Pub Date : 2023-06-26DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2225142
Isaac Abotebuno Akolgo
Abstract Since the pioneering role of Kenya’s mobile money service – M-PESA, a consortium of international development agencies, philanthropists, academics, tech corporations and governments – have led an optimistic account of a poverty-eradicating, prosperity-spreading power of financial technology (fintech) in the global South. In contrast, a growing critical IPE literature has demonstrated that the optimistic accounts are broad-brush and misleading. Drawing from recent theorization on digital financialisation and Marxian conceptualization of capital accumulation, this article shifts the focus of the Kenya-centered critical response to Ghana, the second largest mobile money market in Africa. Relying on quantitative data from the Bank of Ghana, and qualitative data from 42 semi-structured interviews, the article provides evidence to show that the mobile money boom in Ghana is underpinned by (1) customer indebtedness from digital microloans, (2) high transaction costs, (3) excessive taxation, and (4) a prevalence of dormant accounts. Collectively, the findings confirm the wider critical literature suggesting that, far from ending poverty and inspiring prosperity, the fintech-financial-inclusion agenda in Africa is opening new frontiers for a sustained and intensified capitalist exploitation of working-class labor in the continent.
{"title":"On the contradictions of Africa’s fintech boom: evidence from Ghana","authors":"Isaac Abotebuno Akolgo","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2225142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2225142","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since the pioneering role of Kenya’s mobile money service – M-PESA, a consortium of international development agencies, philanthropists, academics, tech corporations and governments – have led an optimistic account of a poverty-eradicating, prosperity-spreading power of financial technology (fintech) in the global South. In contrast, a growing critical IPE literature has demonstrated that the optimistic accounts are broad-brush and misleading. Drawing from recent theorization on digital financialisation and Marxian conceptualization of capital accumulation, this article shifts the focus of the Kenya-centered critical response to Ghana, the second largest mobile money market in Africa. Relying on quantitative data from the Bank of Ghana, and qualitative data from 42 semi-structured interviews, the article provides evidence to show that the mobile money boom in Ghana is underpinned by (1) customer indebtedness from digital microloans, (2) high transaction costs, (3) excessive taxation, and (4) a prevalence of dormant accounts. Collectively, the findings confirm the wider critical literature suggesting that, far from ending poverty and inspiring prosperity, the fintech-financial-inclusion agenda in Africa is opening new frontiers for a sustained and intensified capitalist exploitation of working-class labor in the continent.","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45493147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-18DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2208369
Nina Glatzer, Manuel Neumann, F. Müller
{"title":"New constitutionalism across the North-South divide—neoliberalization through development cooperation agreements","authors":"Nina Glatzer, Manuel Neumann, F. Müller","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2208369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2208369","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48656193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2211280
Nikhil Kalyanpur
Abstract Globalization did not negate state power. It changed the toolkit. We expected the norms and incentives of the liberal economic order to push regimes in places like China and Russia to democratize. Instead, authoritarianism appears to be thriving. This article argues that authoritarians have learned how to take advantage of the institutions underpinning globalization for their own illiberal ends. They use courts in major economic powers to negate the effects of international institutions and to target their political competition. They subvert our expectations by repurposing the basic premises of liberalism – predictability and openness. The article demonstrates these claims by examining how the institutions of multiple international economic regimes, which were designed as constraints, have been turned into offensive tools. The findings illustrate that International Political Economy (IPE) scholars need to begin analyzing how governments learned these tactics and whether we can reconcile the contradictions they exploit.
{"title":"An illiberal economic order: commitment mechanisms become tools of authoritarian coercion","authors":"Nikhil Kalyanpur","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2211280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2211280","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Globalization did not negate state power. It changed the toolkit. We expected the norms and incentives of the liberal economic order to push regimes in places like China and Russia to democratize. Instead, authoritarianism appears to be thriving. This article argues that authoritarians have learned how to take advantage of the institutions underpinning globalization for their own illiberal ends. They use courts in major economic powers to negate the effects of international institutions and to target their political competition. They subvert our expectations by repurposing the basic premises of liberalism – predictability and openness. The article demonstrates these claims by examining how the institutions of multiple international economic regimes, which were designed as constraints, have been turned into offensive tools. The findings illustrate that International Political Economy (IPE) scholars need to begin analyzing how governments learned these tactics and whether we can reconcile the contradictions they exploit.","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42427167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-08DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2220268
Jennifer Bair, S. Ponte, Leonard Seabrooke, Duncan Wigan
in recent decades multinational enterprises have developed ways to reorganize production and trade through Global Value chains (GVcs), and to manage assets and liabilities through Global Wealth chains (GWcs). this co-evolution has permitted the hyper-extraction of labor and natural resources through financial and legal technologies, entangling value creation and wealth accumulation. While scholars have separately acknowledged the role that GVcs and GWcs play in generating distributional outcomes, entanglements of production, trade, finance, and law are now so extensive that we need a sharper analytical lens to understand their inter-relations. in pursuit of such a lens, we propose a research agenda focused on chain entanglements. We argue that GVcs and GWcs are not governed by firms as separate or even sequenced processes, but rather that value creation and wealth accumulation strategies are imbricated in ways that merit careful study. We develop a framework for analyzing entangled chains based on two dimensions: 1) the relative importance of intangible versus tangible assets; and 2) the orientation of firm strategy towards value creation or wealth accumulation activities. Drawing on sector-level examples, we see a general trend in GVc-GWc entanglements towards activities that leverage intangible value and assets for wealth accumulation. We also note how labor and civic activism can highlight the failures of extant regulatory and fiscal systems and intervene on distributional struggles along entangled chains.
