Tempo de leitura: 2 minutos
The continued rise in the number of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) is one of the defining characteristics of the world economy after the global financial crash of 2007/8. In 2006, one year before the crisis began, researchers from the International Labor Organization (ILO) counted more than 3,500 zones in more than 130 nations, with around 66 million workers employed in zone factories (Boyenge 2007).
Thirteen years later, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) World Investment Report (WIR), a lead document in international economic development policy, ran with the subtitle Special Economic Zones, and gave the numbers at 5,400 zones in 147 nations, with more than 100 million workers in 2018.
Promoting “greater participation in global value chains” as an antidote to low Gross Domestic Products and low per capita incomes, the WIR expressed pleasure that five hundred more SEZs were in planning, and declared SEZs as the way forward for developing nations seeking to increase foreign direct investment (FDI) and export earnings (UNCTAD 2019: iv).
A year later, the World Bank’s World Development Report 2020 (WDR), subtitled Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains, echoed the same perspective. The WDR championed the global outsourcing of production in SEZs, with the latter lauded as “islands of excellence” where national governments provide “the resources needed” by foreign investors — labor, land, water, electricity, and telecommunications — to operate without the “burdensome rules for business” otherwise present in national laws (World Bank 2020: 6, 46).
Looking back at the historical development of SEZs, the WIR and the WDR are part of a constant “research” promotion for SEZs from World Bank and United Nations agencies, as well as from private sector corporations like KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Such “research” also stood at the cradle of the world’s first SEZ-style program, implemented in the US-dependency Puerto Rico, where the Boston-based consultancy corporation Arthur D. Little (ADL) recommended government subsidies to attract mainland manufacturing capital, with tax and customs holidays, lax labor laws, and government-guaranteed profit margins.
From the 1950s to the 2000s, a constant influx of private consultancy firms, politicians and bureaucrats from postcolonial nations, United Nations agencies, and declining Western imperial powers helped spread the SEZ model across geopolitical divides, feeding the global drive for capital and high profit margins (Neveling 2015a, 2015b).
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Fonte: De Gruyter Brill | Foto: Arquivo
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