Ingrid's website
This new article in World Development interrogates how Eurocentrism is reflected in the Economics discipline’s approach to mining as well as in global mining policy. It then puts forward an alternative, South-centered understanding of mining, which is explored through a historical view of the Obuasi mine, which has been mined by AngloGold Ashanti in Ghana since 1897. The article is part of a special issue I’m co-editing on Decolonising Economic Development with Surbhi Kesar.
Along with Florence Dafe, Annina Kaltenbrunner and Iván Weigandi, I’ve written a blog post for the Africa Finance Forum Blog, run by the Making Finance Work for Africa project. In the piece, we draw on our recent research to discuss the potential (and risks) of local-currency debt as vehicles for financing of structural transformation on the continet.
I wrote a new article with Florence Dafe, Annina Kaltenbrunner and Iván Weigandi in Development and Change‘s Forum issue on “Negotiating the Current Debt Crisis in Developing Countries”. Our article was on local currency bond markets in Africa and we drew on both quantitative data and interviews conducted. Here is the abstract:
This article examines the development and implications of local currency bond markets (LCBMs) in African countries in the context of international financial subordination (IFS). Despite the promotion of LCBMs as a solution to debt vulnerability, there is a dearth of research that offers a systematic empirical examination of their actual benefits along with conceptual explanations as to when and why such benefits may or may not materialize. This is especially true for countries at the bottom of the global economic hierarchy. To explore how the subordination in global production and financial systems shapes LCBM development, the article offers an empirical analysis of selected African countries that combines interviews with policy makers, officials and experts with statistical data. The findings suggest that while LCBMs offer some benefits, such as mitigating risks associated with foreign currency debt, their potential is limited by the structural processes created by IFS, such as their dependence on the global financial cycle, the relatively higher costs of this debt and the sustained constraint on macroeconomic policy making. However, there are also domestic factors which shape how these structural constraints are mediated in the context of LCBM development — in particular, historically developed financial structures of developing countries, the political economy of the state and the structure of production. This study thus contributes to the debate about the developmental benefits of domestic debt market development and the emerging research agenda on IFS.
Read the full article here.
I recently contributed to a very interesting symposium curated by Stefan Ouma and Christine Vogt-William: Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: centring intersectionality and social stratification in the journal Critical African Studies. It centered on a discussion of Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s book Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa and includes contributions by Obeng-Odoom himself, the curators, Abena D. Oduro, Tanita J. Lewis, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Sara Stevano, and myself.
I’m very happy to finally have this open access article “Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South” out in the Cambridge Journal of Economics (coauthored with Kai Koddebrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla). I summarize the article in this twitter thread.
Here is the article abstract:
One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from productive economic pursuits. In this paper, we explore these claims of ‘expansion’ and ‘divorce’ based on a longue durée analysis of the link between finance and production in Senegal and Ghana. As such, we de-centre the dominant approach to financialisation. Seen from the South, we argue that although there has been expansion of financial motives and practices the ‘divorce’ between the financial and the productive economy cannot be considered a new empirical phenomenon having occurred during the last decades and even less an epochal shift of the capitalist system. The tendency for finance to neglect the needs of the domestic productive sector has been the structural operation of finance in many parts of the Global South over the last 150 years. Therefore, one cannot put forward a theory of the evolution of finance under capitalism without taking these crucial historical insights into account.
The article is a part of a two-part Special Issue on ‘Financialisation in Developing and Emerging Economies: Manifestations, Drivers and Implications’ in CJE, edited by Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi and Annina Kaltenbrunner. Read their introduction to the first part here.
I had the privelege of publishing a review essay of two books in the most recent issue of Race and Class (2022). I review the important contributions and radical potential of Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020), and outline some ways in which their analyses and frameworks could be expanded along anti-colonial Marxist lines.
Read the full review here.
In April, I had the pleasure of speaking at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) seminar series. I drew on both my research on dependency theory as a research programme and my work on finance in imperialism in Senegal and Ghana (with Kai Koddenbrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla). The talk was chaired by Antonio Andreoni (IIPP), and Sophie Van Huellen (SOAS) was the discussant.
Along with Maria Dyveke Styve and Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, I edited a special issue in Review of African Political Economy on Samir Amin’s work and its relevance for contemporary problems.
You can read our introductory editorial here: Samir Amin and beyond: the enduring relevance of Amin’s approach to political economy. We also wrote a blog post about the issue that you can find here.
I recently published a new article in Community Development, along with Kai Koddenbrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla. In the article, Financial subordination and uneven financialisation in 21st century Africa, we ask how the global process of financialization has unfolded across the continent and what it means for relations of dependence. The empirical analysis of aggregate country data shows that financialization is, at best, an uneven and patchy process in the region, not a general structural shift in the way capital accumulation is organized.
Along with Kai Koddenbrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla, I recently published the pre-print Beyond Financialisation РThe Need for a Longue Dur̩e Understanding of Finance in Imperialism on OSF Preprints. This is part of an ongoing research project we are working on and we welcome any comments on the paper!
Ingrid's website 