3.10: Key Terms

Words to Know 

• Algorithmic Management: The use of automated systems to assign tasks, monitor workers, evaluate performance, establish incentives, or make workplace decisions.
• Balance of Payments: A record of economic transactions between residents of a country and the rest of the world; serious imbalances can contribute to foreign-exchange or financial crises.
• Capital: Assets or resources that can be used to generate additional economic value or income.
• Capitalism: An economic system organized substantially around private ownership, market exchange, wage labor, investment, and capital accumulation.
• Conditionality: Policy requirements attached to financial assistance, particularly loans from institutions such as the IMF.
• Data Colonialism: A critical framework describing the appropriation of human life and social activity as data that can be extracted and monetized.
• Deregulation: The reduction or restructuring of government rules governing economic activity.
• Developmental State: A state that actively shapes industrial development through coordinated policies involving finance, infrastructure, technology, exports, education, or strategic industries.
• Digital Sovereignty: A government's or society's capacity to exercise meaningful control over its digital infrastructure, data, technologies, and regulatory environment.
• Externality: A cost or benefit generated by an economic activity that is not fully reflected in its market price.
• Financialization: The increasing influence of financial markets, institutions, motives, and practices throughout an economy.
• Friendshoring: Relocating or concentrating supply chains among countries viewed as strategically or politically reliable partners.
• Global Value Chain: A production system in which different stages of creating a product or service occur across multiple firms, locations, or countries.
• Hyperglobalization: A period of particularly deep international integration of trade, investment, finance, and production, especially from the late twentieth century through the early twenty-first century.
• International Monetary Fund (IMF): An international financial institution concerned primarily with monetary stability, macroeconomic surveillance, technical assistance, and lending to countries experiencing external financial difficulties.
• Market Failure: A situation in which decentralized market activity does not produce an efficient or socially desirable outcome, often because of externalities, monopoly, public goods, or information asymmetries.
• Nearshoring: Moving production or services closer to a company's primary market.
• Neoliberalism: A family of political-economic ideas and policies emphasizing market competition, private enterprise, liberalization, privatization, and reduced direct state control over many forms of economic activity.
• Network Effects: A situation in which a product or platform becomes more valuable as more people use it.
• Platform Capitalism: An economic model in which digital platforms mediate interactions among different groups of users while extracting value from data, transactions, or access to those networks.
• Privatization: The transfer of publicly owned enterprises, assets, or services toward private ownership or management.
• Racial Capitalism: A framework examining how processes of capital accumulation have historically developed alongside systems of racial hierarchy and differentiated labor.
• Regional Trade Agreement (RTA): An agreement among countries that reduces trade barriers and establishes rules governing economic exchange among members.
• Remittances: Money sent by migrants or workers to households or communities, often across national borders.
• Structural Adjustment: Economic reforms, often associated historically with IMF or World Bank lending, involving measures such as fiscal reform, privatization, liberalization, and reductions in state expenditures or subsidies.
• Surveillance Capitalism: Zuboff's term for an economic logic based on collecting behavioral data and transforming it into commercially valuable predictions or interventions.
• Trade Creation: A shift toward purchasing from a more efficient producer because a trade agreement reduces barriers.
• Trade Diversion: A shift away from a more efficient outside producer toward a less efficient producer receiving preferential treatment inside a trade agreement.
• Washington Consensus: A term originally coined by John Williamson for a set of market-oriented reforms widely supported by Washington-based economic institutions during the late twentieth century.
• World Bank: A group of international development institutions providing financing, technical assistance, research, and other support for economic development and poverty reduction.
• World Trade Organization (WTO): The international organization providing a framework for multilateral trade agreements, negotiations, monitoring, and dispute settlement.