Search results

Purpose – A free trade agreement (FTA) or a preferential trade agreement (PTA) is almost always negotiated without concessions to the non-member countries. This chapter studies the welfare effects of such an FTA or PTA on the non-member countries.

Methodology/approach – This chapter employs the revealed preference approach (e.g., Ohyama, 1972; Kemp and Wan, 1976; Deardorff, 1980).

Findings – Under such conditions that the initial levels of the tariffs are small, or that the effects on production efficiency dominate the effects on tariff revenue, or that the tax-subsidy scheme proposed by Bhagwati, Ramaswami, and Srinivasan is employed in all the countries, the formation of a PTA without any tariff concessions to the outside countries will harm the welfare of the outside countries.

Practical implications – In order to make a PTA beneficial not only for member countries but for the rest of the world, member countries need to grant some tariff concessions to the imports from the non-member countries.

World population has increased six-fold in the last two centuries, and thus agricultural production must have grown as well. The last fifty years of this increase are covered by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) production series. This article aims to push our quantitative knowledge back in time as far as possible. It reviews the scattered evidence on agricultural production in the first half of the 19th century, estimates a yearly series of output for the main countries since 1870, and puts forward some guesstimates on trends in the rest of the world. In the long run, agricultural production has increased more than population. Growth has affected all continents, even if it has been decidedly faster in both the countries of Western Settlement and in Eastern Europe, than in Asia or in Western Europe. It was faster before World War I, a veritable golden age for world agriculture, than in the inter-war years. The composition of production has changed as well, with an increase in the share of livestock products.

The introduction of the 22 member countries of the 4+10+2+6 model of the Asian economy is the immediate task. Japan, Korea, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar constitute the now-famous 4+10 model. Following the principle of inclusion, Mongolia, Chinese Taipei, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka, as they belong to the regional map of the continent of Asia, are the eight remaining member countries (see Chapter 1). An overview of Asia's 22 member continental economy the AE-22, with its 3.6 billion people (2006) who have made the region of Asia their home in a land area of 20.5 million km² should be welcome. To put these figures in perspective, the AE-22 comprises only 13.7 percent of the world's land area, but is home to over half the world's population. Tables 2.1–2.4, presented below, illustrate the various figures relating to population, land area, GDP, and GDP per capita of the member nations of the AE-22.

Drawing upon the concepts of transmodernity, pluriversality and border thinking the author stands in a more practical fashion for the co-creation of an-other performative CMS which fosters the decolonization of (critical) management studies – as a way to contribute “to concretely changing the world(s) for the better” (as claimed by the organizers of the symposium “should critical management studies get anything done?” held at the Academy of Management Meeting in 2012 in Boston).

From a more practical and less opaque perspective on border thinking it is shown how and why border thinking can both enable and constrain critical scholars and people to move across the borders of the colonial difference and from Eurocentric modernity toward transmodern pluriversality.

The current performative turn of CMS fails to address the agency of critical knowledge as a potential reworking of Occidentalism which can be mobilized to “manage” the rise of alternatives and knowledges from the rest of the world in general and from emerging economies in particular.

Border thinking as a crucial concept from the coloniality/modernity research program from Latin America is taken as an important contribution from the colonial difference to the co-creation of decolonial management studies (DMS), an-other performative CMS which fosters the construction of a world in which many worlds and knowledges can coexist as a way to change it for the better.

To examine whether indigenous critiques of globalization and critical theories of modernity are compatible, and how they can complement each other so as to engender more realistic theories of modern society as inherently constructive and destructive, along with practical strategies to strengthen modernity as a culturally transformative project, as opposed to the formal modernization processes that rely on and reinforce modern societies as structures of social inequality.

Comparison and assessment of the foundations, orientations, and implications of indigenous critiques of globalization and the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of modern society, for furthering our understanding of challenges facing human civilization in the twenty-first century, and for opportunities to promote social justice.

Modern societies maintain order by compelling individuals to subscribe to propositions about their own and their society’s purportedly “superior” nature, especially when compared to indigenous cultures, to override observations about the de facto logic of modern societies that are in conflict with their purported logic.

Social theorists need to make consistent efforts to critically reflect on how their own society, in terms of socio-historical circumstances as well as various types of implied biases, translates into research agendas and propositions that are highly problematic when applied to those who belong to or come from different socio-historical contexts.

An effort to engender a process of reciprocal engagement between one of the early traditions of critiquing modern societies and a more recent development originating in populations and parts of the world that historically have been the subject of both constructive and destructive modernization processes.

Our Dublin correspondent telegraphed last night: