Description
In 1960, United Nations economist Frederic Clairmont published a searing indictment of free trade and economic liberalism entitled The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism. This year, in the midst of the raging global debate over NAFTA, the new World Trade Organization and other instruments of free trade, Clairmont has reworked the original text, updated it, and added lengthy introductions and conclusions that cover developments over the last four decades.
Clairmont’s contributions are both empirical and historical. On the empirical front, Clairmont’s dazzling juxtapositions of statistics dispel once and for all the idea that in the era of the modern transnational corporations, nothing close to free market conditions exist anywhere in the world. Clairmont’s contributions in this realm are based on decades of research.
After the original publication of Economic Liberalism, Frederic Clairmont became one of the most original social scientists and creative researchers in the vast United Nations system. His three United Nations studies on corporate control of the banana, tobacco, and then fibers and textiles sectors analyze the impact of concentrated corporate power on peasants, prices, marketing, and the entire development process.
Clairmont’s meticulous calculations, updated in this book, describe how the world’s top 200 firms controlled almost a quarter of the planet’s economic output by 1980. He has uncovered the fight oligopolistic control of industry after industry by a handful of global giants.
In Economic Liberalism’s powerful new introduction, Clair-mont tours us through the recent waves of mergers and acquisitions that has led to the further consolidation of the Top 200 firms. Clairmont claims that 60 percent of international trade is now intra-firm transfers among units of the same giant firms; other figures place the total at 30-40 percent. Whichever is correct, a huge segment of international trade escapes any of the so-called “laws” of supply and demand; prices are set according to the internal dictates of private firms.
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