Third World industrialization and capital flows barely grew despite globalization rhetoric

Evidence

David M. Gordon has recently subjected the claimed globalization of production and emergence of a new international division of labour to careful empirical analysis and come up with some startling results. In 1984 the less developed countries’ (LDCs) share of world industrial country was 13.9 per cent, marginally less than the 14.0 per cent they achieved in 1948 as a result of importsubstitution during the Depression and Second World War but subsequently lost during the long boom. Even during the most recent and more unstable period of 1973—84, the NICs’ share rose only from 7.1 to 8.5 per cent, hardly a very dramatic shift. Far from Western capital flooding to the Third World, the share of foreign direct investment going to the LDCs remained roughly constant between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Moreover, such investment, instead of seeking low-wage havens, was governed primarily by broader considerations such as local market size and political and economic stability. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 511

Categorization

• XREF: Direct empirical counterattack on the globalization thesis — LDC industrial shares and FDI shares stayed flat, undercutting the ‘new international division of labour’ claim Jameson-type periodization depends on. — connects to: Western industrialization actively deindustrialized the rest of the world — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 234; Western wealth depends on the active construction of global underdevelopment — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 293; Third World countries depend on East or West for primitive capital accumulation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2602
• QUESTION: Gordon’s 1984 data are now forty years old; worth checking whether later data (China’s rise, offshoring) would alter or merely delay this conclusion.
• SEED: An essay angle: the ‘globalization is overstated’ empirical tradition from Gordon through Piketty — using stubborn data to puncture rhetorical claims about a new economic era.

Broader Connections

• Western industrialization actively deindustrialized the rest of the world #corroborates (0.85) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 234
• Western wealth depends on the active construction of global underdevelopment #corroborates (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 293