Development Seminar

Friday November 16th, 2012

4 pm - 6 pm 

Room 246, Anthropology Building, 19 Russell Street 

Sanjay Reddy

Department of Economics and India China Institute at the New School for Social Research (New York)

 'The New Dynamics of Global Inequality:  China, India, the West and the Rest,' 

'The patterns of contemporary global inequalities, and their causal dynamics, cannot be understood without the consideration of a variety of factors which fall outside the doctrines favoured by economic orthodoxy and which must be appropriately synthesized in order to make sense of the present realities.  The Lewisian character of the global labor market, the active construction of absolute and comparative advantage, the role of threat effects in reconstructing labor relations and the expansion of old and new sources of economic rents as a result of technology and globalization are among these factors, each of which is also crucially shaped by historical legacies.  The rise of the fast growing emerging economies (especially China and to a lesser extent India) is cause and consequence, which help to redefine the possibilities for the rest of the developing world and for those countries we have previously referred to as 'developed'.   The current confusion in our apprehension of the international political economy is an instance of a crisis of concepts and theories in the 'social sciences' which can only be resolved through a rejection of aprioristic reasoning (exemplified by the approach of standard economics to the international economy) in favour of reasoned empiricism. 

For more information on the work Sanjay Reddy has done on this topic as well as others, plesase visit his website at http://www.sanjayreddy.org/.