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Economic Development Zones
Abstract
Economic development zone (EDZ) is a spatial policy and experimental strategy for stimulating economic growth. Even though its roots are ancient, it is only in recent decades that EDZ has emerged as a powerful global form. Zoning technologies, as a compromise between liberal and protective regimes, can be seen as the state's intention to cope with the emerging opportunities and pressures of internationalization by redefining its territory, border, and sovereignty. However, the restructuring process incurs social and spatial tensions, since that zoning policy also implies differentiating the treatment of land and people. Situated in changing political‐economic climates, EDZs, on the one hand, extend to cover as far as possible, through networking, the subcontracted fragments of the national territory, and, on the other hand, become part of the assemblage of a globalizing world.
... These zones are cocoons of exception offering extraordinary regulatory and governance regimes designed to attract foreign and outwardoriented domestic investment (Ong, 2004), while retaining more restrictive and protective national regulation elsewhere, with cross-country zones displaying complex hybridity (Phelps & Wu, 2009). Zones are assemblages of managed globalization (Hsu & Chu, 2016) and arenas for policy experimentation in and between nations (Doucette & Lee, 2015). ...
The joint development by Belarus and China of the Great Stone Industrial Park (GSIP) is designed to establish a high-tech industrial zone and an eco-friendly satellite city of Minsk as a key node on the Eurasian Land Bridge linking China with the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union. The development and organization of the GSIP are explained in the light of a coupling of the strategic goals of the two countries in the context of a new Chinese model of external engagement called an emergent geo-political economic culture. These goals include Belarus' desire to reduce its dependence on Russian gas and oil, upgrade and diversify its economy, strengthen its integration with Eurasia and find new partners, by attracting Chinese and other foreign direct investment in the context of China's Going Out and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). An analysis of the roles of national leaders Aliaksandr Lukashenka and Xi Jinping and of different stakeholders in the predominantly top-down design, development and governance of the park reveals the way in which a BRI cooperation platform permits the coupling of Chinese and Belarusian interests and strategies in ways through which each side expects to benefit.
Shenzhen, China's first special economic zone (SEZ), not only heralds the essence and evolution of the PRC's earlier domestic reform and global integration, but also demonstrates how urban spaces are rapidly produced in a socialist economy undergoing market transformation. This note identifies three such spaces: an economic space of globalization; a social space of exclusion and contestation; and a political space of governance.
The promotion of SEZs is an attempt to deal with infrastructural deficiencies, procedural complexities, bureaucratic hassles and barriers raised by monetary, trade, fiscal, taxation, tariff and labour policies. These structural bottlenecks affect the investment climate adversely by increasing production and transaction costs. Since country-wide development of infrastructure is expensive and implemen- tation of structural reforms would require time, due to given socio-economic and political institutions, the establishment of industrial enclaves (SEZs/EPZs) is seen as an important strategic tool for expediting the process of industrialisation in these countries. The zones offer numer- ous benefits such as, (i) tax incentives, (ii) provision of standard factories/plots at low rents with extended lease period, (iii) provision of infrastructure and utilities, (iv) single window clearance, (v) simplified procedures, and (vi) exemptions from various restrictions that characterise the investment climate in the domestic economy. These benefits foster a conducive business environment to attract local and foreign investment, which would not otherwise have been forthcoming. The competitive advantages of zones may also be explained within the frame- work of the "cluster approach". Zones are industrial clusters where external economies of scale and other advantages help the operating firms in reducing costs, developing competitive produc- tion systems and attracting investment, in particular, FDI. As a result of these benefits, many developing countries have been promoting zones with the expectation that they will provide the engine of growth to propel industrialisation. There is, however, no conclusive evidence regarding the role of the zones in the development process of a country. The literature review indicates that while some countries have been able to capture the dynamic and static gains
The success of export processing zones or the Zone Franche in Madagascar since 1990 is, with the exception of Mauritius, an isolated and unknown case in Africa. This paper, based on first-hand data, explains that the Zone Franche has had a highly significant macroeconomic impact in terms of exports and jobs. We show that average wages in the Zone Franche are equivalent to the other formal activity sectors, other things being equal, and that labor standards there are higher than average. The Zone Franche quickly recovered from the 2002 crisis and has benefited a great deal from AGOA. The final phase-out of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement in 2005 is expected to have a negative impact on the Zone Franche.
