Globalized finance-dominated accumulation regime and sustainable development

International Journal of Sustainable Development

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 40-62

  Serfati, Claude ^a  

^a LABORATOIRE DES SCIENCES DU CLIMAT ET DE L ENVIRONNEMENT   (France)

Author keywords

accumulation regime; finance capital; social costs of capitalism

Indexed keywords

EID: 0004159950     PISSN: 09601406     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/IJSD.2000.001525     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Note that President Truman introduced the term ‘underdeveloped areas’ in his speech before the Congress in 1949.
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7. That Schumpeter was definitely aware that it was one part of the story is evidenced by the contrast between his ‘youthful optimism’ regarding the potentialities of capitalism and his ‘late pessimism’ on capitalism’s self-destructic tendency.
8. O’Connor, M. (Editor) (1994) Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology, The Guilford Press.
9. Before World War 2, in the US, the military expenditure to GNP ratio was less than 1%. During the Post-War period, it has been over 5%.
10. In the US, after the end of the Cold War, the rationale for such costly weapon system programmes (to give an example, the fighter aircraft programmes will cost US$ 350 billion), often designed during the Cold War, has been the threats of ‘rogue’ states, and more recently the desire to avoid peer competiton in the new world order.
11. Serfati, C. (1999) ‘From one war (baq) to the next (Serbia): The New Look Arms Economy’, Presentation at the AlO COST Workshop, Defence Restructuring and Questions of Identity, Copenhaguen, 10–11 September 1999.
12. See, for example, ‘National Defense is one of the few pure public goods, satisfying both conditions: the impossibilty and undesirability of exclusion’ (stressed in the text), Stiglitz, i.E. (1986) Economics of the Public Sector, W.W. Norton and Co.
13. Barro, R. (1990) ‘Government spending in a simple model of endogenous growth’, J. of Political Economy, Vol. 98, no. 5.
14. Baran, P. and Sweezy, P. (1968) Monopoly Capital, Harmondsworth.
15. The view that military expenditures should be considered as depleting material resources and diverting human workforce was taken by few scholars, in particular by Seymour Melman, in a close to institutionalism approachMelman, S. (1997) ‘From private to state capitalism: how the permanent war economy transformed the institutions of American capitalism’, J. of Economic Issues, Vol. 31, no. 2.
16. Renner, M. (1993) ‘Environmental dimensions of disarmament and conversion’, in Cassidy, K.J. and Bishak, G.A. (Editors) Real Security, Converting the Defense Economy and Building Peace, State University of New York Press.
17. Illuminating accounts of the ‘French model’ in the nuclear industryDebeir, J. C., Deléage, J.-P. and Hèmery, D. (1989) Les servitudes de Iapuissance: une histoire de l’énergie, Flammarion, and in the ‘surgenerateur filière’ in Finon, D. (1989) L’échec des surgénérateurs, Autopsie d’un grand programme, Grenoble, PUG.
18. For the first time ever, in January 1999, workers at Brest’s shipyards, where the design and manufacturing of the nuclear naval capabilities are located, contaminated by nuclear radiation have sued their companies in court.
19. Serfati, C. (1995) Croissance, innovation et production d’armes, Economica.
20. The producer is the counterpart of the consumer. Neoclassical theory is not concerned with the production, let alone the labour, process as such. The role of the producer is to combine in an optimal way inputs bought from the market.
21. Beckenbach, F. (1994) ‘Social costs in modern capitalism’, in O’Connor, M. (Edtor) Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology, The Guilford Press.
22. Kapp, an institutionalist, is said to be the first to have given all its meaning to the notion of social costs. He explicitly defines them as resulting from the course of productive activitySteppacher (1994) ‘Kapp, K.K.’, in Hodgson, G.M., Samuels, W.J. and Tool, M.R. (Editors), Institutional and Evolutionary Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK.
23. Perroux, F. (1969) L’économie duXX°siècle, 3rd edn.
24. ‘Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology and combining together of various processus into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer’, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 475, Lawrence and Wishart, 1983.
