Projektskizze
Since 1947, nation-states establishing Export Processing Zones (EPZs) grant tax and customs holidays to investors. The latter further benefit from ready-for-use industrial estates, built on already limited national budgets and from labour laws in the zones that often differ significantly from national laws in that they limit trade union operation and workers’ rights. In 2007, the International Labour Organisation counted 3.500 EPZs in more than 130 nations employing more than 60 million people worldwide, making the zones central places of global manufacturing. Thus, the zones’ make a significant contribution to local, national and to global capital-labour-state relations. Our project is concerned with how this particular relationship has grown since the inception of the world’s first zone in Puerto Rico and how economists, national parliaments and bureaucracies, corporations and workers’ organisations have negotiated the often radically new sets of social and economic relations on the scales of individual zones and the global economy.
One of the central empirical and theoretical aims of our project is to confront the global spread of EPZs with present scientific debates on neoliberalism’s rise to global salience and on the historical shift from fordism to post-fordism in the 1970s. Our project combines the methodologies of global and economic history with those of social anthropology. Case studies include the world’s first EPZ in the US dependency of Puerto Rico, the second zone set up on the world’s first duty-free airport in Shannon, Ireland, in 1959, the Mauritian EPZ, one of the world’s most successful zones, and the zones of Madagascar and Indonesia. Secondly, we focus on the workings of international public and private sector organisations that were involved in and/or concerned about the global spread of EPZs such as The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, the International Labour Organisation, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank. Among the private sector organisations studied will be the World Export Processing Zones Association, World Free Zones Convention, multi-national corporations engaged in several organisations and furthermore we will look at the transnational trade unions and social movements concerned with EPZs.
The project’s aim is informed by the lack of a concise historical account of the global spread of EPZs that followed after a promising start in the 1970s when Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye built their theory of a new international division of labour on a comparative global analysis of the relocation of capital and production from industrialised countries to EPZs in developing countries. In broader terms, we aim for a refined understanding of the emergence of the economic structures that shape the present as EPZs are one of the most striking phenomena of post World War II global economic integration.
Keywords
- Global Economic History
- Social Anthropology
- Development
- Neoliberalism
- Flexible Accumulation
- International Organisations
- Asia
- Latin America
- Africa
- Europe
