Economic Shifts
The Globalization of Migrant Money
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hung Thai
This paper examines the monetization of migrant return activities in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The presence and dramatic return visits in recent years of low-wage workers from the diaspora have created numerous social contradictions and personal inconsistencies in the spatial typologies of the city. While they may not be able to purchase private properties in fortified enclaves such as where foreign expats and their high-wage overseas peers live, the low-wage overseas population can be seen in consumptive transactions at high-end cafes, bars, and restaurants within fortified spaces. This precariat diasporic group is thus visible in different hubs of the city for which they sometimes intersect with other global aspirants. I establish that low-wage immigrants are increasingly turning to the homeland as one response to their postcolonial predicaments of racial and economic exclusion as well as a response to their precarity in the West. These overseas relatives are returning to a homeland now free from the postcolonial power dynamics and racialized exclusions they confront in the United States, yet they bring these dynamics with them and exercise them at the family level through monetary circulation. This paper utilizes more than one hundred in depth interviews and seven years of ethnographic data to analyze the pleasures, contradictions, and tensions in the consumptionscape of the city from the vantage of the overseas working class.
Financial Inclusion and Sustainable Development: Analysing Consumer Financial Products’ Availability, Accessibility, and Affordability in Nigeria
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Onyebuchi Chima
The continuing growth in the technologies of risk reengineering and the reforms in the global neo-liberal market to boost consumer market inclusion have generated different national economic policies and project implementations for the inclusion of consumers previously excluded from the credit and financial market. In Nigeria, financial inclusion has become an integral policy mantra on sustainable development, forming part of the of the core government policy and project banking system. It is believed that increased inclusion of the underbanked to the banking system will enhance their access to financial products – savings and credits, as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) took vigorous measures to ensure the compliance of banks and financial houses (FHs). However, the product designs and strategies of banks and/or FHs have received little analytical studies and neither have there been studies on how the large scale poverty in Nigeria could be ameliorated through the financial market system. This study addresses the problem of poverty as a ‘risk’ and applies the intersection of socio-political economic behavioural analysis to analyse how banks and FHs, using financial market system, undertakes the ‘risk’ in the archetypical Nigeria environment. Overall, the research is predicated on the need to apply a multidisciplinary social science approach in the study of consumer credit availability, accessibility, affordability and bank-led financial inclusion strategy in Nigeria.
A Decade of Defeat: The Decline and Transformation of the American Unions in the 1980s
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Mackaman
Driven by economic globalization, the American trade unions in the 1980s experienced a sharp decline in membership and political influence, part and parcel of a broader impoverishment of American workers and a rapidly growing polarization of wealth. Unions responded to this decline by integrating themselves more closely with major corporate concerns and the Democratic Party, beginning with the bailout of the Chrysler Corporation in 1979 with the cooperation of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Using media accounts of major strikes in the 1980s as well as secondary literature from several fields, this paper (1) demonstrates empirically the decline of the unions, (2) draws out its connection with globalization, and (3) argues that, in the process, the period sets off a transformation of the basic political economy of industrial relations in the U.S.
Globalization of Cannabis and the Green Gold Rush: The Aqualitas Case
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stefan Litz, Opal Leung
In this paper we discuss the current fast spread of cannabis legalization for medical consumption and, to some degree, also recreational consumption around the globe. The globalization of the legalization of medical cannabis hand in hand with large demand - which cannot be met by existing producers at this time - provides many business opportunities in a climate that some have dubbed “the green gold rush”. Canada’s cannabis companies have some strategic advantages and established production facilities as well as the knowledge and experience in cultivating cannabis plants. How do Canadian cannabis companies deal with the opportunities and also challenges this situation holds? In this paper we present an analysis of the strategic focus and business development model as well as challenges and attempts to overcome those focusing on the case of a company from the Atlantic Canada region: Aqualitas. Less known than the big Canadian cannabis producers like Canopy Growth Corporation and Aurora Cannabis that are traded on the Toronto Stock Index (TSX), it pursues a different approach that is not based on vamping up large scale mass production as quickly as possible in order to meet the demand but to refine plant cultivation and growing technology in order to produce high-quality cannabis yet at production costs which is below of the competitors.
