Economía Política Global (2225.YR.013011.1)

Datos generales

Tipo:	OPT	Curso:	3	Periodo:	S semestre
Créditos ECTS:	7 ECTS

Profesorado:

Grupo	Profesor	Departamento	Idioma
Year 3	Daniel Hywell Nicholls	Derecho	ENG

Students should have studied introductory economics and politics/geopolitics courses.

A basic understanding of international trade and institutions is necessary.

The student workload is divided between in-class lectures, readings for each section and the production of assessed pieces of work.

The course aims to bring together the political and economic spheres and show the causal linkages between them. In this sense, students will gain a fuller understanding of causes, processes and outcomes within the global system.

The course aims to familiarize students with historical, theoretical and contemporary trends in global political economy (GPE). The focus is on dynamics, structures and trends rather than specific fields of economic activity in order to encourage students to interpret why and how shifts take place within the global political economy. The key elements of GPE examine the tensions between public and private actors ad domestic and international levels of governance. Students will endeavour to analyse the structure of the global economy through concepts such as fairness, efficiency, legitimacy, representation, dominance and discourse. The course places special attention on the way that social structures (concentration of land and capital ownership, wealth distribution, patterns of social dominance, access to opportunities, discursive control) feed into both domestic and global political and economic structures, and how tensions between social forces create pressure for change. Within this context, a key feature of the course is to examine how societal preferences are produced with respect to public goods and regulation, and how institutional and governance structures reflect and condition these preferences.
Due to the multi-faceted nature of GPE, the course will analyze economic events within the social, political and cultural contexts within which they take place, encouraging students to adopt a broad approach to economic processes both in terms of their causes and consequences. The course deals with many ethical issues related to economic development, freedom and control, and, through an analysis of these, the aim is for students to a critical awareness of different forms of governance and how power can be balanced between actors within the global economy.
The course has been designed bearing in mind other subjects that students have taken or will take within their degree. To avoid repetition, certain themes associated with GPE (historical development of the global economy, environment and natural resources, development studies and regional economic integration) are not included as sections within the syllabus, though they will be touched on at various points throughout the course. The focus on policy analysis and choices makes the subject relevant for students interested in policy, advocacy (private and NGO) and institutional dynamics.

