Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh and Thea Lee: The Field Guide to the Global Economy (revised edition).

Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh and Thea Lee The Field Guide to the Global Economy (revised edition) The New Press, 2005, 208 pp. ISBN 1-565-84956-6 (pbk) 11.99 [pounds]

This new edition of The Field Guide to the Global Economy comprises an excellent introduction for anyone interested in globalisation and in the various oppositional movements that have grown in response to it. It makes ideal background reading for students on courses concerning new social movements, globalisation or inter national political economy, and is an ideal introductory text since its authors assume no prior knowledge--only an interest in and concern with our contemporary global economic predicament.

The book is, according to the authors, 'structured to help nurture both the debate around the global economy and the actions that people take to get involved' (p. 3). It contains chapters on the history and status of global flows of goods and services, money and people; it explains what is new about globalisation today; it lists the ten principal claims of globalisation's backers; it sketches the institutions and policies driving globalisation; and, of course, describes people's efforts to slow down or change the course of globalisation (p. 3). This is an ambitious list but the book lives up to it admirably, covering a lot of ground in an accessible format, supported by a wealth of very useful statistics and graphics.

The opening chapter presents a necessarily brief historical sketch of the contemporary global economy. In its coverage of the period from 1492 to 1945, we learn how the European powers built their empires and, in the process, systematically undermined the indigenous economies of the people they colonised. It was this colonial expansion that produced important antecedents to globalisation, as colonies became sources of cheap labour, raw materials and markets for mass-produced goods. Moving on to the present day, the authors discuss trade patterns, showing that the principal goods traded today are petroleum products (8.3 per cent of world trade); textiles (6.2 per cent of world trade) and motor vehicles (8.4 per cent of world trade). The authors also highlight the scale and significance of the three most lucrative forms of illegal trade. These are the drugs trade (whose monetary value is estimated at $400 billion per year); weapons (monetary value unknown); and the trafficking of people. Of this last form of illegal trade there are, say the authors, four million people who 'fall victim to trafficking networks that coerce people into the sex trade, sweatshops and domestic servitude, generating profits of $5 to $7 billion' (p. 14). Surprisingly lucrative is the illegal trade in animals, worth $6 billion a year and providing raw materials for jewellery, medicines and handbags.

Subsequent chapters contain a wealth of detail about the current political-economic state of the world. Through these chapters, the authors demonstrate the human costs of globalisation in both the First and the Third World. Chapter 2 draws attention to the migration of manufacturing jobs from the North to the South, globally. The migration of manufacturing to the South and East has opened up great differentials between the condition of workers in the United States and in China, for example. Where us factory workers receive $21 per hour, according to The Field Guide, Chinese factory workers receive 90 [cents] for essentially the same job (p. 31). It is not only manufacturing work that is at risk of jobs migration: there are, the authors say, 14,063,130 service-sector jobs in the us that are at risk of outsourcing. The occupations most at risk include administrative support workers, financial support workers, and computer professionals. The kind of work that is likely to replace those jobs in rich countries is also a concern so that, for example, 'of the ten occupations projected to have the highest growth rate in the coming years, five have median pay that is below the poverty line for a family of four' (p. 43).

Discussion of these changes leads naturally to the two problems that form the centre of the authors' concern. The first of these is the level of economic inequality both within and between countries. The second is the size and power of transnational corporations.

In relation to inequality between individuals, the extent of the inequity the authors uncover is breathtaking. In 2003, for example, 'the wealth of the world's 587 billionaires ($1.9 trillion) is greater than the combined incomes of the poorest half of humanity' (p. 55). During the 1990s, moreover, inequality within countries grew worse; or at least, it grew worse if those countries adopted the IMF, World Bank and WTO neoliberal policy agenda of privatisation, liberalisation and free trade. The number of people living on less than US$2 per day increased everywhere, except in East Asia, between 1981 and 2000 (pp. 50-54).

In relation to the power of corporations, the authors contend that 'leading firms have increased their economic and political clout while contributing less to society in jobs and tax revenues' (p. 58). In order to demonstrate this, the book contains detailed discussions about several firms, with Wal-Mart, Nike and General Motors being given particular attention. We learn, for example, that manufacturing corporations produce more goods and earn higher profits with fewer workers than they did twenty-five years ago (p. 58). We also learn that Nike has moved its production from the us to Japan, then to South Korea and Taiwan, then to China and finally to Vietnam, in pursuit of cheap, compliant labour. We also learn that General Motors moved much of its production from the os to Mexico in order to take advantage of lower wages and compliant labour forces there. It is here that a potential problem begins to emerge. Reading this, a question came to mind: the question of whether Nike and General Motors are simply bad cor-porations, run by particularly ruthless executives doing the work of spectacularly greedy shareholders; or whether there is a wider context. That is, whether there is something about free markets, and about capitalism in general, that rewards such behaviour.

This question comes into sharper focus when the authors discuss the background to globalisation. Here, their principal concern is with the size of corporations. On page 69, for example, they list the world's hundred largest economic entities. Of these, only 48 are countries, and the other 52 are corporations, of which Wal-Mart is the largest with a turnover of $246,525,000,000 in 2002. This places Wal-Mart between Belgium and Sweden in terms of economic size. This is very interesting; but the reader is left less than certain of what the comparison demon-strates. The political context suggests, in fact, that the authors might not be comparing like with like. Corporations do not (yet) possess sovereign power over the geographical territories in which they operate. They do not, consequently, have law-making powers or a monopoly on the use of force in those territories. The nations in which the corporations operate could demand that the corporations leave; the corporations cannot demand that the people of those same nations leave. Again, there are specifically capitalist reasons for the growth of giant corporations that the authors do not consider. There is little discussion of how or why corporations reached the size of contemporary oligopolies.

The authors of The Field Guide hint at a solution to these problems when they move on to talk about the political forces behind globalisation. They discuss the broken promises of privatisation, and also the growth of monopolies and duopolies alongside deregulation of business activities. These poisonous results follow from policies that were developed in economic and business-led think-tanks, and which have been adopted around the world over the last thirty years or so. If the description that the authors offer of this process were taken a little further, then we could see something like class action behind globalisation, as the ruling class captures government, dispossesses public services, and silences labour unions. Once again, the question could be raised as to whether this is a result of the system being run by bad people, or whether such excesses of inequality and power always follow as accumulation proceeds and crises develop.

The final chapter offers a brief sketch of movements against globalisation in its current form. The authors include a short paragraph on everything from politically aware pop music to labour unions and anarchist groups. The strength of this approach is to demonstrate the wide variety that opposition can take, and to show that it is potentially as global as capital itself.

None of the material contained in this book is entirely new. What the authors do is to bring it together in a new and accessible format. As such, it forms an excellent basic introduction, and I am already using it with some of my Japanese English-language students.