Tag Archives: Third World

 With its focus on Central Asia and Eastern Europe, the Belt and Road Initiative can be seen as fulfilling a strategy of challenging the West that can be traced back to Mao…. In the midst of this frenzy of connectivity, it’s easy to overlook a significant historical point: that it was all anticipated by Mao Zedong. Scholar Chen Gang has stressed how most BRI-participating nations are not as developed, economically, as China. And they are “not just limited to the Eurasian continent, but...

That is, if you are a highly paid, middle class professional in the West, as Dean Baker notes:“The trade agreements that the United States has negotiated over the last three decades have been about getting low cost auto workers, steel workers, and textile workers. In addition, immigration policy has been designed to ensure that custodians, farmworkers, and dishwashers all work for low wages. These policies have been successful in pushing down wages for large segments of the work force, not...

I recently had a conversation about this, and some important points seem to emerge from looking at the data.The fertility rate (birth per 1,000 women) and birth rate per woman in the Western world started falling in the 1960s after the post-WWII baby boom.See the data for the United States here.Most notably, this largely happened before the loss of full employment and job security in the neoliberal era.But once we take a longer-run historical view, we can see that birth rates have been...

To continue from my post here, Paul Bairoch’s book Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York and London, 1993) further analyses Western colonialism, the industrial revolution, and non-Western versus Western imperialism.Did British imperialism from the 15th to the early 19th century play a major – or indeed necessary – role in triggering the British industrial revolution?The fact is that, economically speaking, the British empire was not very big in the early modern period and...