{"title":"Entangled chains of global value and wealth","authors":"Jennifer Bair, S. Ponte, Leonard Seabrooke, Duncan Wigan","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2220268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2220268","url":null,"abstract":"in recent decades multinational enterprises have developed ways to reorganize production and trade through Global Value chains (GVcs), and to manage assets and liabilities through Global Wealth chains (GWcs). this co-evolution has permitted the hyper-extraction of labor and natural resources through financial and legal technologies, entangling value creation and wealth accumulation. While scholars have separately acknowledged the role that GVcs and GWcs play in generating distributional outcomes, entanglements of production, trade, finance, and law are now so extensive that we need a sharper analytical lens to understand their inter-relations. in pursuit of such a lens, we propose a research agenda focused on chain entanglements. We argue that GVcs and GWcs are not governed by firms as separate or even sequenced processes, but rather that value creation and wealth accumulation strategies are imbricated in ways that merit careful study. We develop a framework for analyzing entangled chains based on two dimensions: 1) the relative importance of intangible versus tangible assets; and 2) the orientation of firm strategy towards value creation or wealth accumulation activities. Drawing on sector-level examples, we see a general trend in GVc-GWc entanglements towards activities that leverage intangible value and assets for wealth accumulation. We also note how labor and civic activism can highlight the failures of extant regulatory and fiscal systems and intervene on distributional struggles along entangled chains.","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42528330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-08eCollection Date: 2024-01-01DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2220088
Aleksandra Piletić
In recent years, a wide range of contributions have sought to conceptualize the emergent effects of platforms on contemporary capitalism(s). One strand of literature has emphasized the novelty of platforms, stressing their disruptive features and proclaiming the rise of a new era - platform/digital capitalism. Another strand has tended to position platforms within the longue durée of capitalist transformation, focusing on the continuities and historical recurrences of platform-led transformations. In contrast to both strands of literature, this paper argues that platforms should be understood as reworking existing, neoliberal institutions from within, engendering a process of hybridization. It builds on the French Régulation approach to trace platform-led transformations in the wage relation and social reproduction. It argues that platforms have consolidated their dominance in the post-2008 financial crisis period by, on the one hand, inserting themselves into neoliberal 'innovations' in labor markets, benefitting from a flexibilized, precaritized and casualized workforce and, on the other, by responding to the neoliberal crisis in social reproduction, and the decades-long privatization, marketization and individualization of reproductive tasks. It explores these dynamics in the context of Amsterdam and Berlin, tracing the hybridization of the neoliberal wage-labor nexus in the context of food delivery, cleaning and care platforms.
{"title":"Continuity or change? Platforms and the hybridization of neoliberal institutional contexts.","authors":"Aleksandra Piletić","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2220088","DOIUrl":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2220088","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In recent years, a wide range of contributions have sought to conceptualize the emergent effects of platforms on contemporary capitalism(s). One strand of literature has emphasized the novelty of platforms, stressing their disruptive features and proclaiming the rise of a new era - platform/digital capitalism. Another strand has tended to position platforms within the <i>longue durée</i> of capitalist transformation, focusing on the continuities and historical recurrences of platform-led transformations. In contrast to both strands of literature, this paper argues that platforms should be understood as reworking existing, neoliberal institutions from within, engendering a process of hybridization. It builds on the French Régulation approach to trace platform-led transformations in the wage relation and social reproduction. It argues that platforms have consolidated their dominance in the post-2008 financial crisis period by, on the one hand, inserting themselves into neoliberal 'innovations' in labor markets, benefitting from a flexibilized, precaritized and casualized workforce and, on the other, by responding to the neoliberal crisis in social reproduction, and the decades-long privatization, marketization and individualization of reproductive tasks. It explores these dynamics in the context of Amsterdam and Berlin, tracing the hybridization of the neoliberal wage-labor nexus in the context of food delivery, cleaning and care platforms.</p>","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10962714/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41352358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-02DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2209914
Karl Yan
Abstract Railway development holds special importance in every major industrialized country. Despite its significance, the wholesale modernization of China’s railway sector only began after the mid-2000s. Against this backdrop, this paper poses three research questions: First, why did China’s high-speed railway (HSR) revolution start in the mid-2000s? Second, which domestic and international factors most decisively shaped the rapid development of China’s HSR industry? Third, can other states replicate the Chinese model? This paper advances the perspective of ‘market-creating states’. Through administrative centralization, the Chinese state created a national HSR market in which state-owned firms and sub- national governments collaborated with the central government to pursue rapid development. In doing so, the Chinese state successfully leapfrogged into the age of HSR, fostered indigenous innovation, and escaped dependency. High-speed rail development serves as a fruitful starting point for understanding the role of a ‘market-creating state’ in managing development in a globalized economy.
