ABSTRACT
Many governments in the global periphery, where spatial inequalities are often as stark as the social inequalities, seek to use industrial export processing to redress regional imbalances in development and industrial growth. The geographical impacts of export industrialization on Jamaica’s urban system demonstrate many similarities to Costa Rica, and one crucial difference. This chapter describes the orientation in countries of the global periphery—the minor players in the world economically and industrially, who nonetheless represent the majority of countries. It utilizes the terms export processing zones and free zones as shorthand representing all empirical variations within neoliberal industrial export policy. In most cases, the agricultural processes shown are those associated with neoliberalism’s non-traditional exports, such as hydroponic gardening and cut-flower “factories in the field.” The neoliberal model establishes the basic requirements of a Third World export platform, and these are standard items in the guidebooks.
