International Political Economy Essays

International Political Economy Essays International Political Economy Essay International Political Economy Essay The first chapter of the text deals with the fundamental nature of international political economy (IPE) and some analytical issues related to its multidimensional character. Chapters 2 through 4 are the core chapters of the text that explore the history and policies associated with the three dominant IPE perspectives, namely economic liberalism, mercantilism, and structuralism. These theoretical tools are useful in understanding many political, economic, and social issues in the global economy of the past as well as the present.Chapter 5 develops two alternative IPE perspectives- constructivism and feminism- that derive, in part, from the three main outlooks under study. ChaPter 1 What Is International Political Economy? We Are the 99%: A Haitian hillside. Georgina Allen When a philosopher has once laid hold of a favorite principle, which perhaps accounts for many natural effects, he extends the same principle over the whole creation, and reduces to it every phenomenon, though by the most violent and absurd reasoning. Our own mind being narrow and contracted, we cannot extend our conception to the variety and extent of nature . . .David Hume, The Sceptic 2 The Darkness on the Edge of Town 3 the Darkness on the eDge of town What are the chances you will find a good paying jobs Doug Irwin, Martin Wolf Hong Kong, U. S. , Great Britain Walden Bello, Benjamin Barber Former East Germany, China before 1982 Amartya Sen Sweden 12 C h a Pte r 1 What Is International Political Economy? stablish a comprehensive theory with easily testable propositions about cause and effect. The world is a messy laboratory. Social science has always reflected this in explanation s of human behavior. IPE today represents an effort to return to the kind of analysis done by political theorists and philosophers before the study of human social behavior became fragmented into the discrete fields of social science. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, for example, considered themselves to be political-economists in the broadest sense of the term.One of our goals is to point out ways in which by mixing the elements of different disciplines we are better able to explain the global political economy. One of the ways of doing this is to think of the antecedent disciplines of IPE as varieties of plants. Just as new plant varieties are produced by splicing parts of them together, since the early 1970s the mixing of disciplinary approaches has gradually helped an appreciation of the traditional idea of international political economy re-emerge, resulting in a productive and powerful hybrid field of study called IPE.So what does the new mixture look like? To help answer this q uestion, Susan Strange suggests that we focus on a number of common analytical and conceptual issues that cut across disciplinary boundaries. For her, the starting point for studying the connections and relationships between states, markets, and society is to focus on the question of cui bono? Who benefits from complex interactions in the international political economy? 5 One good example is Pietra Rivoli’s book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy that examines a commodity chain. 6 Rivoli traces a T-shirt from the time the cotton in it is grown in West Texas, to textile manufacturing in China, to sales in the United States, and then on to Africa, where many donated T-shirts end up being sold in local markets. Her work examines the process by which a T-shirt is made, transported, marketed, and then resold. She raises many questions about politics (the power of special interest groups to a