Ray Hudson Overview of Area, Development & Policy AAG Annual Lecture 2016
Recorded March 2016
My name is Ray Hudson, I’m Professor of Geography at the University of Durham in England and I’m going to talk a little bit about a paper I am going to present to the American Association of Geographers in San Francisco.
What I am arguing, or what I am doing in this paper is trying to locate the rising powers, the emergent economies of China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa and so on in the context of the latest round of changes in the international division of labour, the way in which the global economy is being reshaped.
As major manufacturing companies in the North increasingly focused upon brand management and concentrated their knowledge intensive activities in the North, in their core territories, but shifted their routine production to South East Asia to the rising powers, to Brazil, to China and so on.
The result of that actually became a much more complicated pattern of uneven development globally because as international capital, or multi-national capital, was increasingly investing in more distant locations because it was more profitable for it to do so, at the same time in countries like China and Brazil and India, this offered opportunities for their Governments which were more concerned with their own economic development policies to take advantage to some extent of these new flows of inward investment and combine that or integrate that into their national economic development strategies.
Now of course we know that one of the things about capitalist development is that it’s always combined in uneven development over space and indeed over time. But as well as these major changes taking place at the international level between national economies there were some significant changes taking place in terms of new forms of uneven development within both North and South, so in the rising powers, in China and so on and in India, there were new patterns of intra-national uneven development because much of this new industrial development for export of course tended to be in coastal locations, so that you were getting increasing flows of migrant labour from inland areas to these new industrial centres often on a massive and unprecedented scale, particularly in China.
In these areas where people were increasingly marginalised they began to try and find ways to get by to devise their own economic development strategy which often involved engaging in a range of illegal or informal activities but that increasingly became the case in much of the formal economy because its countries were competing for investment then they often lowered the already relatively low levels of regulation around the labour market, around the environment and health and safety and so on, but then in turn often turned a blind eye to the fact that those regulations themselves were ignored and transgressed as they were competing for, on the one hand workers competing for jobs and on the other hand countries competing for investment. So as part of this emergence of the rise in powers and this change in this new neo-liberalised international division of labour increasingly the illegal and the legal became formally, became tied in a sort of symbiotic relationships in ways that they hadn’t been before and of course there has always been illegality in the capitalist economy and that wasn’t new, but what was new was the extent of this and the extent to which in a whole range of ways from illegality in production to money laundering and the recycling of the proceeds from the illegal economy back into the legal economy, this took on a new not just quantitative, but qualitative significance so that what we, the end product of this was a very, very different and in some ways more fragile form of global economy in which the rising powers are certainly an important part, the question in a way is how long this particular geography of the global economy will be sustainable and will continue.
I’d just like to say a few words about how this, the content of this paper relates to the new Area Development & Policy Journal, because I think this is filling a very important gap in the academic literature around uneven development. The whole point about this new journal is it actually almost takes its point of departure as the significance of the changes that have been taking place in the South, in the rise of China, in the rise of India and so on, and seeks to explore in a whole range of ways - in terms of economic development, in terms of environmental sustainability, in terms of social sustainability and I guess the politics of the whole process, seeks to explore this and encourages people who are working in those areas to actually think about writing accounts, the costs of the conventional boundaries that seek to hook up what is happening in the South and in the North, to hook up developments at different spatial scales as this new geography of uneven development is unravelling and unfolding.
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