Sustainable Industrial Development

Publications

Under the direction of GDAE's Kevin P. Gallagher, the institute's work on sustainable industrial development has four priority areas of research:

Foreign Investment:  Perhaps the most sought after prize of the integration process for developing countries is foreign investment.  GDAE's research has documented the extent to which this promise is overstated, most notably with the 2007 book, The Enclave Economy: Foreign Investment and Sustainable Development in Mexico's Silicon Valley. GDAE continues to build on this work by policy analysis and research on best practices for firms and governments regarding foreign investment policy. 

China and Export Competitiveness:  For the past five years Mexico and other countries in Latin America have been sliding down the list of competitive nations in the world economy, especially compared to China.  GDAE is collaborating on empirical work that examines the extent to which Latin American nations are losing competitiveness to China and what this means about Latin America’s choice of development strategies for the 21st Century. 

Environment:  Building on Kevin P. Gallagher's widely acclaimed book, Free Trade and the Environment: Mexico, NAFTA, and Beyond, GDAE is: assembling a handbook on trade and environment for policy-makers, researchers, students, and advocates; conducting policy-oriented research on the economic and environmental impacts of various energy choices in Mexico and beyond; and continuing to analyze the environmental components of U.S. trade agreements.

Intellectual Property and Late Development - Intellectual property rules were once the domain of national governments.  Now, with IP integrated into international trade agreements, national practices are subject to binding international disciplines and intense external scrutiny.  Senior Research Fellow Kenneth Shadlen examines economic integration and the political economy of emerging IP regimes in Latin America and beyond, with an initial focus on Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.  Specifically, this projects looks at the policy space for promoting public health, facilitating local firms’ access to advanced technologies, and encouraging local innovative capacities. The project contrasts the differences in countries’ national IP regimes and identifies the political conditions for building developmentalist IP regimes in the current global political economy.

 

Key Publications

The Enclave Economy: Foreign Investment and Sustainable Development in Mexico's Silicon Valley , Kevin P. Gallagher and Lyuba Zarsky, The MIT Press, 2007.

Free Trade and the Environment: Mexico, NAFTA, and Beyond, Kevin P. Gallagher, Stanford University Press, 2004. (See also a policy summary of the book.)

International Investment for Sustainable Development, Lyuba Zarsky, editor, Earthscan, 2004.

See other globalization publications

 

 

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