Development and Change最新文献

In the period 2000–2019, Peru enjoyed sustained GDP growth and a long period of macroeconomic stability; as a result, poverty was reduced markedly in comparison to the 1980s and early 1990s, when the country faced severe recessions and hyperinflation. This positive economic performance coincided with the implementation of a mainstream macroeconomic framework which, alongside favourable external conditions, allowed for continuous external financing of current account deficits, mainly through foreign direct investment (FDI). Against the background of current debates regarding the resurgence of debt crises and the advocacy of FDI as a way to avoid such crises, this article uses balance of payments and international investment position statistics to assess whether Peru's acquired macroeconomic stability can be deemed sustainable. Drawing on the contributions of the Latin American structuralist school and more recent analyses that have raised concerns, the article shows that Peru's external position has taken on a Ponzi profile, casting doubt on the idea that FDI is a superior way of external financing compared to external debt. It concludes with a discussion of the social and environmental implications of Peru's widely praised macroeconomic framework, highlighting the limits that peripheral economies face when their growth relies excessively on external financing.

Anti-extractivist critique still positions Indigenous people as protagonists of counter-modern political sentiment, whether as opponents of modernity's processes of productive rationalization and economic integration, or as embodying ontologies that reject modernity's conceptual separation of humanity from natural resources. Indigenous anti-extractivism is thus said to represent a rupture of modern politics in that it exceeds politics as we know it. Yet the calculus of modern politics remains central to Indigenous responses to resource extraction, even in social contexts where non-modern ontological suppositions are widely adhered to. This is illustrated through an ethnography of Indigenous mining in the southern Ecuadorean Amazon and national-level electoral data showing the sweeping support of Indigenous people for former leftist President Rafael Correa's ‘neo-extractivist’ programme. This persistent modernity of Indigenous resource politics exposes the fallacy of projecting counter-modern sentiments onto Indigenous peoples.

OPHI and UNDP, Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022: Unpacking Deprivation Bundles to Reduce Multidimensional Poverty. Oxford and New York: Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and United Nations Development Programme, 2022. 39 pp. https://ophi.org.uk/global-mpi-report-2022/

Few questions are more fraught, or more consequential, than the number of people in the world who are poor, and whether that number is rising or falling. There is no shortage of high-profile liberal ideologues who, in recent years, have been happy to claim that global capitalism has managed to drive down the global poverty rate from some 90 per cent at the turn of the 19th century to around 10–15 per cent today. This claim was made perhaps most (in)famously in recent years by Steven Pinker in his 2018 bestselling book Enlightenment Now. Pinker's data and claims about poverty draw heavily on economist Martin Ravallion's work,1 although he notably brushes aside the latter's caveats and methodological caution in favour of burnishing a teleological narrative of inexorable rationalization, enlightenment and progress.

Such claims echo a longer history of optimistic readings of the capacity of neoliberal capitalism to counter poverty2 and are overwhelmingly based on income-threshold measures of extreme poverty that Ravallion and colleagues originally helped to develop and popularize in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Ravallion et al., 1991). This approach to measuring poverty has long been contested (see Wade, 2004). For instance, based on other measures of poverty such as estimates of real wages and data on height and mortality rates, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel (2023) have recently argued that the rise of capitalism has in fact worsened extreme poverty globally.

Such divergent assessments of the level and trajectory of global poverty are possible in part because measuring poverty is slippery business. Analysts must deal with patchy data, alongside thorny methodological and measurement problems, which are ultimately grafted on top of foundationally contested normative and political questions about what exactly poverty entails (see Fischer, 2018). Whether income thresholds are an adequate or meaningful way of understanding and counting poverty, especially on a world–historical scale, is first and foremost a normative question, even though it often masquerades as a technical problem.

Poverty measures are no less contested at lower levels of aggregation, however. They are invariably both objects of political contention and tools of statecraft. Katharina Lenner, for instance, shows how the contested construction of poverty measures in Jordan simultaneously renders poverty intelligible to the state while also ‘obscur[ing] worsening socio-economic situations, and deflect[ing] responsibility for the situation away from government offices’ (Lenner, 202

The debt crises looming in developing countries are being exacerbated by changing debt composition. Declining net foreign exchange earnings have worsened their predicament. As concessional development finance declined, many governments turned to riskier forms of borrowing from international capital markets. Concerted interest rate hikes are supposed to stem inflation; however, given that prices have mainly risen due to supply chain disruptions caused by war, sanctions and pandemic, interest rate increases are likely to trigger more debt crises, much worse than before. Current discourses, for example about China's ‘debt trap’ diplomacy, distract from urgently needed international and national measures to avert the looming debt crises.

Local financial institutions can play a crucial role in reducing income inequalities at the within-country level by promoting inclusive economic growth and development across time and space. This is against a backdrop of increasing financial and economic fragility, to which emerging economies have also been exposed over more recent decades and years. This article adds emerging economy evidence from Brazil to an empirical literature on the income inequality implications of cooperative financial institutions. Panel-data estimations for 2004‒19 reveal that Brazilian credit cooperatives have gone beyond commercial banks in supporting communities that have traditionally been underserved financially. Additionally, the article provides new evidence and insights on credit cooperatives’ resilience in the context of a relatively recent but severe economic crisis in Brazil. The results indicate that credit cooperatives have helped fill gaps in finance and economic opportunity that tend to arise in an emerging economy setting. Furthermore, the contribution of credit cooperatives in filling these gaps is found to be more significant at lower levels of development. These findings add theoretical and, importantly, empirical support to the relationship channel of financial inclusion, which is in line with the optimistic perspective in this debate.

The COVID-19 pandemic motivated calls for the field of development studies to be recast. This article analyses two prominent, future-gazing ‘pandemic papers’ to illustrate salient features of the ascendant trend towards a new ‘global development’ paradigm. By unpacking and interpreting major lines of reasoning put forward by two agenda-setting articles, this contribution appraises how these texts make the case for the future of development studies. Through this analysis, the article questions the core arguments that seek to shift the contours of the discipline, and thus the study of development generally. In making their call to adopt a universalist or global development framework that includes a focus on Europe and North America, the authors of the ‘pandemic papers’ overlook the Southern origins of and justifications for the North‒South framework they seek to overturn. The present article acknowledges the importance of and supports returning to and advancing — rather than jettisoning — the intellectual lineage anchored in non-Truman understandings of development, including as a popular project of Southern emancipation from colonial, imperial and structural subordination. Rather than de-centring the global North‒South framework, it suggests that the analytically more useful way forward is for development studies to (re)centre the global South and use global South theories and lenses to better understand the world economy and the majority world.

The notion of green growth emphasizes environmental and climate policies that make economic activities more sustainable while contributing to higher growth. In developing countries, the ability of such policies to help solve the most pressing economic challenges is essential for green growth to be a viable concept. Notably, current account deficits, foreign exchange shortage and external debt accumulation are serious obstacles to economic development. The analysis in this article therefore approaches green growth from a new perspective. With a focus on energy, the article estimates the impact of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy on the balance-of-payments constrained growth of energy-importing developing and emerging economies. It assumes that their current economic structure otherwise remains the same. Since renewable energy production is more efficient than fossil fuel combustion and reduces import dependence, the energy transition increases the annual balance-of-payments constrained growth rate of the selected countries by up to 2.5 percentage points on average in a scenario from the present until 2050. This means that policies in favour of renewable energy allow those countries to grow faster without accumulating foreign debt or even triggering currency crises. Consequently, staying with the current fossil fuel-based energy system implies missing a significant potential for growth and development.