I recently published a contribution to this interesting paper Bringing Heterodoxy Back into a World of Pessimism (Extractivism Occassional Papers Series 1/2024), edited by Hannes Warnecke-Berger and Luíza Cerioli.
I worte about structuralism and dependency theory, with a focus on how to move forward. You can read my piece here: Re-Considering the Structural in Contemporary Analysis of the Global Political Economy.
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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 published a new open access article – The Hierarchies of Global Finance: An Anti-Disciplinary Research Agenda – with my friend and collaborator Maria Dyveke Styve, in Review of Political Economy.
Here is the abstract:
This article critically assesses the economics discipline’s capacity to capture the structural features and political economy implications of contemporary financial processes in the global South, with a particular focus on South Africa. Delving into the complexities of financial processes in South Africa, the article proposes an alternative, anti-disciplinary framework for understanding drivers and impacts of financial processes. We show how such an approach cannot simply be about adding social or political perspectives to mainstream economics, but rather about interrogating how we think about economic systems themselves, drawing on a variety of theoretical and disciplinary insights. This is about taking an open and holistic approach that centers history, power, structures, and social relations. With an issue such as finance, critical political economy approaches from a variety of disciplines allow us to see that finance cannot be separated from the wider economy or from the social relations it forms part of today and historically. This becomes particularly clear when considering how racial, gender and class relations both impact and are impacted by financial processes in South Africa. We conclude with recommendations for studies of changing financial processes globally and in the global South.
I had the pleasure of contributing a chapter to this exciting book edited by Cristina Fróes de Borja Reis and Tatiana Berringer on South-North Dialogues on Democracy, Development and Sustainability. Each chapter consists of a dialogue between one scholar based in the global South and one in the global North. My conversation was with Cristina Reis on dependency, GVCs and TNCs.
Check out the book here.
I published a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with my co-author Felipe Antunes de Oliveira. The abstract:
Whereas the field of International Political Economy (IPE) included a diversity of voices at its outset, histories of the field tend to marginalize certain contributions – particularly those from the Global South. The endeavor to decolonize IPE offers an opportunity to look back at IPE’s history, re-discover the marginalized voices, and imagine new possible futures. This article engages with contemporary calls to decolonize IPE and proposes an alternative route to do so by recovering dependency theory. We argue that dependency theory can be conceptualized as a peripheral IPE perspective that was committed to thinking from the Global South and to producing politically engaged scholarship just as the field was being formed. The article elaborates on the key tenets of dependency theory, contrasting it with mainstream IPE, and putting it in dialogue with decolonial approaches. To demonstrate the simultaneous non-Eurocentric, anti-colonial, and policy-oriented potential of dependency theory, we recover a foundational moment that disciplinary histories of IPE have forgotten: the 1972 Dakar conference, organized by Samir Amin, with the participation of leading Latin American and African dependency scholars.
I really enjoyed reading & reviewing Margarita Fajardo’s The world that Latin America created with Felipe Antunes de Oliveira. We argue the book makes a major contribution by taking Latin American development debates seriously, but leaves key political questions unresolved. Read the full review here.
Along with Erik Reinert, I’ve published A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development. In contrast to mainstream approaches to economics, this Guide addresses the complex reality of economic development as an inherently uneven process, exploring the ways of theorizing and empirically exploring the mechanisms with which the unevenness manifests itself. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth and poverty, technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, financialization, population, gender, and geography, considering the dynamics of cumulative causations created by the interplay between these factors.
I wrote a new article on decolonizing economics teaching with my collaborator Surbhi Kesar. It’s now open access in Review of International Political Economy, check it out: Standing in the way of rigor? Economics’ meeting with the decolonization agenda.
Here’s the abstract:
This article critically discusses the scope for decolonizing economics teaching. It scrutinizes what it would entail in terms of theory, methods, and pedagogy, and its implications for scholars grappling with issues related to economics teaching. Based on a survey of 498 respondents, it explores how economists across different types of departments (economics/heterodox/non-economics), geographical locations, and identities assess challenges to economics teaching, how they understand the relevance of calls for decolonization, and how they believe economics teaching should be reformed. Based on the survey findings, the article concludes that the field’s emphasis on advancing economics as an objective social science free from political contestations, based on narrow theoretical and methodological frameworks and a privileging of technical training associated with a limited understanding of rigor, likely stands in the way of the decolonization of economics. Indeed, key concepts of the decolonization agenda—centering structural power relations, critically examining the vantage point from which theorization takes place and unpacking the politics of knowledge production—stand in sharp contrast to the current priorities of the economics field as well as key strands of IPE. Finally, the article charts out the challenges that decolonizing economics teaching entails and identifies potential for change.
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 have a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with the fabulous co-author team of Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Koddenbrock and Jeff Powell. The article (open access) outlines a research agenda for understanding international financial subordination by drawing on the heterodox traditions of dependency theory, Marxism, and Post-Keynesianism.
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