Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Understanding the Trends, Themes, and Strata of International Migration
- 2 Why People Move or Stay Put: International Migration Is the Result of Compelling and Conflicting Factors
- 3 What Happens When International Migration Happens? The Dilemmas Posed by Migration
- 4 How Empires, Policy Regimes, and Economic Imperatives Influenced the Mobility of Capital and People in the 20th Century
- 5 Latin America: Where Volatile Economic Development, Political Crises, Poverty, and Remittance Income Is a Laboratory for Studying the Determinants of International Migration
- 6 Who Migrates and What They Offer: A Focus on People and Elites with Talent, Knowledge, and Entrepreneurial Skills
- 7 A Fair and Orderly International Migration Process Requires a Global Social Contract
- References
- Index
4 - How Empires, Policy Regimes, and Economic Imperatives Influenced the Mobility of Capital and People in the 20th Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Understanding the Trends, Themes, and Strata of International Migration
- 2 Why People Move or Stay Put: International Migration Is the Result of Compelling and Conflicting Factors
- 3 What Happens When International Migration Happens? The Dilemmas Posed by Migration
- 4 How Empires, Policy Regimes, and Economic Imperatives Influenced the Mobility of Capital and People in the 20th Century
- 5 Latin America: Where Volatile Economic Development, Political Crises, Poverty, and Remittance Income Is a Laboratory for Studying the Determinants of International Migration
- 6 Who Migrates and What They Offer: A Focus on People and Elites with Talent, Knowledge, and Entrepreneurial Skills
- 7 A Fair and Orderly International Migration Process Requires a Global Social Contract
- References
- Index
Summary
The international mobility of people and capital does not take place in an institutional and historical vacuum. They are closely linked to economic policy regimes, degrees of openness to people and capital mobility, state of the business cycle in source and destination countries, prevalence of cosmopolitan versus nationalist sentiments, and other factors. As discussed in the previous chapter, the international mobility of labor and capital are linked phenomena, as manifested by the economic history of the world in the past one and one-half centuries. Thus, both phenomena must be analyzed jointly. In periods in which economic policy and political regimes made greater access to the global marketplace possible, people and capital moved internationally to regions, countries, and cities that offered better jobs, higher wages, and more attractive investment regimes.
As this chapter shows, the world economy has undergone four very distinct phases and policy and political environments between 1870 and the early 21st century, each of which affected the international mobility of people and capital in significant ways. The first period (1870–1913), which ushered in the first wave of globalization, was one in which international capital and trade flowed freely under the gold standard, and the mobility of labor across national borders was largely unrestricted. This liberal movement of capital and people led, over time, to the convergence of real wages and per-capita income between the Old and New Worlds (European empires and their colonist economies), but not countries and regions outside that international circuit of mass migration and capital mobility – the “periphery” of the world economy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- International Migration in the Age of Crisis and GlobalizationHistorical and Recent Experiences, pp. 78 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010