Serving Whose Interests?: The Political Economy of Trade in Services Agreements

by Kelsey; Jane

• ISBN13: 9780415448222
• ISBN10: 0415448220
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2008-08-19
• Publisher: Cavendish Pub Ltd

Summary

Services permeate almost every moment of our daily lives, whether they are social services such as education, media and midwifery, or inputs to capitalist production such as finance, transport, energy, and telecommunications. Yet they are being purged of their social essence in the name of 'trade' and relegated to commodities in an international marketplace. Serving Whose Interests? explores the political economy of 'trade in services' agreements from a critical legal perspective.

Author Biography

Professor Jane Kelsey specialises in the political economy of law and policy at the University of Auckland

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Abbreviations	p. xii
Introduction: taking services to market	p. 1
Reading the GATS as ideology	p. 22
GATS 2000: going nowhere in a hurry	p. 42
FTAs: GATS on steroids	p. 50
How the GATS was won (and lost?)	p. 58
The 'services mafia'	p. 76
Understanding the 'GATS attack'	p. 82
Trade-related development	p. 89
The WDR 2004: making services work for rich companies	p. 104
The closed circuit of summitry	p. 110
The illusion of public services	p. 119
Accounting for PFIs	p. 137
Privatising power in the Philippines	p. 144
Ruling the services infrastructure	p. 152
Gambling on the GATS	p. 174
Public pensions or corporate welfare?	p. 181
Trade in people	p. 189
Call centres - the assembly line of the twenty-first century	p. 206
Taking nurses and soldiers to market	p. 213
Minds and markets	p. 221
The higher education supply chain	p. 241
A counter-convention on cultural diversity	p. 248
Dominion over the earth	p. 255
Wal-Mart rules, OK?	p. 270
The real Cancun	p. 276
Energy wars	p. 284
Confronting 'El Diablo'	p. 302
Gulf accessions: a legal invasion	p. 310
Conclusion: serving whose interests?	p. 318
Notes	p. 327
Bibliography	p. 353
Index	p. 375
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