Tag: free trade
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Double standards in ‘Free Trade’
Wealthier countries in Europe make extensive use of import taxes to make imported goods more expensive and protect domestic business. At the same time they cajole African countries to sign free trade agreements which prevent them from imposing import taxes on European products which puts local farmers in Africa out of business. This means that…
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What are Transnational Corporations?
We’ve probably all heard of companies such as Walmart, Amazon, Apple, and Shell, and these are all examples of Transnational Corporations – in fact these four all feature in the top 10 global companies by revenue in 2020. Some of the others you may never have heard of because they don’t have such a public…
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Arguments for Transnational Corporations in Development
Modernisation theory saw TNCs as playing a positive role in helping societies to develop. Rostow (1971) saw the injection of capital as essential in the pre-conditions for take-off phase of development, and he thought TNC’s were one of the institutions which could help kick start the process of development by investing money, technology, and expertise…
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The Role of the World Trade Organisation in International Development
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is the body through which governments and businesses (mainly TNCs) negotiate the rules of trade, and settle trade disputes once these rules have been established. The concept of the WTO first began with the 1947 the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was signed by the Western powers to…
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Arguments Against Trade as a Strategy for Development
Andre Gunder Frank (1971) argues that the reason trade doesn’t work for poor countries is a legacy of colonialism – before independence, the colonizing power simply took these commodities. After independence, developing societies are often still over-dependent on exporting these primary commodities, which typically have a very low market-value, and rich countries are happy to…