Humphrey J. and Schmitz H. (2002) How does insertion in global value chains affect upgrading in industrial clusters?, Reg. Studies 36, 1017-1027. What is the scope for local upgrading strategies where producers operate in global value chains? The literature on industrial clusters emphasizes the role of inter-firm co-operation and local institutions in enabling upgrading. The value chain literature focuses on the role of global buyers and chain governance in defining upgrading opportunities. This paper argues that clusters are inserted into global value chains in different ways, and that this has consequences for enabling or disabling local-level upgrading efforts. It pays particular attention to the position of developing country firms selling to large, global buyers.
The process of global economic integration has sharply altered the context in which most governments are thinking about policies for economic development. The world economy and the 'dictates' of international economic integration loom much larger than ever before. Indeed, in many 'emerging' economies traditional developmental concerns relating to industrialization and poverty have been crowded out by the pursuit of 'international competitiveness'. Openness to the world economy can be a source of many economic benefits. The importantion of investment and intermediate goods that may not be available domestically at comparable cost, the transfer of ideas and technology from more developed nations, and access to foreign savings can help poor nations circumvent some of the traditional obstacles to rapid growth. But these are only potential benefits, to be realized in full only when the complementary policies and institutions are in place domestically. The claims made by the boosters of international economic integration are frequently inflated or downright false. Countries that have done well in the postwar period are those that have been able to formulate a domestic investment strategy to kick-start growth and those that have had the appropriate institutions to handle adverse external shocks, not those that have relied on reduced barriers to trade and capital flows. The evidence from the experience of the last two decades is quite clear: the countries that have grown most rapidly since the mid-1970s are those that have invested a high share of GDP and maintained macroeconomic stability. The relationship between growth rates and indicators of openness - levels of tariff and non-tariff barriers or controls on capital flows - is weak at best. Policymakers therefore have to focus on the fundamentals of economic growth - investment, macroeconomic stability, human resources, and good governance - and not let international economic integration dominate their thinking on development.
Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific.Ong traces how these and other neoliberal exceptions to business as usual are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. She argues that an interactive mode of citizenship is emerging, one that organizes people—and distributes rights and benefits to them—according to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market value—such as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian cities—are denied citizenship. Nevertheless, Ong suggests that as the seam between sovereignty and citizenship is pried apart, a new space is emerging for NGOs to advocate for the human rights of those excluded by neoliberal measures of human worthiness.
This article compares land dispossession for industrial development under state‐developmentalism and neoliberalism in India. Drawing on interviews, ethnography and archives of industrial development agencies, it compares earlier steel towns and state‐run industrial estates with today's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and argues that they embody different regimes of dispossession. While steel towns and industrial estates reflected a regime of land for production with pretensions of inclusive social transformation, SEZs represent a neoliberal regime of land for the market in which ‘land broker states’ have emerged to indiscriminately transfer land from peasants to capitalist firms for real estate. The present regime has been unable to achieve the ideological legitimacy of its predecessor, leading to more widespread and successful ‘land wars’. The article argues more broadly that variations in dispossession across space and time can be understood as specific constellations of state roles, economic logics tied to class interests and ideological articulations of the ‘public good’.
The recent phenomenon of the export zone attracts scholarly attention primarily for its economic and political logics, yet it is as a cultural phenomenon that the Zone may ultimately signal its transformational role in the trajectory of state sovereignty and the global urban imagination. This article approaches the phenomenon of the Zone as a key location for understanding the social and cultural impact of globalization on urban space. It conceptually locates the trajectory of the export-oriented zone and its analogues to understand how, in little over 40 years, the phenomenon of the Zone experienced a rapid and veritable institutionalization as part of the topography and imagination of globalization. The first part traces the contours of the Zone as a territorial strategy that re-scales national economic and political space and enables the networked models of distributed production so critical to the global economy. The second part critically supplements the standard account by re-thinking the Zone as an incipient urban form — the Ex-City — that incorporates classically modernist fantasies in the context of contemporary logics of sovereignty and accumulation.
The economic enclaves that are being built across South India would appear to exemplify what Aihwa Ong has called ‘neoliberalism as exception’. Drawing on fieldwork in and around one ‘special economic zone’ in the state of Andhra Pradesh, this article critiques the language of exceptionality by exploring the structural continuities and dynamic interconnections between the zone and what continues to be called the ‘informal economy’. Rather than valorize India’s economic zones as manifestations of a juridical-discursive ‘exception’ in which the state experiments with alternative forms of market-oriented rule or as carceral spaces in which working populations are subjected to innovations in bio-political government this article shows how these zones formalize conditions of precariousness and political subjectivity that already characterize working life in much of South India, incorporating social networks and livelihoods that extend beyond their walls.
