One small voyage for a ship, one giant leap for New Zealand. Listener: 2 June 2007. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Growth & Innovation; Political Economy & History; This month, 125 years ago in 1882, the Dunedin docked at the Port of London with a cargo of meat from New Zealand that sold…
Continue reading this entry »
Presentation to a Reserve Bank Seminar, 16 March, 2006 Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Introduction Later this year Auckland University Press is to publish my book Globalisation and the Wealth of Nations, which is the result of a project supported by a Marsden Fund Grant. It is a big book, as befits the…
Continue reading this entry »
By Brian Gould (Craig Potton 2006) 175pp. $29.95. Review for New Zealand International Review, March/April 2007. p. 29 Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; As an economics student I was struck by Paul Samuelson’s notion that the market place was a ‘democracy’ in which consumers expressed their preferences by their purchases. But it is a democracy…
Continue reading this entry »
Comments on a paper by Michael Moriarty. New Zealand-Pasifika: Interactions and Perspectives Conference, 8 February, 2007. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Thankyou Michael for a thought-provoking paper. Let me introduce your subject by saying a little more about the theory of borders. We need to distinguish jurisdictional borders from geographical borders. Jurisdictional…
Continue reading this entry »
Paper to Labour Employment and Work Conference 12, Wednesday 15 November. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Labour Studies; Aging is a global phenomenon, that is it exists in may parts of the globe. This paper argues it is also a globalisation phenomenon, that is it involves the increasing interaction between national and regional economies…
Continue reading this entry »
The Rugby World Cup presents a challenge to Auckland’s governance. Listener: 7 October, 2006. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Growth & Innovation; The Auckland economy has been performing badly over the past few decades, partly because of the policies of the 1980s and 1990s, partly because of the failure to build adequate infrastructure. But the region’s…
Continue reading this entry »
The Doha round is dead. But NZ’s bilateral trade deals are no substitute for global ones. Listener: 26 August, 2006. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; The Doha round on trade liberalisation is suspended “indefinitely”. More colourfully, India’s Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said that the round, though not dead, “is between intensive care and the crematorium”. Trade…
Continue reading this entry »
Listener 3 June 2006.
Keywords: Environment & Resources; Political Economy & History;
The last time I talked with Rod Donald was shortly after the 2005 election, walking along Lambton Quay. Rod was very disappointed with the election outcome, for his Green Party lost voter share, and hence seats. He thought that the scurrilous anti-Green election pamphlet did a lot of damage. I said that anyone who thought it valid was too ignorant to vote Green, although it damaged the Greens when the new government was being formed.
Speech to the Auckland University of Technology Residential Course on Regional Development, Tatum Park, Levin, May 30. The author is an adjunct professor of the Institute for Public Policy at AUT.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Growth & Innovation;
Tonight I am going to talk about what New Zealand’s Economic Transformation might look like, and some of the things which need to happen in order to accomplish it. However, I need to begin with two caveats.
Presentation to a Leadership New Zealand seminar, 18 May 2006.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Governance;
I am working on a book, The Globalisation of Nations, sponsored by the Marsden Fund. As the title suggests I am concerned with both the process of globalisation and how that affects the nation-state. Today I begin by giving a brief overview of the economics of globalisation, but my main focus will be about its impact on the nation-state.
Shown at the 2006 Wellington Human Rights Film Festival. Comments while on a panel which followed the film.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;
While the intended messages of the film are obvious enough, I want to comment on a few more subtle issues.
Listener: 6 May, 2006.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;
In November 2001, trade ministers in Doha in the Arabian-Persian Gulf declared the next trade negotiations round to be a “development round”, aiming to enable the poor countries to experience “growth, development and prosperity”. But there were conflicting reasons for their vision.
Can We Transform Auckland From A Gateway City to A Global One?
Listener: 8 April, 2006.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Growth & Innovation;
Many cities are gateways, connecting a country or region to the rest of the world. Some are “government” cities, capitals of region or country. But some are global cities, where key global industries boost their size and vibrancy far above their dependence on gateway or government activities.
Editors: Robert Patman and Chris Rudd. Published by: Critical Security Series, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot. England. 258pp. $US99.95/£55.00.
NZIIA, May/June 2006, p.28.
Much of the public’s anxiety about globalisation is concerned with sovereignty. However its understanding of the previous sentence’s last two nouns is vague and imprecise, for each requires careful definition. Patman and Rudd’s introduction defines sovereignty by tracing back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as ‘a sovereign state … exercises supreme legal unqualified and exclusive control over a designated territory and its population’, claiming that there are ‘close to 200 sovereign states’ (which almost resolves their question, since if they exist what is the problem?). They are less sure of giving a ‘precise meaning to the term globalisation’, broadly defining it as ‘the intensification of interconnections between societies, institutions, cultures and individuals on a worldwide basis’. Note the first definition involves a situation, the second a process, which complicates the coupling of the two.
Some Key Papers
Listener: 17 December, 2005.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;
The World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference, to be held in Hong Kong December 13-18, will be a desperate attempt to get the Doha Round’s trade liberalisation back on track.
Presentation to the Browning Institute, of Public Affairs forum “The WTO in Hong Kong: Make or break time for neo-liberalism?”, 14th of December, McKenzie Room, St John’s in the City, Wellington.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;
If New Zealanders are to do what they say they want to do, the New Zealand economy is going to have to specialise in what it is good at, to obtain the dynamic economies of scale which give the high productivity which can underpin New Zealanders’ desire for a rich, sustainable and varied material and non-material life. The New Zealand economy will then have to trade much of what it specialises in, for that which it cannot produce so well. That rules out autarchy and puts us squarely into a world of international economic engagement.
Revised version of Paper for NZIIA Seminar “The Economic and Social Impacts of Globalisation” 21 September, 2005.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; The Economics of Globalisation: An Introduction is a version of this paper with a more detailed economic analysis
Introduction
The Royal Society of New Zealand awarded me a Marsden Fund grant to study globalisation. The study is a continuation of my earlier research program, especially that which is summarised in my book In Stormy Seas with its central message that the fate of New Zealand will be largely a consequence of what happens overseas, together with our ability to seize the opportunities and manage the problems those events create.
Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul in conversation with Brian Easton about globalism, ideologues and rediscovering moderation.
Listener: September 10, 2005.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
EASTON: You are a very cosmopolitan person. Canadian father and British mother. You have a degree in French from London, you’ve worked in Paris. You have a Chinese-Canadian wife. You’ve written successful novels as well as international bestsellers on contemporary issues, beginning with “Voltaire’s Bastards”, through another three to your latest, “The Collapse of Globalism”. Yet you seem to be a Canadian nationalist
SAUL: The non-ideological reality is that people come from somewhere. It is an impossible romantic dream that you can be from nowhere. I’ve always believed that the way human beings really live is that they come from somewhere and it colours or shapes the roots of what they think and then you try to find how that fits into the common good.
This is the full edited version of Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul in conversation with Brian Easton about globalism, ideologues and rediscovering moderation, from which the Listener version of September 10, 2005 was extracted.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
EASTON: It strikes me that you are a very cosmopolitan person – Canadian father and a British or English mother