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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages Adam Smith's reflections concerning the moral and economic dimensions of business–society relations in the context of the Multinational Corporation (MNC). The paper argues that Smith formulates a pronounced moral criticism of prevailing corporate business practices, which emphasize profit while de facto undermining the moral underpinnings and social cohesion of commercial society. Rather than simply promoting selfish profit maximization by individuals, businesses, and society at large, Smith's work reveals a deeply entangled analysis of the complex interplay between material interests, moral aspects of human behavior, and Smith's overall goal of broad socioeconomic welfare. The balancing of moral and material motivations requires the social embeddedness of economic exchange within normative community frameworks. In this context, the sociopsychological process of moral approbation via Smith's impartial spectator mechanism has the potential to temper humans' tendency for excessive (material) self-love. Smith's scrutiny of internationally active corporations problematizes a range of institutional and governance issues and their implications for the moral bonds between individuals, MNCs, and global society. Most importantly, Smith worries about the potentially negative impact of increasingly anonymous and emotionally distant economic relationships between market participants on their ability to reckon with the moral consequences of their actions. Building on Smith's entangled perspective, the paper proposes a normatively grounded framework to critically contend with contemporary efforts to redefine corporate citizenship in the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops comparative case studies of the Virginia, Somers Isles, and Hudson's Bay Companies' colonies. The analysis uncovers significant historical layering through multifaceted and dynamic modes of production, class relations, corporate governance forms, land ownership schemes, and legal arrangements. Company colonies emerged as hybrid combinations of partially feudal company-owned plantations using white indentured servitude together with proto-capitalist stockholding and freehold land, nascent Black slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and illiberal legislative assemblies oriented to company prerogatives in a largely pre-Westphalian international order. Complex historical layering indicates that no single theoretical approach can fully capture all nuance; thus, the paper mobilizes its case studies to explore critical understandings of these companies through a company-state sovereignty focus, a Marxian view of privatized land and labour, and a Weberian perspective on early capitalist public-private institutional alliances. The paper concludes with connections to contemporary anti-colonial political struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, China emerged as Africa's main partner in digital development. Sino-African cooperation in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector meets African demand for advanced technologies and know-how while helping China to position itself in the global ICT sector. Albeit crucial for Africa's digital development in the short term, this paper argues that the breadth of Sino-African cooperation carries important long-term consequences that could afford China latent control over Africa's digital development. Drawing on Susan Strange's pillars of structural power, this paper considers how the rollout of fiber-optic network cables underpins Chinese control over production, how the construction of data centers might impinge on security, and how research partnerships enhance norms and standards in future innovation—the knowledge pillar. The paper argues that the enabling force of Sino-African cooperation in these three realms is Chinese finance. To test this claim, I conduct a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 42 states in Sub-Saharan Africa, showing that Chinese aid and, to a lesser extent, Chinese loans are the main drivers of Sino-African ties in the ICT sector. The paper concludes that Chinese financial support not only promotes Africa's digital development but also paves the way to Chinese structural power in the ICT sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the great financial crisis of 2007–2009, central banks were handed a macroprudential mandate to contain systemic risks, a mandate seen as endangering their independence due to expected distributional conflicts. At the same time, depoliticization through scientific expertise was largely foreclosed, as systemic risk was a largely undefined concept. This paper focuses on how central banks dealt with this conundrum. It examines the scientific debate on systemic risk and macroprudential regulation post-crisis, focusing on the debate's impact on final regulation. Employing author-topic-modeling on a unique dataset of 2397 published economic papers on the relevant topics, we detect the formation of a new alliance between central bankers and academic economists working jointly on developing systemic risk measures. Centered around a hinge of systemic risk contribution by individual banks, this new alliance expresses itself by incorporating the macroprudential concerns of practitioners into abstract market-based systemic risk measures. These measures develop incrementally, using and repurposing techniques from financial economics pre-crisis to legitimize and justify macroprudential interventions post-crisis. This alliance allows us to account for the incremental change witnessed post-crisis and point to its potential for long-term fundamental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on