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How finance is a mechanism of social and political domination The 2007–08 credit crisis and the long recession that followed brutally exposed the economic and social costs of financialization. Understanding what lay behind these events, the rise of “fictitious capital” and its opaque logic, is crucial to grasping the social and political conditions under which we live. Yet, for most people, the operations of the financial system remain shrouded in mystery. In this lucid and compelling book, economist Cédric Durand offers a concise and critical introduction to the world of finance, unveiling the truth behind the credit crunch. Fictitious Capital moves beyond moralizing tales about gree...
In contrast to neo-classical mainstream approaches to economics, this innovative Modern 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.
Other Canon Economics: Essays in the Theory and History of Uneven Economic Development brings together key essays on development economics from one of the most prolific and important development economists and historians of economic policy today. Erik S. Reinert argues through essays ranging from 1994 to 2020 that neo-classical economics damages developing countries, mostly via adherence to the theory of comparative advantage. Based on a long intellectual tradition, started by the Italian economists Giovanni Botero (1589) and Antonio Serra (1613), Reinert shows that the country which trades increasing returns goods – e.g. high-end manufacture – has advantages over the country which trades diminishing returns goods – e.g. commodities. This has important implications for today’s development strategies that, Reinert argues, should be seen as industrial strategies.
In the two largest countries in South America, successive waves of structural reforms adopted in the name of development invariably have ended in disappointment. The promise of development never seems to materialize. Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentinaexamines why. Instead of looking for policy failures, F. Antunes de Oliveira’s focus is on the parameters of the public debate about “development” itself. An unfruitful dispute between neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism has dominated Brazilian and Argentine political economy debates to the detriment of both countries. Antunes de Oliveira presents a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the neoliberal and neodevelopmentalist structural reform cycles in Brazil and Argentina and applies insights from dependency theory to craft an alternative political economy framework for the analysis of development challenges.
African Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century: Theories, Perspectives, and Issues edited by Emeka C. Iloh, Ernest T. Aniche, and Stephen N. Azom fills the gap in the discourses on African political economy from an African perspective. Since the end of colonialism in the second half of the twenty-first century, a wide-ranging debate has opened on the future of African development and the nature and character of its political economy, especially as it concerns its web of relationships in the international political and economic system. Two decades into the twenty-first21st century, the debate still rages on and is likely to continue for a long time. This book contributes to the debate by addressing the important question of how African countries can strategically and tactically approach global political economy at multilateral, continental, and regional levels in view of North-South versus South-South configurations. African Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century further suggests how African countries can effectively utilize global forces to Africa’s advantage in advancing domestic, regional, and continental development objectives.
Since the Global Financial Crisis, economics has been under greater public scrutiny, revealing a crisis in the discipline. This represented a potential turning point on how economics should be thought and taught. Heterodox economics has played a prominent role in these discussions revolving around new economics thinking and pluralism in economics. Yet, its identity, aspirations, and pedagogy remain underexplored, contested, and somewhat opaque. This volume brings together sixteen interviews with leading economists to understand what heterodox economics is. How and why does an economist become heterodox? In which way do heterodox economists see themselves as ‘different’ from mainstream ec...
This book offers an original analysis of global political economy by examining it through the ideas, agency and influence of Raúl Prebisch, one of the most important thinkers, leaders and personalities of the global political economy in the second half of the 20th century. This book offers an important corrective, reintroducing current and future generations of GPE scholars and students to this important body of work and allowing a richer understanding of past and ongoing political struggles.
Today’s middle-income countries tend to be locked in a middle-income trap, unable to transition to higher income levels due to rising costs and declining competitiveness. While there is a broad consensus that upgrading these economies towards innovation-led growth is imperative, countless institutional and political economy obstacles remain. This book brings together analytical perspectives from comparative political economy, innovation studies, and development economics for the study of technological upgrading. Its distinctive contribution is the development of an innovative theoretical framework, named upgrading regimes, combining and extending the comparative capitalism and innovation system perspectives. It explores the usefulness of this approach by providing an indepth assessment of the political economy of upgrading in Brazil under the Workers’ Party governments. As the politics of technological upgrading will be one of the crucial research areas in the years to come, this book promises to become a key reference point in this debate.
This book argues that the lack of adequate theories of contemporary capitalism is due to the increasing separation of the sub-disciplines of Comparative and International Political Economy. Theorizing only takes place in one of the two over-specialized sub-disciplines of Political Economy, thereby leading to a neglect of the interplay between national and international dimensions of capitalism. The author seeks to rectify this gap by developing a theory of Second Image IPE. Based on the “second image” notion developed by Kenneth Waltz, he furthers the classical theoretical approaches as developed by Peter Gourevitch and Peter Katzenstein. For this purpose, he incorporates recent analytical developments in Comparative Capitalism and Growth Model analysis. The book demonstrates the usefulness of Second Image IPE theory by studying the major empirical topics of Global Political Economy, including security, finance, regional integration, trade, production and global order.
Other Canon Economics: Essays in the Theory and History of Uneven Economic Development brings together key essays on development economics from one of the most prolific and important development economists and historians of economic policy today. Erik S. Reinert argues through essays ranging from 1994 to 2020 that neo-classical economics damages developing countries, mostly via adherence to the theory of comparative advantage. Based on a long intellectual tradition, started by the Italian economists Giovanni Botero (1589) and Antonio Serra (1613), Reinert shows that the country which trades increasing returns goods – e.g. high-end manufacture – has advantages over the country which trades diminishing returns goods – e.g. commodities. This has important implications for today’s development strategies that, Reinert argues, should be seen as industrial strategies.