Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
given monopolistic/oligopolistic privileges to smaller and smaller groups
of highly influential power brokers. As a consequence, it has encouraged
insider-trading, corrupt practices of accounting, tax evasion and bribery
of officialdom, avoidance of regulatory oversight, and the use of techno-
logical fixes further hide the actual economic health of corporate enter-
prises. Eventually, the 'Asian Meltdown' in 1997-98, in which several
East Asian national economies suffered financial crises, would signal an
end to the uncritical optimism that had prevailed since the late 1980s.
Ten years later, a more severe global recession in 2007-2011 was brought
on by a liquidity shortfall in the United States' banking system which
resulted in the collapse of large financial institutions and major down-
turns in global stock markets. Although neoliberalism's excesses had
brought the world to this latest global economic cyclical crisis (Stiglitz,
2010), contrary to historical precedents, neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy
appears to have survived almost intact as an entrenched ideological faith
in the next phase of the new global geo-economic order (Sparke, 2007)
that globalization is overseeing (as noted above, Chapter 2.1 introduced
this geo-economic restructuring of global power relationships).
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Contemporary Aspects of Globalization
The profound restructuring of national economies and international cor-
porate capitalism that followed in the 1980s, and into and through the
1990s and 2000s, ushered in a global neoliberal capitalism phase that
became known as the 'era of globalization'. Globalization's structural
dimensions and complex global-to-local interactions and interrelation-
ships, therefore, are the subject of this second part of the chapter. This is
because they constitute a new phase of advanced capitalism, which we
have characterized as neoliberalism, in which geographic, political, eco-
nomic, technological, social, cultural and ecological dynamics have
become much more diversified and have changed rapidly, while new
hybrid relations are constantly appearing and new processes succeeding
former out-of-date ones. Partnering advanced capitalism across the glo-
bal South is its subordinate neoliberal model, peripheral capitalism, so
that the era's core-periphery structural relations are interwoven, though
extremely unequal in power and self-determination. Two terms which
neatly characterize globalization are the notions that we now live in a
'hyperactive world' (Thrift, 2002) and a 'runaway world' (Giddens, 2003).