1. Content 1. Introduction to GPE ¿ What is GPE? Object of study, trends ¿ Role of the state ¿ Role of capital and markets ¿ Theoretical approaches 2. Modes of Capitalism ¿ Global capital and efficiency ¿ Relocation, surplus labour and wages ¿ Hobson ¿ Falling profits, monopoly capital and imperialism ¿ Base and superstructure ¿ Neogramscianism ¿ organic intellectuals and epistemic communities ¿ Robert Cox and Critical Theory ¿ Uneven and combined development 3. State-society Relations ¿ Shackled, despotic and absent leviathans ¿ Solon, voice opportunities and organized civil society ¿ Empathy and the welfare state ¿ Immigrants, GDP and tax ¿ Diminishing marginal returns to income and redistribution ¿ The Scandinavian model ¿ Ordoliberalism ¿ The dangers of meritocracy 4. Institutions, Preferences and Change ¿ Putnam and two-level games ¿ Regime theory, cooperation and expectations ¿ Institutions, socialization and legitimacy ¿ New Institutionalism ¿ Prospect Theory and crises ¿ Crisis, discourse and change (Legro) ¿ Interest groups, venue shopping and punctuated equilibrium (Cairney) ¿ Institutional drift, layering and conversion ¿ The ideas industry (Drezner) 5. The Economics of Authoritarianism ¿ Natural resources, extractive institutions and the rentier state ¿ Selectorate theory ¿ Plutocracy and the balance of power ¿ Redistribution and legitimacy ¿ Neomercantilism ¿ Social cohesion, economic rights and freedom ¿ External patronage, stability and market access 6. Global Trade and Production ¿ Global trade and growth ¿ Asian Tigers ¿ Structural inequalities ¿ China, the WTO and the convergence wager ¿ Transnational production, technology transfer and FDI ¿ Hymer and monopoly capital ¿ Labour standards ¿ Intellectual property protection and global health ¿ Due diligence and corporate social responsibility ¿ The UN Global Compact ¿ Transfer pricing and tax evasion 7. Globalisation and its Backlash ¿ Economic geography of populism ¿ Cultural Vs economic interpretations of populism ¿ Polanyi ¿ Unresponsive elites ¿ Domestic liberalism and peripheral exploitation 8. The Global Cultural Industry ¿ Mediascapes, ideoscapes and financescapes ¿ Homogeneous, heterogeneous and hybridized cultures ¿ Culture, socialization and commodification ¿ The power of global media ¿ Bourdieu, profitable culture and the public interest ¿ Power, knowledge and discourse 9. Big Tech and the Global Economy ¿ Regulation ¿ Data, market structure and control ¿ Data and non-rivalry ¿ Cryptocurrencies and speculation ¿ Bitcoin whales and democratization ¿ Neofeudalism ¿ Homophilious sorting, democracy and protectionism 10. The Global Security Economy ¿ The privatisation of security and monopoly on the use of force ¿ The arms industry and shaping foreign policy ¿ France, uranium and security in the Sahel ¿ The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and resource access ¿ Defence spending and public preferences ¿ The security-economic nexus in the Middle East ¿ The sanctions paradox (Drezner) ¿ The economic consequences of conflict ¿ New wars and decentralized finance ¿ Cyberwarfare and vulnerability 11. Global Finance, Regulation and Crises ¿ Asian crisis of 1997 ¿ Dot.com bubble and accounting ¿ Ratings agencies ¿ Credit default swaps and collateralized debt options ¿ Glass-Steagall and Dodd-Frank ¿ Crisis response ¿ the role of public actors ¿ China¿s response 12. Public Affairs ¿ Lobbying ¿ public Vs private interests ¿ Diffuse and concrete interests ¿ Upstream and downstream lobbying ¿ Institutional arenas ¿ Information and policy ¿ Neofunctionalism and shifting loyalties ¿ The power of corporate Europe ¿ Global lobbying -The WTO and TRIPS ¿ Think tanks ¿ the fifth estate 13. New Theoretical Perspectives ¿ Anarcho capitalism ¿ Degrowth ¿ Gender and GPE ¿ Postcolonialism ¿ Accelerationism from the right ¿ Accelerationism from the left 14. Governing the Global Economy ¿ US Hegemony ¿ China as a free rider or hegemonic contender? ¿ The role of the G20 ¿ Global food production ¿ Deglobalisation? ¿ Bretton Woods and the rise of alternative institutions ¿ EU ¿ Modelski, long cycles and international regimes ¿ Public goods and hierarchy ¿ The end of the Global Liberal Order? ¿ A new Cold War?

The course has been divided into 14 thematic sections, to be covered over 20 sessions. The course lecturer will deliver a lecture for each session. There will be readings and other materials for each section, which students are expected to read prior to the session. Throughout the course there will be in-class activities (in groups or individually) related to a specific area of IPE (write a brief policy paper, analyse a particular issue in terms of causes and effects, compare theoretical approaches to a particular issue, carry out a counterfactual analysis etc.). These exercises must be uploaded to the course Moodle. They will not be graded as such, but participation in, and engagement with, these activities will count towards students' participation grade.

Acemoglu, D. and Robinson J.A. (2019), The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty. New York: Penguin Press
Arrighi, G. (2008), Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso
Cairney, P. (2019), Understanding Public Policy: Theories and Issues. London: Red Globe Press
Drezner, D. (2017), The Ideas Industry: How Peasants, Plutocrats and Partisans are Transforming the Ideas Industry. New York: OUP
Frieden, J., Lake, D.A., and Broz, J.L. (2017), International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth. New York: WW Norton & Cº
Harvey, D. (2010), The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: OUP
Hobsbawm, E. (1996), The Age of Capital. New York: Vintage Books
Milanovic, B. (2019), Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Oatley, T. (2018), International Political Economy. New York: Routledge
O'Brien, R. & Williams, M. (2016), Global Political Economy: Evolution and Dynamics. New York: Red Globe Books
Ravenhill, J. (2020), Global Political Economy. Oxford: OUP
Rodrik, D (2011), The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy. New York: W. W. Norton and Company
Tooze, A. (2019), Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. London: Penguin

Grupo	Profesor	Departamento
Year 3	Daniel Hywell Nicholls	Derecho