ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism instructs Third World governments to deregulate their economies and labor markets in order to attract foreign investors, boost exports, and generate growth. 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. Peripheral countries contain the greatest human needs in the world today, and sound development planning is essential across the spectrum of social concerns. Export processing zones (EPZ) take several forms across countries of the global periphery. These include publicly- and privately-run zones; full scale EPZs and industrial estates, in which only a portion of the new industrial export incentives apply; government-designated sites and dispersed sites at which foreign investors lobby for EPZ status. The chapter utilizes the terms EPZs and free zones as shorthand representing all empirical variations within neoliberal industrial export policy.
