which consumerism in places such as malls is commonly dependent on exploitation in other places such as EPZs on the other side of the world. In theoretical debates over psychoanalysis and post-colonialism, another rather different global re-framing of fetishism has been developed as a result of work by the American critical theorist Anne McClintock (1995). While Marx had been drawing on a secular critique of religious fetishism in order to strip away the mystifying meanings of commodities in capitalism, Sigmund Freud was famously interested in the sexual meanings and drives connected to fetishism. McClintock examines all these interpretations vis-à-vis imperial attitudes about the colonies that were common during the times in which Marx and Freud were writing: attitudes that dismissed native religious icons as fetishistic while simultaneously propagating commodity fetishism and propagating Christian icons, statuary and beliefs along the way. McClintock's approach not only takes us beyond one of Freud's sexist errors (i.e. explaining sexual fetishes solely in relation to the so-called 'castration anxieties' of men), it also interestingly opens questions about the degree to which Marx's critique might have contained (albeit in an unexamined way) an awareness of the non-economic gender and racial power relations underpinning commodity production in the colonies.