ABSTRACT
As with globalization itself, the debate on international private capital flows has long diverged in content.2 A range of perceptions – from whole-hearted support to outright rejection – has evolved. Many take positions somewhere along the plank that links the two extremes. Others oscillate between one extreme and another depending on political circumstances. To believers, the globalization process has unleashed the transnational productive forces following the flow of consumption capital to every nook and cranny of the world. To critics, global private capital flows have been driven by specific locales and directed to particular locales. Hence, while technological change has made the world increasingly integrated, it has also been disembedding at the same time (see Polanyi 1957).3 On the one hand, information and interactions have increased, and on the other hand, relationships between individuals have become more impersonal. The pattern of international private capital flows, in other words, continues to reproduce unequal relations and accumulation. The power asymmetry between peoples, firms and nations is exacerbated by the widening gap that has emerged with unequal information access (Dicken 1998).
