Multinational corporations, responding to government regulation, rising labor costs, and other factors, have been picking up stakes and relocating production and assembly plants to domestic jurisdictions or offshore sites with lower costs. For two decades the maquiladoras , or export-processing zones, of Mexico have had their equivalents in Latin America, Asia, and to some extent, Africa. Host countries hope to attract outside investors that will create much-needed jobs in exchange for tax breaks, a nonunionized workforce, and other incentives. Too often, however, the exchange has proved unequal. Most imported factories assemble components produced elsewhere that will be consumed elsewhere and offer no backward or forward linkages with the local economy.
Wages are low, and there is little job security or opportunity for advancement.
What trickles down is often only a trickle. The New Civil War Watson chronicles is being waged with incentives not bullets. Its soldiers are the state and municipal authorities who have gone beyond their traditional mandates to become entrepreneurs for local development. The competition to attract corporate and federal government investment is stiff, and communities that are inexperienced or have not thought the process through, can wake up too late to find they have given away the store in the heat of battle. Tax losses mount, and sometimes the entire operation closes down in a few years as the company departs for greener pastures, leaving behind an empty shell paid for with public funds.