Hierarchical integration: The dollar economy and the rupee economy

While contemporary globalization makes the world more interconnected, it also reworks and builds on existing cleavages and uneven development. This is an under-researched dimension of the emerging twenty-first century international division of labour. The core question is whether new developments (associated with exports, offshoring and outsourcing) spin off to the majority in the countryside and the urban poor. This article examines the relationship between the dollar economy and the rupee economy in India. It documents the ways in which inequality is built into and sustains India's development. The authors discuss other instances of multi-speed economies and analytics that seek to come to grips with these relations, from combined and uneven development to global value chains. They present three ways of capturing contemporary inequality: asymmetric inclusion, enlargement-and-containment and hierarchical integration, each of which captures different dimensions of inequality. © 2008 Institute of Social Studies.

Duke Scholars

Author Anirudh Krishna Sanford School of Public Policy