Global Wealth Chains (GWC) has analysed how value is captured across different segments of offshore financial sector activities. A division of labour has emerged, with financial centres in North America, Europe and East Asia capturing most value out of GWCs while other tax havens remain stuck in low-value GWC segments or in positions of dependency on larger financial centres. This paper analyses how one prominent tax haven (Mauritius) established its position in the GWC while being stuck in low-value GWC segments. The paper analyses both how offshore strategies transformed the country's political economy but also how such strategies shape contemporary vulnerabilities. In the 1980s, with the Mauritian economy in dire need of foreign exchange, the government adopted an offshore strategy. Mauritius' offshore growth has contributed to a vast inflow of foreign exchange for an otherwise import-dependent economy. Offshore has also contributed to social and economic benefits for segments of the population. However, the vulnerabilities and detrimental effects of this strategy are now increasingly visible. As Mauritius' example shows, when countries are locked into low-value GWC segments, tax haven strategies may only be a short-term band-aid, substituting one form of dependency (commodity dependence) for another (offshore finance). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of United States' power in the global economy, suggesting that China's structural power potential vis-à-vis its American counterpart has been underestimated in recent international political economy (IPE) literature. It examines the US-China trade and technological conflict and maps China's autonomy and influence in the global economy, offering a new interpretation of structural power, assessed on the basis of the growing importance of intangible assets in global value chains. The paper focuses on the notion of productive power, expanding on Susan Strange's definition of productive power by breaking down this category of power into four subcategories: 1) centrality in global value chains, 2) market power, 3) ownership of assets, and 4) technological standard-setting. The paper begins by framing the US-China tech and trade confrontation in terms of a relative power contest between the two superpowers. Examining data and literature on China's ascent in the realm of intellectual property protection and commercialization, global value chain ascension, as well as standard setting and competition policy, it points to China's growing strengths in each of these categories, respectively. It concludes that China possesses latent productive power, and that the Made in China 2025 and related industrial policy plans aim to actualize China's structural power potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two recent linked special issues on 'blind spots' in (international) political economy present a welcome challenge: to think more carefully about the topics to which (I)PE pays insufficient attention. I argue in this commentary that while these special issues make a compelling case for incorporating certain topics more centrally into (I)PE, their conceptualization of and approach to identifying 'blind spots' contain unrecognized tensions, ambiguities and exclusions. The special issues also share with most discussions of (I)PE research a consequential failure to treat (I)PE as labour done by humans who are usually university employees facing professional (dis)incentives that influence how and what they study. I conclude with concrete suggestions regarding how (I)PE scholarship might more effectively incorporate understudied topics and perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 financial crisis saw central banks introduce a variety of tools to shore up the financial system, including unconventional measures that made use of central bank balance sheets to directly shape markets. This paper argues that central banks increasingly rely on unconventional tools in noncrisis times to maintain confidence in an unstable financial system: in rich countries, outright asset purchase programs form the core of monetary policy, and in emerging capitalist economies, the sale and purchase of foreign exchange assets constitute the central mechanism of exchange rate policy. These interventions increasingly target 'market dysfunction,' as opposed to (a narrow interpretation of) monetary policy or the level of the exchange rate, suggesting a convergence in central bank operations around maintaining the plumbing of finance. Using two case studies – foreign exchange operations by the Reserve Bank of India and asset purchase programs by the U.S. Federal Reserve – the paper demonstrates a blurring of the boundaries between crisis and noncrisis interventions, and lends evidence to the concept of a de-risking state that guarantees liquidity. The paper concludes with a discussion of how a de-risking state exacerbates inequality, financial vulnerabilities and undermines meaningful action on pressing issues such as climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the consequences of the rise of foreign state-led investment for international politics? Existing research oscillates between a 'geopolitical' and a 'commercial' logic driving this type of investment and remains inconclusive about its wider international reverberations. In this paper, I suggest going beyond this dichotomy by analyzing its systemic consequences. To do so, I conceptually delineate a geoeconomic approach that emphasizes the globalized nature of foreign state investment. I argue that foreign state investment creates system-level patterns, which can be studied by observing similar sectoral and geographic investment behavior. I map this phenomenon globally for the