New york globalisation

Stories you care about. The source you trust. Subscribe today. While most think about the city as being merely the historical setting for urban phenomena and societal forces such as violence, poverty, protests and liberation; cities themselves are not exempt from this.

As was first stated by Paul Knox, cities are not only the setting for the many phenomena that affect our lives but they themselves are nothing more than a physical reflection of these forces. New York is no different and has undergone dramatic changes as a result of capitalism and its shift from a national to a transnational, or global, phase. This leads to the formation of the Federal Housing Administration, created with the goal of reviving the housing industry post Great Depression Hevesi These projects made it much more feasible for residents to commute into the city from the outer suburbs Columbia University, This trend was supported by the demand for housing post World War II and the policy changes levied by the Federal Housing Administration concerning home lending Hevesi City begins borrowing to pay for expanded city support services and employee contracts Dunstan During this time, people were also displaced from their homes due to things such as landlord abandonment and arson Freudenberg et.

Deterioration of the urban environment encouraged continued suburban abandonment of the city both by families and corporate decision makers and further loss of tax revenues Freudenberg et. After what many viewed to be years of borrowing to support the great society era social welfare programs of the city, banks bar the city for borrowing any more funding Freudenberg et.

Additionally, under President Ford, the city was told that no federal assistance would be provided for the city Freudenberg et.

This is accomplished via cuts to all city services and reductions in city employment Freudenberg et. Additionally, one in five public sector jobs had been lost by , eliminating two of the traditional means of exiting poverty Freudenberg et. The first mega-trend refers to the impact that production changes have had on labour markets, including through outsourcing and mechanization, which have spurred job losses, particularly in manufacturing sectors. These trends in labour markets are associated with higher rates of income inequality, which has increased in a majority of countries across the globe.

The second mega-trend is closely connected to the first, as it relates to the fast-moving development and advancement of new technologies, including in information and communications and artificial intelligence, that have also affected the world of work.

While these innovations can act as catalysts for sustainable development, countries that do not have access to them are at risk of being left behind.

Globalization and its effect on climate change is the third emerging mega-trend. In China, the tariff demands of W. But European farmers get 35 percent of their income from government subsidies, and American farmers get 20 percent.

Farm subsidies in the United States, moreover, are a huge corporate-welfare program, with nearly 70 percent of payments going to the largest 10 percent of producers.

Subsidies also depress crop prices abroad by encouraging overproduction. Wealthy nations justify pressure on small countries to open markets by arguing that these countries cannot grow rice and corn efficiently -- that American crops are cheap food for the world's hungry. But with subsidies this large, it takes chutzpah to question other nations' efficiency.

And in fact, the poor suffer when America is the supermarket to the world, even at bargain prices. There is plenty of food in the world, and even many countries with severe malnutrition are food exporters. The problem is that poor people can't afford it.

The poor are the small farmers. Three-quarters of the world's poor are rural. If they are forced off their land by subsidized grain imports, they starve. Back in the 's, Latin American economists made a simple calculation.

The products their nations exported -- copper, tin, coffee, rice and other commodities -- were buying less and less of the high-value-added goods they wanted to import.

In effect, they were getting poorer each day. Their solution was to close their markets and develop domestic industries to produce their own appliances and other goods for their citizens. The strategy, which became known as import substitution, produced high growth -- for a while. But these closed economies ultimately proved unsustainable.

Latin American governments made their consumers buy inferior and expensive products -- remember the Brazilian computer of the 's? Growth depended on heavy borrowing and high deficits. When they could no longer roll over their debts, Latin American economies crashed, and a decade of stagnation resulted. At the time, the architects of import substitution could not imagine that it was possible to export anything but commodities. But East Asia -- as poor or poorer than Latin America in the 's -- showed in the 's and 's that it can be done.

Unfortunately, the rules of global trade now prohibit countries from using the strategies successfully employed to develop export industries in East Asia. American trade officials argue that they are not using tariffs to block poor countries from exporting, and they are right -- the average tariff charged by the United States is a negligible 1.

But the rules rich nations have set -- on technology transfer, local content and government aid to their infant industries, among other things -- are destroying poor nations' abilities to move beyond commodities. The commodities that poor countries are left to export are even more of a dead end today than in the 's.

Because of oversupply, prices for coffee, cocoa, rice, sugar and tin dropped by more than 60 percent between and Because of the price collapse of commodities and sub-Saharan Africa's failure to move beyond them, the region's share of world trade dropped by two-thirds during that time. If it had the same share of exports today that it had at the start of the 's, per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa would be almost twice as high.

Probably the single most important change for the developing world would be to legalize the export of the one thing they have in abundance -- people. Earlier waves of globalization were kinder to the poor because not only capital, but also labor, was free to move.

Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a leading academic critic of the rules of globalization, argues for a scheme of legal short-term migration. Globalization means risk. By opening its economy, a nation makes itself vulnerable to contagion from abroad. Countries that have liberalized their capital markets are especially susceptible, as short-term capital that has whooshed into a country on investor whim whooshes out just as fast when investors panic.

This is how a real-estate crisis in Thailand in touched off one of the biggest global conflagrations since the Depression. The desire to keep money from rushing out inspired Chile to install speed bumps discouraging short-term capital inflows. But Chile's policy runs counter to the standard advice of the I.

Prudent nations are wary of capital liberalization, and rightly so. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who has become the most influential critic of globalization's rules, writes that in December , when he was chief economist at the World Bank, he met with South Korean officials who were balking at the I. They were scared of the hot money, but they could not disagree with the I. If the I.

In the wake of the Asian collapse, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad imposed capital controls in Malaysia -- to worldwide condemnation. But his policy is now widely considered to be the reason that Malaysia stayed stable while its neighbors did not.

Post-crash, the I. But balancing a budget in recession is, as Stiglitz puts it in his new book, ''Globalization and Its Discontents,'' a recommendation last taken seriously in the days of Herbert Hoover.

The I. Indonesia had to cut subsidies on food. Is your international financial infrastructure breeding Bolsheviks? If it does create a backlash, one reason is the standard Bolshevik explanation -- the I. Formal influence in the I. It is striking how many economists think the I. The fund serves ''the interests of global finance,'' Stiglitz says. It listens to the ''voice of the markets,'' says Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development in Washington and a former executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank.

In fact, Stiglitz writes, the I. But the White House fortunately had the luxury of ignoring the I. And that will be never. The idea that free trade maximizes benefits for all is one of the few tenets economists agree on. But the power of the idea has led to the overly credulous acceptance of much of what is put forward in its name.

Stiglitz writes that there is simply no support for many I. You can always argue -- and American and I. Policy makers also seem to be skipping the fine print on supposedly congenial studies.

It finds a strong correlation between globalization and growth and is widely cited to support the standard rules of openness. But in fact, on close reading, it does not support them. Among successful ''globalizers,'' Dollar and Kraay count countries like China, India and Malaysia, all of whom are trading and growing but still have protected economies and could not be doing more to misbehave by the received wisdom of globalization.

Dani Rodrik of Harvard used Dollar and Kraay's data to look at whether the single-best measure of openness -- a country's tariff levels -- correlates with growth. They do, he found -- but not the way they are supposed to. High-tariff countries grew faster.

Rodrik argues that the countries in the study may have begun to trade more because they had grown and gotten richer, not the other way around. China and India, he points out, began trade reforms about 10 years after they began high growth. When economists talk about many of the policies associated with free trade today, they are talking about national averages and ignoring questions of distribution and inequality.

They are talking about equations, not what works in messy third-world economies. What economic model taught in school takes into account a government ministry that stops work because it has run out of pens?