What’s missing when we think about Global Political Economy?

Abstract

Global Political Economy (GPE) and especially International Political Economy (IPE) remain relatively silent about three critical and nested issues: the nature of empire as a form of global order, control over the enterprises that structure much quotidian life, and the distribution of profits. Each issue in different ways also highlights heterogeneity across units and actors in the GPE, providing clues to what should be Critical Political Economy’s object of investigation: the structure of power in the global economy. This commentary connects empire, corporate control and the sources of profits to show the connections in the GPE across macro, meso- and micro-levels and how these relate to the racial and gender hierarchies sustaining that structure of power, in the hope of opening up more systematic debate and treatment.

After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond

“…Commercial databases received renewed attention in the years following the 2008 crash, as services like Bloomberg Professional, Refinitiv Eikon, Bureau van Dijk Orbis, and Standard and Poor's Compustat promised to provide new means for tracking and mapping financial power. These are fast becoming an important part of the toolkit for critical finance research at the firm-level (Schwartz, 2022). Data from these platforms has been used to chart networks of corporate ownership, revealing, for example, the ubiquity of the 'Big Three' asset management firms BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, as universal and permanent owners of capital (Fichtner et al, 2017; Fichtner andHeemskerk, 2020).…”

Introduction to the launch issue

“…Herman Mark Schwartz (2022), in his article 'What's missing when we think about Global Political Economy?' asks similar questions to Ulrich Brand in this issue.…”