Tag Archives: transnational corporatism

Even if free trade is ultimately broadly beneficial, the fact remains that as trade has become freer, inequality has worsened. One major reason for this is that current global trade rules have enabled a few large firms to capture an ever-larger share of value-added, at a massive cost to economies, workers, and the environment....  The only significant exception to these trends is China, which has designed industrial policies specifically to increase the share of domestic value-added and to...

In examining the implications for an exit from a currency union, one of the issues that arises is the proportion of public debt that is issued under foreign law. This is a separate issue to the implications of foreign-currency denominated debt. Both issues are problematic and compromise a government’s capacity to remain solvent. I covered the former issue to some extent in my 2015 book – Eurozone Dystopia: Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale – when I was considering different strategies...

Does a country like Germany actually need a real government and a proper parliament? For global business, at least, the answer is no. Transnational structures have long taken over the tasks of parliaments and governments, telling them what they should do. Politicians, who are officially responsible, are no more than discussion partners and implementers.This is the situation described by commentator Fritz R. Glunk in his new book, "Shadow Powers: How transnational networks determine the...

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn addressed United Nations officials in Geneva this Friday in a speech outlining his vision for a twenty-first century internationalism. The speech, scheduled to mark International Human Rights Day, examined the roots of global economic inequality, the developing climate crisis and the impact of war across the world. These “threats to our common humanity,” it argues, can only be overcome with “a global rules-based system that applies to all and works...

Earlier this year, a Stigler Center paper by Luigi Zingales [Faculty Director of the Stigler Center and one of the editors of this blog] argued that market concentration can lead to a vicious circle, in which companies use market power to gain political power that in turn allows them to gain more market power, and vice versa. Zingales called this the “Medici vicious circle”: “Money is used to gain political power and political power is then used to make more money.”A new UN report shows...