25. That nature is given no value is not a contradiction of Marx’s analysis but of capitalism. As for science, which costs the capitalist nothing, Marx distinguishes capitalist appropriation from personal appropriation. For a comprehensive reviewBurkett, P. (1999) Marx and Nature: a Red and Green Perspective, St Martin’s Press.
26. Faucheux, S. and Passet, R. (1995) ‘Introduction’, Economic Appliquée, Vol. XLVIII, no. 2.
27. Interestingly, the classics’ view that labour – and nature – were at the very foundation of the production process has been turned around by neoclassical economists: capital is the only input (labour power is human capital, environment is natural capital, machines are capital, etc). Confusion on what capital means was a major criticism of Solow’ s production function made by J. Robinson
28. Similar critics to internalizing security as the ones made to internalizing the ‘pollution effects’ can be made (Serfati, 1995).
29. O’Connor, M. (Editor) (1994) Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology, The Guilford Press.
30. O’Connor, M. (1997) ‘Environmental valuation: from the point of view of sustainabihity’, in Dragun, A.K. and Jakobson, K.M. (Editors) Sustainability and Global Environmental Policy, New Perspectives, Edward Elgar.
31. Shaik, A.M. and Tonak, E.A. (1994) Measuring the Wealth of Nations, The Political Economy of National Accounts, Cambridge University Press.
32. Chesnais, F. and Serfati, C.‘Long horizon investment under a globalized finance dominated accumulation regime: an interpretation of the levelling off and decline of R&D in the 1990s’, in Moatti, P. and Mouhoud, E.M. (Editors) (2000) Technologie et connaissance dans la mondialisation, Economica.
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47. This was already the case at the end of the last century in France as far as state regulation is concerned. Some big firms were less reluctant than others to tolerate the implementation of some social security allowances by government, first because workers employed by them were often already benefiting from social, even if paternalistic, advantages, and second because the passing of a law charged this extra cost to every firm, and contributed to medium and small firms going bankrupt.
48. Clement, K. (1997) ‘Investing in Europe, governmental support for environmental technology’, in Ledgerwood, 0. (Editor) Greening the Boardroom, Corporate Governance and Business Sustainability, Greenleaf Publishing.
49. ‘green companies’ see Sachs, W., Loske, R., Linz, M. et al. (1998) Greening the North, A post-industrial blueprint for ecology and equity, Zed Books.
50. Alden, M. (1999) ‘Go green, invest and then prosper’, Financial Times, Monday January 25.
51. The analyst finding this correlation made the case of Mobil Oil outperforming Unocal, because its toxic waste per dollar of revenue was lower by 50%. The fact that, against the M/As mania background, Mobil Oil announced late 1998 its merger with Exxon in the biggest deal ever could have encouraged more or less rational ‘exuberance’ for the company’s stock value as well.
52. Walley, N. and Whitehead, B. (1996) ‘It’s not easy being green’, in Welford, R. and Starkey, R. (Editors) Business and the Environment, Earthscan, p. 44.
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55. A strong case for furthering privatization to ‘health, education, some incarceration, some military and police activities’Schleifer, A. (1998) ‘State versus private ownership’, J. of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 12, p. 4.
56. Again, the situation is somewhat similar in the defence industry, with more technical responsibilities being dropped from US Department of defense, UK and French Ministries of Defence and passed onto prime contractors as far as how the weapon systems development and production are worked Out.
57. Newell, P. and Paterson, M. (1998) ‘A climate for business: global warming, the state and capital’, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 5, no. 4.
58. On the influence of major companies on governmental policy, see also the account inGreider, W. (1996) ‘Citizen GE’, in Mander, J. and Goldsmith, E. (Editors) The Case against the Global Economy, and for a Turn toward Local Economy, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.
59. Chichilnisky, G. (1997) ‘Development and global finance: the case for an international bank for environmental settlements’, in Dragun, AK. and Jakobson, K.M. (Editors) Sustainability and Global Environmental Policy, New Perspectives, Edward Elgar, p. 257.
