Event Date: March 15, 2018 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location: FSS 4006, 120 University Private

Presented by CIPS and IPEN
IPEN Speaker Series with Herman Schwartz, University of Virginia

What explains the slowdown in global (and especially rich OECD) growth rates after 1990? The change in corporate profit strategy and industrial structure from the control over physical capital embedded in vertically integrated firms towards profits strategies based on control over intellectual property rights (patent, copyright and brand) embedded in a small number of vertically disintegrated firms has caused a massive concentration of profit into a shrinking number of firms. Profit inequality in turn causes income inequality while hampering productive investment. US and other countries’ efforts to reinforce intellectual property rights in trade negotiations after 1986 have contributed to rising profit inequality. The inability to create an international regime to regulate tax havens in turn inhibits active government fiscal policy, which also slows growth.

Herman Mark Schwartz is a geographically oriented economic historian who finds it congenial to work in a politics department because he studies the constitution of and interaction of state and market power.  He has worked on foreign debt financed, agricultural export led economic development in the 19th century; the development of the global economy since 1500; marketization of the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s; and the global causes and consequences of the American housing bubble.  He is currently working on the political economy of the knowledge economy.