first time, drawing on the largest dataset on foreign state investment. Empirically, I show how foreign state investment is highly concentrated in Europe, North America and East Asia, and is owned by a handful of dominant states. It is especially European geo-industrial clusters that represent the hotspots of such concentration. The findings also suggest that three global industries – energy production, high-tech manufacturing, and transportation and logistics – form the key areas for current and future state-led investment concentration. With these contributions, the paper illuminates the increasing presence of states as owners in the global political economy, and facilitates its study as a geoeconomic phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central banks and finance ministries have been faced with growing calls for better monetary-fiscal coordination in recent years as the solution to an array of macroeconomic policy problems, promoted by an ever-wider range of stakeholders. Yet, how can the silver-bullet solution of coordination be expected to play out across very different political-economic contexts? This paper sheds light on this question by introducing a novel typology of monetary-fiscal coordination that can help us make sense of formal and informal coordination efforts in the post-2008 era. It zooms in on a peculiar but key aspect which monetary and fiscal authorities have sought to achieve coordination on: The fiscal backing of central banks' balance sheets to insure monetary policy against losses and 'insolvency'. To understand central bankers' aversion towards loss-making despite their ability to create currency, the paper develops a political economy account which emphasizes policy-makers' interpretations of their own independence and their desire for fiscal protection, in contrast to traditional accounts of delegation that treat independent agents as discretion-seekers and power-maximizers. The typology is illustrated with case studies of the European Central Bank, Bank of England, and Bank of Japan between 2008 and 2023, each representing a different type of monetary-fiscal coordination post-crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorizes the gendered consequences of refugee dispossession for social reproduction, focusing on Ethiopian refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. We analyze the Kenyan refugee regime as structured by colonial legacies of racialization and by neo-colonial global political economy strategies of managing 'surplus' populations. We demonstrate that refugees' ongoing experiences of interpersonal and structural violence constitutes an attack on their capacity for social reproduction and argue the 'feminization of refugee survival' is an important gendered consequence. We identify two transnational displacements that produce a new form of racialized enclosure and the alienation of refugees from the means of social reproduction. The first transnational displacement occurs due to their dispossession from support infrastructure for social reproduction in their origin country, and in the host country. A second, invisible but racialized transnational displacement is the refusal of global North countries to take on the anticipated welfare costs of refugee social reproduction. Transformative and re-generative approaches to refugee social reproduction would need to address both forms of displacement. The paper thus urges IPE scholarship to recognize that the crisis of refugee social reproduction is not only produced by global capitalist regimes, but also deeply structured by gendered, racialized, and colonial hierarchies of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the 'blind spots in IPE' recently addressed in related Special Issues of Review of International Political Economy and New Political Economy. It identifies a blind spot of law in IPE, tracing the problem to a blind spot in the discipline of international relations (IR) generated by tendencies in dominant theories to consider international law to be super-structural, epiphenomenal, and not worthy of political analysis, and to associations of international law with idealism. The analysis notes an inverse blind spot in international law (IL), wherein legal scholars tend to regard IL as autonomous of politics and the political economy of 'who gets what, when, how'. These blind spots contribute to the neglect of how legal forms function to mystify the political economy of IL, thereby advancing transnational capitalism and inequality. The empirical focus is on transnational contract law, dispute settlement, and value and production chain contracting. These laws function as Capital's law and central pillars of the transnational politico-legal order by reaching deep inside states to restructure domestic spheres according to new constitutionalism and the demands of transnational capital. Drawing on critical political economy, the paper develops a historical materialist analysis to denaturalize and demystify Capital's law. This is a necessary move for scholars interested in the progressive and emancipatory potential of IL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The division of the world into 'developing' and 'developed' countries has grown increasingly problematic in the past decades. Nonetheless, it remains embedded in legal documents, foreign policy discourse, and colloquial use. This paper explores this complexity by unpacking the different ways in which the 'developing' label is used in the international system. It argues that understanding the complexity around its use requires a rigorous analysis of the label's diverse meanings and consequences. This is done by introducing a taxonomy that intersects two elements: (1) the source of the classification (External or Internal) and (2) the kind of hierarchy implied in the classification (Narrow or Broad). This two-by-two matrix generates four approaches in which the 'developing' vs 'developed' dichotomy is used: Technocratic, Elective, Northern Gaze, and Southern Solidarity. Each approach is explored empirically, illustrated by cases connected to international organizations and multilateral treaties. In doing so, the paper teases out the underlying reasons why the use of the dichotomy is so challenging, based on what kinds of contestation it generates, and which actors are pushing for demise or longevity (and where). