Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/157785 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Citation: 
[Journal:] New Political Economy [Volume:] 18 [Issue:] 5 [Publisher:] The Bichler and Nitzan Archives [Place:] Toronto [Year:] 2013 [Pages:] 715-747
Publisher: 
The Bichler and Nitzan Archives, Toronto
Abstract: 
Criticism of trade and investment liberalisation (TAIL) in North America has drawn attention to weak economic performance, wage-profit redistribution, social dumping and fiscal pressure on government programmes as evidence that the TAIL regime has failed to deliver on some of its key promises. This criticism has been unable, however, to establish satisfactory conceptual and empirical connections between the dramatic distributional changes witnessed in the TAIL era and the institutional reorganisation of power that the TAIL regime entrenched. This article will undertake a quantitative assessment of the Canadian political economy to see who the main beneficiaries of the TAIL era have been, contrasting returns to labour and to capital in the pre-TAIL and TAIL eras. Employing tools from the capital as power framework, two pictures are painted: the first picture examines broad changes in the distribution of income and the second examines differential business performance. The evidence from this inquiry suggests that although the official purpose of TAIL was to enhance the prosperity of all Canadians, this trade deal actually represented – both in its intentions and consequences – a political-economic transformation written by dominant capital for dominant capital.
Subjects: 
capital as power
differential accumulation
distribution
dominant capital
liberalisation
trade and investment
globalization
URL of the first edition: 
Published Version’s DOI: 
Creative Commons License: 
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Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Accepted Manuscript (Postprint)






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