Rethinking Unequal Exchange

Rethinking Unequal Exchangetraces the structural forces that have created the conditions for the increasing use, production, and circulation of temporary migrant nurses worldwide. Salimah Valiani explores the political economy of health care of three globally important countries in the importing and exporting of temporary migrant nurses: the Philippines, the world's largest supplier of temporary migrant nurses; the United States, the world's largest demander of internationally trained nurses; and Canada, which is both a supplier and a demander of internationally trained nurses. Using a world historical approach, Valiani demonstrates that though nursing and other caring labour is essential to human, social, and economic development, the exploitation of care workers is escalating. Valiani cogently shows how the global integration of nursing labour markets is deepening unequal exchange between the global North and the global South.

Salimah Valiani's study traces the relations underlying international nurse migration from circa 1990 to the present. The richness of her analysis lies in her use of the grand synthesis approach of world historical political economy. Through this approach, Valiani is able to expose the overlapping processes of the global North and the global South that are relevant to the particularities of international nurse migration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries a moment now well-understood to be one of major restructuring and reorganization in the world capitalist economy.