Rethinking the Market » Activities and Outputs (tag [Oxford])

Oxford University Press Blog Post on Brexit: Part 2

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 14:11:52 GMT

This is the second of the two-part blog post that OUP published on its website on October 6th 2016 to accompany the release of the seventh edition of Baylis, Smith and Owens's The Globalization of World Politics. It is entitled, 'Brexit and Article 50 Negotiations: Why the Smart Money Might be on No Deal'.

http://blog.oup.com/2016/10/brexit-article-50-no-deal/

Oxford University Press Blog Post on Brexit: Part 1

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 13:19:09 GMT

In August 2016 I was invited by Oxford University Press to do some filming for their website, answering questions on Brexit. This was to help them in their advertising for the seventh edition of Baylis, Smith and Owens's The Globalization of World Politics, to which I am a contributing author for the chapter on Global Trade and Global Finance. These are two dimensions of the modern-day phenomenon of economic globalisation that will definitely be impacted on by the UK's decision to withdraw from the European Union.

As a follow-up to my afternoon filming, I was then asked to write two blog posts for the OUP website. The first was published on September 25th 2016, and is called, 'Brexit and Article 50 Negotiations: What it would take to strike a deal'. This post, along with the accompanying film, can be found via the following link.

http://blog.oup.com/2016/09/brexit-article-50-negotiations/

Oxford Brookes University General Departmental Seminar Presentation

Sat, 28 Nov 2015 16:09:08 GMT

On November 23rd 2015 I delivered a paper to the General Departmental Seminar of the Department of Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. The paper is entitled, 'Exploring Ricardo's Silences: Re-Historicising the Theory of Comparative Advantage', and it is available from me on request. Here is the abstract.

"According to David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, all countries stand to gain if they trade freely their surplus stock having first specialised production along the lines of relative opportunity costs. This basic insight is now two centuries old, but it remains at the heart of economists’ theories of international trade, and it also continues to provide the underlying economic ethics for liberal IPE. Any numerical example attributing any level of relative labour efficiency to any two countries across any two goods provides a simple system of equations that will demonstrate how specialisation and trade increases total world production. Ricardo’s own numbers showed a productively superior hypothetical ‘Portugal’ and a productively inferior hypothetical ‘England’ share the gains from free trade. This article, however, reinserts the historical back-story of actual eighteenth-century trading relations between the real Portugal and England that Ricardo silenced through omission. It is a highly illiberal tale of gunboats, royal intrigue and personal subjugation. Ricardo’s account of the purely market-based logic of comparative advantage writes out of economic history the centrality of both imperial wars and African slavery to the early English and Portuguese experience of ‘free’ trade. Given this historical back-story, liberal IPE thus appears to be in urgent need of new normative foundations."