A few weeks ago, at a campaign event in Georgia, Donald Trump unveiled his latest scheme to bring back the glory days of American manufacturing. Under his next presidency, he explained, the United States would “steal” jobs from other countries by creating “special zones of federal land with ultra-low taxes and regulations,” which would be “ideal spots for relocating entire industries” from overseas.
Special economic zones, where governments relax certain taxes and domestic laws in the hopes of luring factories, are nothing new. Hundreds already exist in the United States for the narrow purpose of sparing exporters from customs duties. Many thousands more can be found elsewhere around the world, in large part because poorer nations have for decades leaned hard on them as a tool to attract business. In the days before the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico’s government jump-started its industrial sector by setting up tariff-free maquiladoras along the border with Texas to make goods destined for the United States. Today, deep in the jungle of Laos, you can find the more extreme example of Boten — a whole town run by a Chinese corporation where the clocks are set to Beijing time.
The history of such locales is detailed vividly in “The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World,” a slightly heady but very worthwhile new book by the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. In it, she explores the “fractured atlas” of places that help the international rich bend globalization to their advantage, often by making it possible to do business within a country without being subjected to its laws.
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