In this episode, I invited Jennifer Bair and  Benjamin Selwyn to share their insights on the World Bank’s 2020 World Development Report. The WDR is the World Bank’s flagship publication, which aims at defining a hegemonic framework for thinking about development. In 2020, the WDR was entitled “Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains”. Jennifer and Benjamin both recently published critical papers on the  WDR 2020: We talk about the methodological and theoretical contradictions of the WDR, what it says about the strange non-death of neoliberalism, but also how the Global Value Chain (GVC) concept can be reclaimed by organized labor at a transnational level.

To access the two papers we discuss:

http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/98024/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0308518X211006718

You can follow Jennifer's work at:

https://twitter.com/BairJenn

https://sociology.as.virginia.edu/people/profile/jlb5md

To follow Benjamin's work:

https://sussex.academia.edu/BenSelwyn

To read more on the topic:

https://monthlyreview.org/2021/11/01/world-development-under-monopoly-capitalism/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12132