The International Finance Corporation and the emerging market funds industry

Linking the world’s core equity markets with semi-peripheral and peripheral equity markets has been a fundamentally different process from linking core markets with each other. International financial institutions have played a larger role in core‐periphery equity market integration, and issues of corporate governance assume greater importance in the core‐periphery cases. Illustrating these differences, this article considers the creation of the Korea fund, one of the early country funds in an emerging market promoted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC). The case shows that increasingly sophisticated financial instruments, like country funds, alter the structure of the international financial system in such a way as to reposition governments in developing market economies with respect to their domestic financial systems; allow for some international capital inflows without loss of corporate control; and make diversification possible for a transnational class of investors. Moreover, the article proposes that international financial institutions like the IFC can alter the structural context of a particular market within which various financial actors later strike deals. In the light of the process of coalition building elaborated here, the article reserves a role for considerations of both multilateralism and a state’s position in the world system in a body of literature heavily concentrated on state-level political activity.     

Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean

Land grabbing has gained momentum in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past decade. The phenomenon has taken different forms and character as compared to processes that occur in other regions of the world, especially Africa. It puts into question some of the assumptions in the emerging literature on land grabbing, suggesting these are too food-centered/too food crisis-centered, too land-centred, too centred on new global food regime players – China, South Korea, Gulf States and India – and too centred on Africa. There are four key mechanisms through which land grabbing in Latin American and the Caribbean has been carried out: food security initiatives, energy/fuel security ventures, other climate change mitigation strategies, and recent demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital. The hallmark of land grabbing in the region is its intra-regional character: the key investors are (Trans-)Latin American companies, often in alliance with international capital and the central state. Initial evidence suggests that recent land investments have consolidated the earlier trend away from (re)distributive land policies in most countries in the region, and are likely to result in widespread reconcentration of land and capital.     

On the Micropolitics and Edges of Survival in a Technocapital Sacrifice Zone

This article explores the industrial sacrifice zone of Endicott, New York, which in 1924 became the birthplace of International Business Machines Corporation and quickly established itself as an industrial launching pad for the production and innovation of modern computing technologies. Drawing on ethnographic research and taking a micropolitical ecology approach, I consider industrial decay and community corrosion key agents for understanding the sedimentary record of neoliberal “technocapitalism” [Suarez-Villa, Luis. 2009. Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press]. In particular, I explore here how the flip-side of local narratives of deindustrialization and economic sacrifice are other narratives of coping and navigating community decline. These local sacrifice zone narratives, I argue, expose key dimensions of surviving corporate neoliberal and technocapital sacrifice.     

Strategies of technical choice in the Peruvian sugar industry, 1955–74

Despite the rapidly growing literature on agricultural mechanisation in developing countries, there are few studies which examine the evolution of technical choice on large plantations over time. This article analyses the process of selective mechanisation in sugar cane harvesting on three Peruvian plantations over a 20‐year period. Decisions regarding the choice of technique and the control of field labour are intimately connected. The concept of a strategy of technical choice is introduced to emphasise this interdependence and to provide a framework of analysis.