Do export processing zones draw local manufacturers into world markets – and thereby engender broader market reform – by way of a ‘demonstration effect’? The answer is likely (i) to be determined, not in the EPZ, but in the host country's national customs area, and (ii) to vary systematically with the size of the relevant market. While manufacturers from large economies are able to compete in world markets, and are therefore susceptible to the demonstration effect, their counterparts from small economies are unable to do so, and are therefore intractable. Thus, the nature of the EPZ life-cycle, like the legacy of import-substituting industrialisation, is in no small measure a function of market size.
In this paper I explore what the development of an expedited border-crossing program called NEXUS reveals about the changing political geography of citizenship in contemporary North America. Developed after 9/11 as a high-tech solution to competing demands for both heightened border security and ongoing cross-border business movement, NEXUS and other so-called Smart Border programs exemplify how a business class civil citizenship has been extended across transnational space at the very same time as economic liberalization and national securitization have curtailed citizenship for others. The biopolitical production of this privileged business class citizenship is explored vis-à-vis the macroscale entrenchment of neoliberal policy through NAFTA and the microscale production of entrepreneurial selfhood. By examining how this transnational privileging of business class rights has happened in an American context of exclusionary nationalism, the paper also explores the relationship between neoliberalism and the development of new spaces of exception defined by exclusion from civil rights. Examples of such exclusion include ‘expedited removal’ and ‘extraordinary rendition’, two forms of American anti-immigrant control that have been developed in concert with expedited border-crossing programs. Examining these forms of expedited exclusion and comparing the carceral cosmopolitanism they produce with the soft cosmopolitanism of the NEXUS lane, the paper ends by offering an argument about the relationship between the neoliberal privileging of transnational mobility rights and its exclusionary counterparts.
Shortlisted for the Inaugural International Political Economy Group annual book prize '…amongst the most important books yet written on globalization' - Review of International Political Economy "In this original and very accessible work Cameron and Palan make a major contribution to the narrative turn in political economy. Skillfully combining sustained theoretical critiques and contemporary empirical analyses, this politically engaged book promotes a paradigm shift that sheds new light on the changing relations among the economy, the political, and the social. It will quickly become a major reference point for its account of globalization as a persuasive story and a flawed reality. I recommend it unreservedly" Bob Jessop How do theories, discussions and debates about globalisation shape the very subject they reflect on? How are conceptions of the state, society and politics are changing in the age of globalisation? This book critically introduces the main contemporary debates on globalization and demonstrates how conventional versions or narratives of globalization have served to shape policy responses at both state and corporate levels. Rather than accepting the disintegration of the state thesis, the authors present an alternative transition from the nation-state as a homogenous imagined community', to a more complex and fluid series of normative economic spaces or imagined economies'. They illustrate how this respatialization of the contemporary state is rapidly taking shape in concrete institutions, processes, people and places serving to recast the boundaries of the social, political and economic in fundamental ways. By accessibly demonstrating the way in which the discourse of globalization has itself become an integral part of the politics of globalization, The Imagined Economies of Globalization serves as an ideal introduction to key contemporary debates in politics, international relations, geography, international political economy and sociology.
In this paper I assess the value of regulation theory for studying transformations in governance at the local level, focusing on the issue of local economic development. Adopting a third-generation approach, regulation theory is recognised as having varied success at theorising local governance. More advanced third-generation approaches offer some useful concepts that require integration through mid-level concepts. This is to be contrasted to approaches which `read off' local transformation from broader macroeconomic change. Both approaches are, however, trapped in the regulationist enigma, defined in the paper as the difficulty of employing regulation theory to theorise local transformations in local governance. In order to solve the enigma, I utilise concepts from Jessop's strategic-relational state theory. This approach stresses, amongst other things, the political nature of state intervention. Jessop's approach is, however, not sufficiently sensitive to space and I introduce the notion of spatial selectivity to understand adequately the dynamics of local change. Spatial selectivity implies that the state has a tendency to privilege certain places through accumulation strategies, state projects, and hegemonic projects. The process of geographical privileging, which is implied by the notion of spatial selectivity , takes on both material and ideological forms. This tentative concept is explored through a reworking of theoretical approaches to Thatcherism. I conclude by highlighting issues that spatial selectivity needs to address, namely uneven development and structure - strategy - agency dialectics.
ILO Database on Export Processing Zones (Revised).” Sectoral Activities Programme Working Paper WP.251.Geneva:International Labour Organization
- J P S Boyenge