{"title":"Market-creating states: rethinking China’s high-speed rail development","authors":"Karl Yan","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2209914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2209914","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Railway development holds special importance in every major industrialized country. Despite its significance, the wholesale modernization of China’s railway sector only began after the mid-2000s. Against this backdrop, this paper poses three research questions: First, why did China’s high-speed railway (HSR) revolution start in the mid-2000s? Second, which domestic and international factors most decisively shaped the rapid development of China’s HSR industry? Third, can other states replicate the Chinese model? This paper advances the perspective of ‘market-creating states’. Through administrative centralization, the Chinese state created a national HSR market in which state-owned firms and sub- national governments collaborated with the central government to pursue rapid development. In doing so, the Chinese state successfully leapfrogged into the age of HSR, fostered indigenous innovation, and escaped dependency. High-speed rail development serves as a fruitful starting point for understanding the role of a ‘market-creating state’ in managing development in a globalized economy.","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47198341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-24DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2205656
Will Bateman, Jens van ’t Klooster
{"title":"The dysfunctional taboo: monetary financing at the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank","authors":"Will Bateman, Jens van ’t Klooster","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2205656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2205656","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43005313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-19DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2200964
M. Anner
{"title":"The contested terrain of global production: collective versus private labor governance on Guatemalan banana plantations","authors":"M. Anner","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2200964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2200964","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44577937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-18DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2208871
Jacob A. Hasselbalch, Matthias Kranke, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya
Abstract The global political economy is organized around the pursuit of economic growth. Yet scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) have been surprisingly slow to address its wide-ranging implications and, thus, to advance debates about post-growth alternatives. The premise of the article is that for IPE to deepen its grasp of the escalation of contemporary socioecological crises both analytically and normatively, it needs to put the growth question front and center. To problematize the pursuit of economic growth from an IPE perspective, we bring together research on green growth, post-growth/degrowth, sustainability transitions and socioecological transformation. More specifically, we develop an analytical framework that revolves around four pathways of reorganization toward socioecological sustainability: (1) modification, (2) substitution, (3) conversion and (4) prefiguration. We use illustrative examples from the plastics and food sectors to show how the post-growth pathways of conversion and prefiguration could interact to trigger change for sustainability. Notably, our discussion reveals that conversion, which requires a strong state for developing post-growth institutions, is the least traveled pathway in both sectors. This insight points to a strategic priority for post-growth proponents and an urgent research agenda for IPE scholars.
{"title":"Organizing for transformation: post-growth in International Political Economy","authors":"Jacob A. Hasselbalch, Matthias Kranke, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2208871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2208871","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The global political economy is organized around the pursuit of economic growth. Yet scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) have been surprisingly slow to address its wide-ranging implications and, thus, to advance debates about post-growth alternatives. The premise of the article is that for IPE to deepen its grasp of the escalation of contemporary socioecological crises both analytically and normatively, it needs to put the growth question front and center. To problematize the pursuit of economic growth from an IPE perspective, we bring together research on green growth, post-growth/degrowth, sustainability transitions and socioecological transformation. More specifically, we develop an analytical framework that revolves around four pathways of reorganization toward socioecological sustainability: (1) modification, (2) substitution, (3) conversion and (4) prefiguration. We use illustrative examples from the plastics and food sectors to show how the post-growth pathways of conversion and prefiguration could interact to trigger change for sustainability. Notably, our discussion reveals that conversion, which requires a strong state for developing post-growth institutions, is the least traveled pathway in both sectors. This insight points to a strategic priority for post-growth proponents and an urgent research agenda for IPE scholars.","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44540315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-18DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2023.2213441
John Y. Taggart, K. Abraham
{"title":"Norm dynamics in a post-hegemonic world: multistakeholder global governance and the end of liberal international order","authors":"John Y. Taggart, K. Abraham","doi":"10.1080/09692290.2023.2213441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2023.2213441","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48121,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Political Economy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48657790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：