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The World System

The Earth System A Hierarchy

6 November 2016

The Earth’s climate is an energy system, it is complex and adaptive.  Sunlight arrives from our star, some bounces back into the coldness of space, some of the energy is trapped in the atmosphere and some in the oceans.  That’s a very basic picture. A better view is to see the Earth’s [read more]

The Influence of Corporations on the Global Economic System

21 October 2016

Large corporations are often vehicles for expressing the opinions and supporting the interests of their owners and senior executives. Although they are a key part of the operation of the global economic system, and have a legitimate interest in ensuring that legislation and government policy does [read more]

Criminality and Corporations

21 October 2016

Some corporations have policies which actively encourage law-breaking, Enron was one example. Rowan Bosworth-Davies’s report on the 33rd Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime held at Jesus College, Cambridge in September 2015 “The Limits of the Law, The role of compliance in the [read more]

The Problem of Financial Imbalances

19 October 2016

In addition to the weakness of self-equilibrating mechanisms within the global monetary system, there is an arguably even more serious problem with underlying financial, trade and debt imbalances. In the words of the BIS, “Historically high debt levels and signs of financial imbalances point to [read more]

Crony Capitalism

19 October 2016

Crony capitalism is a term used where corporations have corrupt relationships with government officials and politicians in order to obtain an undue advantage over competitors, or to take over public assets for nominal or unfair prices. It has been frequently used to describe the form of capitalism [read more]

Global Corporations and States

19 October 2016

Students of international affairs, familiar with the Westphalian system, have been taught to see states as the paramount and only significant actors in the world, this is, however, not the case. Corporations, who operate globally, and with few restrictions, are also major players, in many cases [read more]

Measuring Inequality

19 October 2016

One measure of inequality is the Gini index, according to the World Bank, this measures the extent to which the distribution of income (or, in some cases, consumption expenditure) among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Lorenz curve plots [read more]
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© Andrew Palmer