60. Green, K. and Miles, I. (1996) ‘A clean break? From corporate research and development to sustainable technological regimes’, in Welford, R. and Starkey, R. (Editors) Business and the Environment, Earthscan.
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68. OECD (1997) Economic Outlook, June, No. 6.
69. What is meant by ‘stretching’ the workforce is made explicit by the heading of one of the section in the Roach’s paper ‘Technology and the 24-hour day’ (i.e. new technologies require workers to stay on-line longer). In short, ‘stretching’ the workforce goes through a mechanism both intensifying and lengthening the workday. In our view, it could be the first time since the 19th century, except during the two world wars and in weapons-dedicated factories, that such a mechanism is at work on such a large scale;
70. Roach, R. (1997) ‘The hollow ring of the productivity revival’, Harvard Business Review.
71. Feldstein, M. (Editor) (1991) The Risk ofEconomic Crisis, University of Chicago Press.
72. This phenomenon is known as ‘capital flight’. ‘According to various estimates, some $70 billion left the debtor countries between 1979 and 1982 as capital flight for assets investments in the US and Europe. In Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Nigeria the exodus of money drained away over half of the funds borrowed abroad during those years’;Guttmann, R. (1996) ‘Les mutations du capital financier’, in Chesnais, F. (Editor) La mondialisation financiere, genèse, coat et enjeu.x, Syros, Alternatives économiques.
73. The US external short-term debt at the end of 1998 reached US$ 1900 billion out of a total of over US$ 2600 billion.
74. Sachs, W., Loske, R. and Linz, M. et al. (1998) Greening the North, a Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity, Zed Books.
75. UNCTAD (1996) World Investment Report.
76. Surprisingly repeating the same outright misperception as a 1993 World Bank report, whose title was ‘The East Asian Miracle’…
77. UNCTAD (1998) World Investment Report.
78. Luxembourg, R. (1951) The Accumulation of Capital, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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80. UNDP (1997) Human Development Report, United Nations, p. 121.
81. Heredia, C. and Purcell, M. (1996) ‘Structural adjustment and the polarization of Mexican society’, in Mander, J. and Goldsmith, E. (Editors) The Case against the Global Economy, and for a Turn toward Local Economy, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.
82. WCEDa (1987) Our Common Future, Repoft of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Oxford University Press.
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84. Kaimovitz, D. and Silveira, D. (1996) ‘The political dimension of implementing environmental reform: lesson from Costa Rica’, in Costanza, R., Degura, 0. and MartinezAlier, J. (Editors) Getting Down to Earth, Practical Appliations of Ecological Economics, International Society for Ecological Economics, Island Press, Washington, DC.
85. 70% of the $250 billion in international lending outstanding to Brazil at the end of 1998 had a maturity of less than one year.
86. International Labor Office (1998) htpp://www.ilo.org, ‘World of work’, No. 25, June/July.
87. Sato, H. (1997) ‘The parent company’s role in environmental protection’, in Ledgerwood, O. (Editor) Greening the Boardroom, Corporate Governance and Business Sustainability, Greenleaf Publishing.
88. In the ‘Intermediate Costs Projection’, GDP growth is put around 2.00% annually from 1998 to 2007, and projected to 1.2% over the ensuing years. In the 1995–1998 period, the GDP growth was annually around 3.9%.
89. A pay-as-you-go system can be considered as resting upon an intergenerational solidarity mechanism, through which those persons now in the labour force are obliged to contribute to the financing of the defined pension benefits for those presently retired. This sytem is considered as more solidarity-based than the various systems of individual capitalization.
90. In the US, the proportion of workers contributing to pension funds was 53% in 1987, and 45% in 1995.
91. Interview with Le Monde, 19-20/04/98 [our translation] ‘Au moment oü les Français décident de travailler 35 heures et oü les syndicats allemands exigent La semaine de 32 heures, les Coréens ont décidé de travailler 60 heures’.
92. Whalen, C.J. (1997) ‘Money-manager capitalism and the end of the prosperity’, J. of Economic Issues, Vol. 31, No. 2, June.