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conducts a study into the exercise and development of US structural power in the global semiconductor industry and offers a geoeconomics explanation for US dominance in the sector. It emphasizes the role of legal jurisdiction and spatial dimensions of technological development in perpetuating US structural power in global semiconductor value chains. The goal of this paper is to apply the concept of extraterritoriality to the study of structural power; how it is acquired, and how it is used. It explains why we should consider extraterritoriality as a feature of US structural power in International Political Economy (IPE) and suggests three features to help illuminate the concept: Power in global value chains, legal-jurisdictional power, and alliance-based power. The paper first explains how the US acquired the policy tools and leading market position for projecting extraterritorial power in the semiconductor industry during the late twentieth century, how it then utilized its structural privileges to target Chinese technology firms, and finally, the current and potential constraints on its deployment based on the reactions of Chinese and US transnational corporate actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While International Financial Institutions (IFIs) play an increasingly relevant role in post-war countries, the interplay between their interventions and other aspects of post-conflict transitions, such as those related to dealing with the consequences of wartime violence, has not received much attention in the literature. This paper tackles this gap and suggests that, in post-conflict contexts, gendered forms of socioeconomic violence and injustice can be perpetuated through economic reforms led by IFIs. Overlooking justice considerations in post-war economic reforms not only reflects and reinforces a limited understanding of wartime violence and justice issues, but also entrenches gendered forms of socioeconomic injustice that had their roots in the war. A feminist approach to the study of political economy encompassing both gender and socioeconomic justice is adopted here to show how complex and overlapping forms of injustice are supported by wartime and post-war political-economic power structures. To illustrate how and why justice considerations are important for post-war economic reforms, the paper looks at the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and analyses the rationale and gendered effects of economic reforms that reorganized welfare and jobs, and promoted privatisations that accelerated deindustrialisation and economic decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has shown that national language policies can attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and that potential FDI-host countries coordinate their domestic language policies in anticipation of this. While the increased FDI-inflows arising from such language policies may benefit some members of society, these shifts in policy can adversely affect those whose spoken languages are not perceived as beneficial for attracting FDI inflows – primarily indigenous language speakers. This paper develops a theoretical framework to accordingly suggest that FDI inflows have contributed to declines in the usage and protection of indigenous languages in recent decades. This hypothesis is tested on a country-year sample of Latin American countries for the period 1988–2018. In evaluating this hypothesis with the aid of a newly constructed and comprehensive measure of time varying indigenous language usage spanning 20 Latin American countries and 30 years, FDI is determined to be a statistically significant contributor to the decline of indigenous language usage in contemporary Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the US Federal Reserve (Fed)'s landmark 2012 decision to adopt an explicit inflation target for the first time in its history. The paper focuses on explaining the dynamics of this policy shift. The relevant literatures authoritatively establish types of incremental change and the transformative nature of this kind of change. Using the case of the Fed's policy shift, this paper advances a framework for explaining when the likelihood of such change increases, and how 'policy entrepreneurs" strategies can affect this likelihood. Its theoretical discussions are broadly applicable to other techno-political institutions. The paper's evidence comes from previously non-public internal Fed transcripts, and its discussions draw from diverse literatures – on the Fed and central banks, on multilateral economic institutions with similarly techno-political characteristics, historical institutionalism, as well as Macroeconomics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are increasingly surrounded by talk of digitalization. Yet, we remain unsure about what impact this digitalization will have upon socio-economic institutions, how the introduction of this digitalization will be contested, the likely role of the state in managing the adoption of digital technology, and the likely consequences for the broader political economy if and when