Competition & Change

As an emerging economy, China has relied on trade for export-led economic growth, imitating the path taken by its immediate neighbours over the past 25 years and the road taken previously by Germany and Japan. The original deal to normalize relations between the USA and China has been over-taken by the massive surge in Chinese exports to the USA, the tensions occasioned by the global financial crisis and the sense in which the USA, as a debtor country, is now reliant upon China for its long-term future. This article focuses on the China Investment Corporation (CIC) Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), which is a product of the original deal and is emblematic of the new status of China in the global economy. It is argued that, as one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, the CIC has eschewed conventional portfolio investment in developed financial markets for strategic investment in resources and jurisdictions deemed essential to China's long-term growth. As such, attempts to rein-in its ambitions through the “Santiago Principles” may be circumvented by a very different approach to investment. The CIC has the ability to re-make the rules of engagement in global financial markets, thereby redrawing the nature and scope of the long-term relationship between the two superpowers of the twenty-first century: China and the USA.

Current debates in migration studies underestimate or neglect altogether the implications of the privatization of migration management. Outsourcing control and detention functions to private companies is part of the paradigm of new public management. Such outsourcing has created self-reinforcing mechanisms and lock-in effects. However, the extent to which such privatization is embraced varies internationally depending on the degree of neo-liberalization of the state. Empirically, the article therefore analyses developments in countries with divergent levels of privatization of migration management, including the UK, Australia, the USA, Germany and the Netherlands.

Since the 1980s a wave of demutualizations has occurred across the financial services sector from stock exchanges to building societies, savings and loans associations and insurers. In both Australia and South Africa, this has had a marked effect on the life insurance markets that had been dominated by mutual life insurers for 150 years. This article adopts a case study approach to analyse the key drivers of organizational change. It examines the experiences of the Australian Mutual Provident (Australia's oldest and largest life insurance mutual) and Sanlam (the second-largest mutual life office in South Africa) as they proceeded down the path to demutualization. Firm-specific, market-specific and country-specific forces are identified as placing pressure on existing mutual structures.

Commodity chains that are global in extent have increasingly come to be seen as the defining element of the contemporary globalized world economy. Since the 1990s a body of theory — evolving from global commodity chain analysis to global value chain analysis to global production network analysis — has focused upon understanding how such commodity chains function. However, despite providing many important insights, these bodies of literature have generally suffered from a major deficiency in that they have failed to consider labour as an active agent capable of shaping such chains' structure and geographical organization. Here, then, we present a case for locating more centrally labour, in production network analysis.