Diasporic Networks and the Offshored Knowledge Economy in the Global South

• In Event: Development, Conflict & Cooperation in the Global South: Bayesian Case Studies

Abstract

Since the 1990s, various developing countries have “leapfrogged” into the exportation of offshored, knowledge-intensive services—yet this phenomenon has received little attention in comparative and international political economy (C/IPE) research. I establish the importance of this development for C/IPE scholarship, and advance a two-step theory concerning the emergence of this export-oriented “knowledge economy” within the Global South. Sustained high-skilled labor migration, I argue, has created transnational networks of high-skilled migrants that can leverage economic diversification opportunities enabled by services offshoring in advanced democracies, and diffuse tacit knowledge needed to harness such opportunities in their home countries. But the prospects for such diaspora-linked actors to engage in collective action with government is also conditioned by the openness of the economic bureaucracy to nascent, non-state influences, bringing advantages to “polycentric” governance systems for diversification into knowledge-based offshoring. Informed by a Bayesian reasoning framework for case study research, I examine the Philippines’, Malaysia’s, and Mexico’s diverging transitions to the global knowledge economy since the 1990s. Apart from illustrating an application of Bayesian process-tracing for C/IPE research, I also explore options for mixing both qualitative and quantitative research strategies in an integrated Bayesian reasoning framework.

Author

• Jerome Patrick Diaz de Rivera Cruz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology