Exploring Interconnections
Padmini Swaminathan
MOBILITIES OF LABOUR AND CAPITAL IN ASIA by Preet S. Aulakh and Philip F. Kelly Cambridge University Press, 2020, 275 pp., 895.00
August 2022, volume 46, No 8

Aulakh and Kelly provide readers with a brilliant conceptual framework to situate the themes of interdependent capital and labour mobilities. The choice of Asia is dictated by the latter’s phenomenal economic growth in the last couple of decades, it being both the source and destination of significant new migration corridors, as well as its distinctive institutional arrangements created to regulate these mobilities. Besides mapping the standard forms of capital mobility, the authors emphasize the significant role that remittances play in economic development at both local and national levels in the countries of origin of Asian migrants.

Delineating the forms that capital and labour mobility take, the authors argue that ‘…the mobility of each can have both generative (or enabling) effects on the other, but it can also have disruptive (or disabling) effects’ (p. 4). Capital’s generative ability is discussed in terms of opportunities created for employment at places where capital parks and concentrates itself, while the same mobility could be disruptive in places where erstwhile livelihoods get displaced forcing outmigration. Most papers in the book, however, emphasize the manner in which mobile labour enables processes of capital accumulation even if, at the cost of being controlled and exploited.

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