it is introduced. This article examines the process of digitalization as it has unfolded in the service sector in Japan. Based on qualitative interviews with managers in the hospitality industry and union officials, the paper depicts a process that contrasts starkly with the more optimistic view adopted by some commentators, according to which digitalization has the potential to improve working conditions and contribute to a more stable form of growth. Instead, the paper draws on Regulation Theory to argue that the introduction of digitalization is part of a wider process of neoliberalization. As such, digitalization has contributed to deskilling, the fragmentation of work tasks, a digital divide, the intensification of work, and higher levels of workplace surveillance. This represents a further dismantling of the social compromise that underpinned Japan's earlier period of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the paper titled "'Robin Hood' politics? Turkey missing the chance to adopt a new model in the 1990s," by Anna Leander. The author argues her interpretation which state that coalition government ruling in Turkey missed the chance to formulate new economic regulations. According to the author, Leander's interpretations are flawed and need to be qualified.

Bringing together insights from feminist political economy and everyday financialization, this paper explores the complex nature of women's pension decisions. Women in the UK experience structural constraints originating from a pension system which ignores socially reproductive activities, and they face limitations in pension planning due to prevalent gender norms. Both aspects have a significant impact on women's long-term financial wellbeing and yet little attention has been paid to how they operate within these constraints, ultimately leading to women's behaviors being construed as passive or irrational. Drawing on 61 interviews, our paper conceptualizes pension practices adopted by women through gendered finance rationality, defined as variegated financial practices shaped by the gendered context in which they arise. Rather than being irrational or passive victims of an unequal welfare system, women actively engage with the limitations of the pension system and seek out asset strategies which seem more suited to their life trajectories, but implicitly reinforce gendered wealth inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies research interests, paradigmatic orientation and political involvement among roughly 700 full professors of economics at universities located in German-speaking countries. We collect biographical and institutional information on these professorships to derive indicators for research orientation, paradigmatic stance and political involvement. The main contribution of this paper is empirical; it documents the fairly homogeneous paradigmatic stance of German-speaking academic economics, analyzes the interplay between paradigmatic orientation and the policy process and contributes to a better understanding of the role of economic experts in German economic policymaking. Regarding the latter, we found that a highly asymmetric involvement of (under-represented) pluralist/heterodox perspectives relative to (over-represented) ordoliberal views in policy contexts is characteristic of economic policymaking in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper focuses on the impact of social reproduction patterns on borrowing experiences in everyday life, linking two lines of research within feminist and critical International Political Economy (IPE) literature of the everyday, one on social reproduction and debt, and the other on financial subjectivities. Drawing on interviews with women from indebted households in Istanbul, Turkey, it specifically explores how this impact is reflected in the meanings attached to borrowing and the perceptions of what it entails to be a debtor, thereby generating gendered implications. This article reveals that borrowing from family and friends, once seen as an expression of trust and solidarity, is now associated with financial dependence and humiliation, while borrowing from banks is perceived as a means to achieve self-reliance and self-responsibility. However, these meanings contradict women’s self-identifications as debtors, which are framed in moral terms surrounding the structural necessity of incurring credit-debt for social reproduction. This paper contributes to political economy scholarship by addressing how the everyday lives of the indebted are linked to the broader global financial system, mediated by the specific conditions of a Global South context (Turkey) characterized by subordinate financialization, the political use of credit expansion, and a neoliberal/conservative gender regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany represents a new and unconventional actor in the field of energy foreign policy. Based on its reputation as an energy transition frontrunner, it is pursuing a soft power strategy aimed at promoting its Energiewende policy approach abroad. Germany's bilateral energy partnerships, this paper argues, represent the government's central policy instrument for this purpose. After a discussion of the German energy transition as a soft power resource, the paper provides an in-depth empirical analysis of Germany's bilateral energy partnerships. The paper argues that the partnerships have been deliberately designed as instruments for mobilizing the Energiewende narrative as soft power. Linking it to concepts in the soft power debate, it discusses the main channels through which the partnerships aim to boost the attractiveness of German policy solutions and persuade partners to consider their adoption. