Possible answer to the Third world question

Zambia

lostexpectation wrote:

the country may have left their coporations stayed for the most part, you may be from zambia but you must have led a very sheltered life.

Yes a lot of them did and where brought under goverment control in time. There help was needed to keep those industrys running had they left they simply would have been invited back.

As for your second comment your sadly ill equipped after comments like

We should we stop stealing their doctors and nurses.
We should we stop stealing their enginners
We should we stop stealing their teachers over to teach.
We should we stop stealing their conservationists over.

to call anyones life sheltered.

Dada I do not know much at present About the anti-china protests but I think the flood of chinese workers is something the world should prepare for. The Patriotic Front (nice name)in Zambia adovcates them being thrown out akin to Idi Amin actions with the Indians. Africans are not above racism despite being black. The could easily be compared to the irish attitude to Polish people in areas.

The influx of foriegn labour of no benefit to the Zambia or any country should be avoided.

DadaKopf

Dada I do not know much at present About the anti-china protests but I think the flood of chinese workers is something the world should prepare for. The Patriotic Front (nice name)in Zambia adovcates them being thrown out akin to Idi Amin actions with the Indians. Africans are not above racism despite being black. The could easily be compared to the irish attitude to Polish people in areas.

In fairness, Mwanawasa's government has a more ambivalent position on Chinese workers. Zambia wants/needs money and infrastructure; and many Chinese workers do integrate with locals and transfer skills to Zambians. But social tensions may emerge, particularly around accusations of worker exploitation by Chinese firms, which is what the protests have been about. That's fine - trades union actions, not racist.

The pattern of Chinese investment is also different in Zambia than other countries in Africa. The companies are private Chinese companies, rather than state-owned enterprises.

fly_agaric

MadsL wrote:

If Africa is allowed to feed the world in all likelyhood it will begin to be able to feed itself.

How can Africa ever "feed the world"? It can barely feed itself now and it is unlikely to be in a better position when its population may have increased a few fold and warming has destroyed more of its good farmland in the future?

DadaKopf wrote:

But I'm not talking about just Africa.

But Africa is special isn't it? Many Asian countries have come a long way since WW2 and some of these were far poorer, certainly in terms of resourses etc than the postcolonial African states. I wonder how Korea and Malaysia compared to (I suppose, what was soon to become) the typical new African state after WW2...

Was Africa more "backward" than these parts of Asia when it was colonised and suffered more under colonialism as a result?
Was the natural resourse wealth a curse because it corrupted the governing class in the new postcolonial states and invited more meddlng from predatory outside interests?

DadaKopf

Sub-Saharan Africa is 'special' in the sense that it's still getting poorer while much of the rest of the developing world is more or less stagnant, except Brazil, Russia, India and China, which are growing and extreme poverty is decreasing. But even in these countries, GDP growth rates mask persistent poverty above the $2 a day line and the vast inequalities within these and all other developing countries.

Africa is losing out most of all, yes. And the reasons for it are, obviously, very complex and in most cases, highly case-specific.

Recent studies have found that most countries in the world are becoming more unequal; inequalities of national wealth are growing between rich and poor countries; and the whole world is as unequal as South Africa was during Apartheid.

Akrasia

DadaKopf wrote:

Recent studies have found that most countries in the world are becoming more unequal; inequalities of national wealth are growing between rich and poor countries; and the whole world is as unequal as South Africa was during Apartheid.

there is an economic theory called Social structure of Accumulation theory (SSA) which attempts to explain the almost universal tendency for economic and social inequalities to increase in capitalist economies.


http://www.economics.ucr.edu/seminars/fall06/ped/VictorLippit10-20-06.pdf

http://hsr-trans.zhsf.uni-koeln.de/hsrretro/docs/artikel/hsr/hsr2002_542.pdf

DadaKopf

Akrasia wrote:

there is an economic theory called Social structure of Accumulation theory (SSA) which attempts to explain the almost universal tendency for economic and social inequalities to increase in capitalist economies.


http://www.economics.ucr.edu/seminars/fall06/ped/VictorLippit10-20-06.pdf

http://hsr-trans.zhsf.uni-koeln.de/hsrretro/docs/artikel/hsr/hsr2002_542.pdf

Yes, it's rebranded World-System Analysis, isn't it? It was central to a recent conference held in Ireland. Could SSA be rebranded Marxist dependency theory?

Thanks for the links. I'll definitely give them a read.

Akrasia

DadaKopf wrote:

Yes, it's rebranded World-System Analysis, isn't it? It was central to a recent conference held in Ireland. Could SSA be rebranded Marxist dependency theory?

Thanks for the links. I'll definitely give them a read.

yeah the conference was held in NUIG last autumn. It's all up on google video (search for SSA galway) though the sound quality is very poor.

It is a very marxist style discourse and it has a lot in common with theories on the political economy. I don't think it's quite the same as dependency theory because SSA has a lot to say about internal inequalities in 'developed' countries and 'developing countries', while world systems and dependency theory tend to focus on international relations

DadaKopf

Yeah, theories about states as conveyor belts of global capital accumulation, but less to say about the roles governments, policies and people.

Reading through this, it looks like a fusion of world-system analysis, neo-Marxian theories of state (Poulantzas, Miliband, Offe) and new institutional economics. An advance in one sense, and a 'hollowing out' of the 'dangerous words' of Marxism on the other.

I'm really moving towards more social constructivist and political anthropological views meself, so I am. Doesn't mean you have to ignore power relations inscribed in global capital accumulation and its effects, though!