South-South and South-North Economic Exchanges: Does it Matter Who is Exchanging What and with Whom? Omar S. Dahi Hampshire College School of Critical Social Inquiry Amherst, Massachusetts, USA 01002 Tel: +1 413 559 5392 E-mail:
[email protected] Firat Demir1 University of Oklahoma Department of Economics 436 Cate Center I, 308 Cate Center Drive Norman, Oklahoma, USA 73019 Tel: +1 405 325 5844 E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract This article surveys the literature on costs and benefits of South-South vs. South-North economic exchanges. Debates around South-South cooperation in international development in the 1960s to the early 1980s used to mirror the mainstream/heterodox economics divide with the former being critical while the latter seeing it as having the potential for industrial development in the global South. Since the 1990s, the literature has changed in two main ways. First the rise of the Emerging South has both blurred the line of for and against: now criticism and support of South- South cooperation can be found in both the mainstream and heterodox literature. Second, it has opened new themes of inquiry to include not just the traditional modes of inquiry of trade and preferential trading agreements, but also cover technology transfer, financial flows, labor migration, institutions, and environment. We end the review by showing how both the empirical and theoretical literature is exploring the increasing divergence within the South between what we refer to as Emerging South and Rest of South. Keywords: South-South and South-North trade and finance, Neoclassical theory, Heterodox theory, Analytical Political Economy, China JEL codes: B50, F10, F30, O10, O53, O55 1 Corresponding author.