Neoliberal Globalisation/ Economic Growth => Inequality

Question 1

Neoliberal Globalisation/ Economic Growth => Inequality
HPKBC

Answer 1

Global System which takes from those on periphery
- HARVEY shows that neoliberalism is inherently extractive
- PARRY and KASMIR show who suffers and how
- BEAR shows who profits
- COE shows the deep personal toll across generations
- Together, they reveal that neoliberal globalisation doesn’t lift all boats — it builds yachts for a few and leaves many to drown.

Question 2

David Harvey - AG

Answer 2

• ACCUMULATION by Dispossession: Harvey builds on Polanyi by proving how neoliberal “GROWTH” often requires taking: extracting value from the commons, labour, and public services to fuel elite wealth and global capital flows.

Question 3

Harvey Case Studies - FR SAP BWS

Answer 3

• The 2008 global FINANCIAL crisis, triggered by the collapse of speculative housing markets and high-risk financial products, revealed the fragility of neoliberal financial systems.
• RATHER than holding banks and corporations accountable, governments across the U.S. and Europe injected trillions in public funds to bail out failing institutions, stabilise markets, and prevent systemic collapse.
• These bailouts effectively SOCIALISED private losses—transferring the consequences of elite mismanagement onto the public.
• Many countries, including the UK, Spain, Greece, and Ireland, imposed harsh AUSTERITY measures to recover the cost of the bailouts.
• PUBLIC services—healthcare, education, welfare, and infrastructure—were slashed, pensions were cut, and labour protections were rolled back.
• BANKS recovered quickly, executive bonuses resumed, and financial markets rebounded, largely benefiting those who already held capital.
• WORKING people bore the brunt of the recovery effort: job losses, wage stagnation, evictions, and declining public investment in their communities.
• The STATE plays an active role in protecting capital at the expense of the population, turning public funds into a safety net for private accumulation.

Question 4

Jonathan Parry - HDB

Answer 4

• Neoliberalism reconfigures HIERARCHIES within labour markets.
• DEEPENS inequality within labour markets themselves, creating stark divisions between a protected minority and a precarious majority.
• Reshaping labour hierarchies ensures that BENEFITS—like job security, healthcare, and collective bargaining—are reserved for a shrinking elite, while most are rendered disposable, flexible, and invisible within global production systems.

Question 5

Parry Case Studies - BNNKT MCS

Answer 5

• The BHILAI Steel Plant, built with Soviet assistance in the 1950s, symbolised socialist development and provided its workers not just jobs, but state housing, healthcare, pensions, education for children, and civic status.
• These workers were referred to as having NAUKRI—a term that connotes formal, dignified, and secure employment.
• Under NEOLIBERAL restructuring, the plant increasingly relies on contract laborers, many of whom perform the same tasks but under entirely different conditions.
• These workers—doing KAM, or “just work”—lack contracts, benefits, union protection, and legal recourse.
• They are typically employed through THIRD-party contractors, paid much less, and can be dismissed at will.
• Parry explores this MORAL hierarchy - Naukri is associated with citizenship, respectability, and a sense of inclusion in the national project; kam is associated with disposability, instability, and marginalisation.
• Reinforced and re-inscribed CLASS within the same workspace, creating a stark two-tiered workforce.
• This SEGMENTATION is politically useful, suppressing labour solidarity, weakening collective bargaining, and ensuring that only a shrinking elite benefits from economic growth.

Question 6

Sharryn Kasmir - IF

Answer 6

• INVISIBLE Economies of Globalisation: Kasmir shifts the focus from formal labour to informal, gendered, and racialised work — essential but undervalued.
• Globalisation’s FOUNDATIONS rest on a hidden inequality — reinforcing Harvey’s and Parry’s points.

Question 7

Kasmir Case Studies - RPEE

Answer 7

• Expanding RELIANCE on informal, gendered, and racialised work, particularly in the care economy manufactures inequality (not only by dismantling formal labour protections)
• In POST-Industrial U.S., as unionised jobs disappear, more labour is pushed into invisible, low-paid roles—childcare, cleaning, elder care—performed largely by women and migrants.
• These workers are EXCLUDED from the rights, wages, and visibility granted to formal-sector employees, despite playing a central role in sustaining both households and national economies.
• In Kasmir’s analysis, this invisibility is ESSENTIAL to how neoliberalism redistributes insecurity from capital to labour.

Question 8

Laura Bear - TB

Answer 8

• Financial Growth and TEMPORAL Inequality: Bear critiques the morality of trickle-down: it celebrates those who can wait (speculators) and punishes those who can’t (workers).
• Growth under neoliberalism creates a moral economy that BLAMES the poor for their instability.

Question 9

Bear Case Studies - AMCAOS

Answer 9

• Laura Bear documents how UK AUSTERITY policies (2010–2019) led to a 40% cut in local government funding, hollowing out frontline services like housing, social care, and public health.
• Civil servants tasked with “making do” suffered from what Bear calls “MORAL injury,” as they navigated impossible trade-offs, often working unpaid overtime or subsidising state failure from their own pockets—exposing the myth that economic growth benefits all when it relies on institutionalized precarity at the base of the state.
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bear and the LSE COVID and Care Research Group showed how low-income essential workers faced three times the infection risk of higher-income earners, while the UK’s billionaires increased their wealth by over £106 billion between March 2020 and March 2021
• ASSET inflation = Bank of England pumped trillions into the economy through quantitative easing and low interest rates to prevent economic collapse, boosting stock markets and real estate prices
• Billionaires tied to ONLINE retail, logistics, and digital services (like those behind ASOS, Boohoo, Ocado, and Deliveroo) saw huge demand increases
• This SPLIT reality—survival hand-to-mouth for the working poor vs. accumulation through waiting for the wealthy—embodies neoliberal inequality: crises are opportunities for some, and disasters for others, contradicting any notion of trickle-down redistribution.

Question 10

Cati Coe - ESIM

Answer 10

• EMOTIONAL and familial consequences of global labour systems often missed
• Globalisation fractures the SOCIAL fabric — linking back to Polanyi’s original concern about disembedded economies.
• Produces deep emotional and INTERGENERATIONAL harm, particularly in families separated by the search for survival income.
• MIGRATION becomes a strategy to cope with economic precarity, but the human cost is often borne by those who stay behind.

Question 11

Coe Case Studies - GCS DVE

Answer 11

[The Scattered Family (2014)]
- In GHANA, many parents—especially mothers—migrate abroad for domestic or low-paid care work in wealthier countries, sending remittances home as a lifeline.
- CHILDREN are often raised by extended family or in unstable arrangements, experiencing long-term emotional neglect, abandonment, and identity fractures.
- Children SUFFER profound affective dislocation, struggling with resentment, confusion, and loss.

• Global system DEMANDS care labour from the poor to sustain the wealthy, while forcing families to fragment in the process.
• Migrant parents are VALORISED as “providers,” but the relational damage is privatised and made invisible—love is globalized, but unevenly distributed.
• The system ENRICHES others by making survival emotionally costly for the global poor.