Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Anti-globalization activists have their facts wrong.' Really?

[Doug Henwood]

Jim Devine wrote:

>capital mobility, not trade, helps explain the "race to the bottom," 
>as different countries compete to cut labor costs to attract capital.

Could you offer some empirical evidence for this? Of the first world 
countries, the U.S. was the only one to see a sustained decline in 
real wages, a trend that reversed after 1995, though "globalization" 
hasn't been reversed, nor has capital become any less mobile. In 
Africa and Latin America, which have had a largely dismal time of it 
over the last 20 years, the major culprit has been structural 
adjustment programs - imposed politically, though the IMF ("a toy of 
the United States to pursue its economic policy offshore," as Rudi 
Dornbusch helpfully put it). Africa is largely outside the circuit of 
mobile capital.

Doug