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for further research on the international political economy of energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurozone's export-oriented policy regime and pursuit of trade surpluses remains thoroughly puzzling. Rooted in overly strict fiscal policies, inequality and underinvestment; undermining growth and contributing to trade tensions– it defies economic self-interest. This paper develops an analytical framework to confront this puzzle. It argues that these policies are self-harming, but are nonetheless pursued, because of three fallacies that obscure the cost-benefit calculus attached to them. These fallacies are rooted in the empirical problem of observational equivalence: the same observed surplus can be driven by different underlying processes, and its net benefit will depend on our assumptions about these drivers. The first fallacy is mistaking external enablers for domestic competitiveness—interpreting export success to be linked to domestic reform, when it was largely explained by better links to faster growing trading partners. The second fallacy is mistaking weak imports for strong exports—interpreting surpluses as 'winning', even when they are not driven by superior exports but sluggish imports. The third fallacy is mismeasuring multinational firms' contributions to national exports—interpreting profit shifting and assets stashed in low tax jurisdictions as export performance. Germany and Ireland, as paradigmatic 'success cases of austerity', are used to expand the argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Rodney is a household name in IPE. Traditionally, scholars place Rodney in the tradition of dependency theory. More recently, scholars of 'racial capitalism' have identified Rodney as a foundational analyst of the empirical and conceptual relationship of racism and capitalism. However, while Rodney's work is often invoked in contemporary literature, it is rarely discussed. This paper offers a detailed engagement with Rodney's major works and situates them in their broader intellectual context in the history of IPE. In doing so, the paper highlights three major contributions. First, Rodney locates processes of working-class formation within the historical emergence and structural constraints of the capitalist world economy, breaking down conventional divides between domestic and international political economy. Second, Rodney demonstrates the centrality of unfree labor to the extension and reproduction of capitalism on a world scale. Third, Rodney highlights the integral role of race and racism in working-class formation, but stops short of positing these relations as functionally necessary to capitalist reproduction – a nuance which distinguishes him from current fashions. The paper argues that retrieving these three contributions can help renew a critical-historical IPE centered on the development of – and challenges to – working-class power in the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of International Political Economy (IPE) has changed considerably since the inception of the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE). This 30th anniversary editorial reflects on how these changes have impacted the journal's publications over the past ten years. Some trends are promising. RIPE has become more gender inclusive, as the share of women authors in submissions and publications has risen. RIPE has also resisted the 'quantitative' focus inherent within other political science/international relations journals, continuing to publish articles that demonstrate diverse qualitative methodologies (particularly case studies). Some trends are less encouraging. RIPE has struggled to move beyond its Anglo-American base, resulting in a paucity of published authors from institutions within the Global South, and limited articles that exclusively focus on IPE phenomena in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America (although Global South countries feature more heavily within trans-regional studies published by the journal, and have similar levels of coverage as the Global North). We conclude by introducing the RIPE 30th Anniversary Special Feature, a series of contributions by early career and emerging researchers reflecting on the history and future directions of the field of IPE. In commemorating RIPE's 30th anniversary by opening - and continuing to open – its pages to new authors we seek to continue a long tradition and reaffirm the journal's commitment to heterodoxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism has been a core concern for international political economy (IPE) for several decades, but is often ill-defined. Research offering greater definitional clarity stresses the role of contingent and local level factors in diverse processes of neoliberalization. This paper contributes to that literature, addressing a surprising gap in critical IPE knowledge; the management practices by which pressures to activate the unemployed and to make them more competitive, are implemented. The paper suggests that performance management is significant as both a depoliticizing policy coordination mechanism and a highly politicized policy implementation practice. The paper invokes a scalar-relational approach which sees the pressure to innovate and compete at lower scales as driven by the political economy of competitiveness at the system scale. The paper reports on research undertaken within the empirical frame of EU meta-governance, showing how performance management is part of lower-scale attempts to adapt to system-scale pressures. It is neoliberalizing in both form and content. It concludes by showing that while performance management may be a significant component of neoliberalization there is scope for engagement and contestation