Global Social Policy

Connections between global governance and poverty are usually made in relation to what are loosely called ‘poor countries’ of the ‘global south’. However, global governance also significantly shapes dynamics of impoverishment in ‘rich countries’ of the ‘global north’. These impacts become all the more apparent when global governance is understood to involve not only well-known intergovernmental agencies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation, but also additional institutional forms such as transgovernmental networks and private regulatory mechanisms. This broad complex of global governance has often exacerbated poverty in the global north, for example through neglect of the issue, through marginalisation of the people affected, and through the promotion of neoliberal policy frames. At the same time, global governance has in other ways also promoted poverty alleviation in ‘high-income countries’, for example with rules that work in their structural favour, with policy learning, with rights discourses, and with some promotion of global-scale social democracy. Thus, the challenge for efforts to reduce poverty in the global north is, on the one hand, to counter the negative implications of global governance and, on the other hand, to nurture the positive forces. Global coalitions of anti-poverty campaigners – in particular across north–south lines – could especially serve these politics.

Brought to fame by a 1994 World Bank report, the idea of pension pillarization has become part of the orthodoxy of pension reform. Yet scholars have neglected both the national origins and the pre-1994 diffusion of the ‘three-pillar doctrine’. This article presents a critical history of the transnational diffusion process that led to the adoption of this concept at the World Bank. My analysis retrieves the Swiss roots of the doctrine during the late 1960s, as well as its gradual adoption and mainstreaming during the 1970s and early 1980s by a transnational epistemic community of life insurers and pension consultants. By 1990, the doctrine was widely used without reference to its national origins: a Swiss trademark had become a generic reform idea that framed controversies on the future shape of old-age provision.

Based on the Dominican Republic’s economic and political institutional characteristics, we would expect social spending there to be at least average for Latin America. Yet in reality this country ranks at or near the bottom of the region in educational, health, pension and overall social spending, alongside significantly poorer, slower growing and less democratic countries. This article argues that the underdevelopment of Dominican social policies reflects the political impact of international migration flows, including both Dominican emigration to the United States and the immigration into the Dominican Republic from neighboring Haiti. These flows have inhibited the development of progressive political actors, including the partisan left and organized labor, and facilitated the adoption of an economic production model that erects additional obstacles to the expansion of the country’s social policies. Although the Dominican case is rather anomalous within Latin America, it holds important implications for countries outside the region.

Despite criticisms of their derivation and implementation, corporate codes of conduct (CoCs) continue to dominate debates on Corporate Social Responsibility and the informal regulation of worker exploitation and abuse by ‘sweatshops’ supplying northern multinational corporations (MNCs). Through analytical interrogation of existing literature and empirical evidence from Vietnamese case studies, two propositions are made to clarify the poor performance of CoCs. It is argued, firstly, that the extent of the control of MNCs over their subcontracting suppliers is misconceived and over-estimated because supply chains function more like networks than the hierarchies assumed by ‘principal-agent’ preconceptions. Conceptualizing such relationships instead as networks of conflicting political and economic imperatives amongst various sets of actors generates a second proposition derived from our case studies. The factory workers, their subcontractor employers, intermediary vendors and even the MNCs seeking CoC commitments, have convergent interests in violating key aspects of the codes and deceiving their auditors. The analysis evaluates the residual value of CoCs in light of these constraints and the options for improving labour regulation, with particular reference to the plight of disadvantaged women workers.