Starting in the late 1970s, we witnessed the spread of neoliberalism, building on market liberalisation and privatisation. The dismantling of tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade and the opening of countries to foreign investment, technological progress in the fields of information and communications technology (ICT), and decreasing costs of coordination and transport completely changed the organisation of production. As a consequence, large companies in the Global North could outsource and offshore a significant share of their economic activities. So-called global value chains (GVCs)1 emerged, multiplying the trade of intermediates and semi-finished goods across borders (Barrientos et al. 2016: 1214). In fact, this geographic dispersion of globally integrated production steps represents the distinctive feature of the latest wave of globalisation in comparison to earlier waves, which displayed – from a trade perspective – an increased exchange of finished goods on the world scale. The deepened trade integration through cross-border production chains has also changed the power relations among companies and between capital and workers. On the one hand, we witnessed what Bennett Harrison (1994) termed “concentration without centralisation”. lire la suite
