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Maquiladoras And Globalization

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According to research by J. Timmons Roberts, Peter Grimes, and Jodie L. Manale a “global restructuring of capitalism since the 1970’s has seen a capital flight from the core to the semi-periphery and periphery, creating ‘New International Division of Labor’ with increasingly complex production taking place in poorer, lower wage nations” (284). With this global restructuring we have seen the outsourcing of pollution intensive-industries to nations (mostly East Asia and Latin America) that do not possess the infrastructure or expensive pollution control devices to create an efficient use of fossil fuels (Grimes, Manale, and Grimes 264,265). The lack of carbon efficiency in their infrastructure, increases the carbon emissions associated in the …show more content…

Scott Frey, a sociologist at the University of Tennessee, uses Maquiladora factories located along the Mexican side of the U.S-Mexico border as examples of EPZs. Maquiladoras are mostly foreign-owned factories using imported materials for export, with more than eighty percent being located in the northern border areas of Mexico. Like many states of the periphery, Mexico has pursued export-oriented industrial policies in order to attract industries. Reports during the 1980s show an increased investment in maquiladoras as U.S pollution abatement costs increased, also, many of the U.S corporations lobbying for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were major polluting industries (Frey 322). In 1986 Mexico entered the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which liberalized trade restrictions in Mexico (Frey 324). The result of this was a dramatic increase in the number of maquiladora factories. In 1985 there were 760 factories, by 1990 after GATT there were 1,818 factories (Frey 325). When NAFTA came into effect in 1994, the number of factories went from 2,138 in 1995 to 3,486 in 2000 (Frey 325). The fifty largest maquiladora companies in Mexico represent a wide variety of nations, including the U.S, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Germany, and Mexico. Of the fifty, only three companies originated in Mexico (Frey 326). Trade liberalization in Mexico has given core nations the opportunity to capitalize on low production costs and lax

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