Robert Gilpin
Robert Gilpin is a scholar of International Political Economy and the professor emeritus of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Does the functioning of the world economy tend to concentrate wealth and power, or does it tend to diffuse it?
The parallel existence and mutual interaction of "state" and "market" in the modern world create "political economy"; without both state and market there could be no political economy.
The opposing tendencies of concentration and spread are of little consequence in the liberal model of political economy.
A market is not politically neutral; its existence creates economic power which one actor can use against another.
Structuralism argues that a liberal capitalist world economy tends to preserve or actually increase inequalities between developed and less developed economies.
The competitive nation-state system, with all its capacity for good and evil, is spreading in the Third World and is transforming that world.
Trade is the oldest and most important economic nexus among nations. Indeed, trade along with war ha been central to the evolution of international relations.
The clustering of technological innovation in time and space helps explain both the uneven growth among nations and the rise and decline of hegemonic powers.
Despite its increased dependence on the international economy, America continues to behave as if it were either a closed economy or the leader whom everyone else should automatically follow.
The economic success of the Reagan Administration was largely dependent upon the pyramiding of massive debt and the siphoning of capital from the rest of the world.
Through exploitation of its influence over global financial affairs, the United States has been able to cover the costs of its hegemonic position, preserve a false domestic prosperity, and mask the consequences of its relative political and economic decline.
A prolonged and massive increase in aggregate wealth per capita has taken place over several centuries.
Many critics see international trade as a form of cultural imperialism that must be strictly controlled.
The multinational corporation and international production reflect a world in which capital and technology have become increasingly mobile, while labor has remained relatively immobile.
In short, the elimination of the financial legacy of Reaganomics could force the United States to make some exceptionally difficult choices indeed.
I was certain that I was not a Marxist, but I did believe firmly that a connection between economics and politics existed.
There is a pressing need to integrate the study of international economics with the study of international politics to deepen our comprehension of the forces at work in the world.
The world economy diffuses rather than concentrates wealth.
The historical record suggests that the transition to to a new hegemon has always been attended by what I have elsewhere called hegemonic war.
Liberal economists conceive of societies as black boxes connected by exchange rates; as long as exchange rates are correct, what goes on inside the black box is regarded as not very important.