英语论文网

The rapid growth of foreign direct investment (FDI) since the early 1990s, generally involving a company from one country making a physical investment into building a factory in another country, has also led to the immense influence of transnational corporations (TNCs). This trend is most notable in the food industry where large corporations dominate the whole supply chain, from the seeds planted in fields through to the production, processing, manufacture, marketing and selling of food to consumers. By 1990, for example, companies from OECD countries controlled 90 percent of the global seed market. Between 1990 and 2001, the foreign sales of the world's largest food-related TNCs rose from US$88.8bn to US$234bn, with total foreign assets rising from US$34bn to a spectacular US$257bn.

The result is a global trading regime subjugated to control by Northern-based TNCs, and a so-called ‘race to the bottom' for workers in developing countries. The liberalisation of capital and trade markets has made it easier for TNCs to operate wherever the conditions are best suited to maximising the return on investments, allowing them to quickly move into countries with cheaper labour or more natural resources to exploit. Entire operations are often transferred into low wage and low tax countries with less environmental or labour protections, or ‘special economic zones' (SEZs) are set up in poorer countries that allow TNCs to operate with exemptions from certain taxes and business regulations. In 2004, 5,000 SEZs worldwide employed around 50 million workers. For many jobseekers in the South, poverty and unemployment force them to accept unhealthy working conditions and insufficient wages, in turn exacerbating the social determinants that lead to ill health. The employment trend in Northern countries is also towards downsized workforces, casual contract labour with less social protection, and increased job insecurity.

The privatisation of health and other essential services, which has gone hand in hand with the neoliberal ideology that still defines the macro-economic system, has also increased the power of transnational corporations based in the North. In most developing countries, market-driven health sector reforms intensified in the late 1990s under policies dubbed the ‘Washington Consensus' (led by the World Bank, IMF, WTO and United States), based on the assumption that government-run services were uneconomical and inefficient. Health insurance schemes flourished alongside a mix of public and private options for healthcare, often producing a two-tiered health system in low- and middle-income countries as a result of packages designed by the World Bank - meaning one for the rich who could afford choice, and a deficient version for the poor.

The effect for those who could not afford user fees or the Bank's ‘best buy' health interventions was often disastrous. In sub-Saharan Africa, primary education levels fell by as much as half between the 1960s and the 1990s, while many diseases of poverty once thought ‘conquered' made a sudden return such as tuberculosis and dengue fever.本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。