motivated by egalitarian ideals. Critical IPE scholars interested in contesting neoliberalization should therefore engage with the political economy of management practice as well as policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of international regime complexity that frames this study specifies expectations for international cooperation stemming from different combinations of hierarchy and differentiation among institutions in regime complexes. This paper compares relationships between regional financial arrangements and the International Monetary Fund in the regional complexes for crisis finance in East Asia, Latin America, and the euro area during 2000-2019 and tests these expectations. Creditor states that sit at the nexus between global and regional institutions are particularly influential in the choice of architecture (the combination of hierarchy and differentiation) for these complexes but are constrained by arrangements inherited from previous decades. Once chosen, the complex's architecture in turn shapes policy adjustment in borrowing countries and influences whether states pursue regime shifting or competitive regime creation when dissatisfied with institutions. These findings generally coincide with expectations, but exceed the degree of policy adjustment that the core theory expected for the euro area. Interinstitutional collaboration, the dynamics of which are elaborated, fills this explanatory gap. The paper concludes that relations among institutions are essential for understanding the outcomes and evolution of regime complexes and underpin a more complete explanation than provided by singular institutionalism, the power-gap hypothesis and other alternative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, International Political Economy (IPE) scholars have increasingly turned their attention to cities. However, their primary focus has been on the role of a select few global 'cities' that regulate global flows of capital, goods, and services. Nonetheless, a significant gap in the IPE literature pertains to the limited exploration of how processes of neoliberal globalization are impacting and regulating the low-income 'informal' housing sector in cities located in the global South. To address this gap in the existing IPE literature, this paper critically analyzes the processes of formation and demolition of informal housing settlements against the backdrop of the neoliberal regime of accumulation. Informal housing settlements have been extensively examined by critical geographers and scholars in the field of urban studies. What distinguishes this paper is its unique contribution to the literature on IPE, that is, it utilizes the political economy of informal housing settlements as an entry point to critically analyze social ontology and the inherent contradictions of the postcolonial state. The paper argues that the relationship between informal housing settlements and the postcolonial state can be better understood through the lens of the 'institutional hybridity.' This concept refers to the fusion of contradictory socio-economic and institutional impulses within the postcolonial state, which aims to manage social reproduction and capitalist accumulation simultaneously. The inherent tension between social reproduction and accumulation manifests in the informal housing settlements in the form of a dialectic of 'benevolence-violence.' On one hand, the postcolonial state attempts to appear 'benevolent' towards marginalized groups by 'allowing' them to establish informal housing settlements through a multi-layered network of clientelism. On the other hand, the postcolonial state resorts to violent displacement of marginalized groups as soon as they pose obstacles to real estate-led capitalist accumulation. Thus, the paper contends that IPE scholars should carefully consider the political economy of informal housing settlements, as it provides captivating insights into the mechanisms through which the postcolonial state becomes subject to regulation and is pulled in different directions by the socio-economic forces of neoliberal globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2021, the largest free trade area in the world measured by number of participating countries came into effect. This African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which links 54 countries and 1.3 billion people, is designed to foster rapid economic growth and pull tens of millions of people out of poverty. Despite the fact that this project raises issues central to International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship, major journals in the field including Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) have given it negligible attention. The paper begins by asking why the AfCFTA has remained at best, marginal, and at worst, absent in the IPE literature. Drawing on the critical and postcolonial literature in the field to address this question, the paper identifies IPE's Eurocentrism as the root cause of the discipline's oversight of the continent. After uncovering the implications and costs of this oversight, the paper discusses the insights that emerge from a close consideration of the AfCFTA, including the Pan-African ideology which undergirds the project and insights that contribute to the literature on regionalism. Highlighting the implications of both the AfCFTA and the analysis, the paper additionally discusses the promises and challenges in the future trajectory of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial liberalization has noticeably reduced the role of the state in effectively influencing the economy in post-developmental states. Yet many studies have found that the legacies of the developmental model continue to influence the policies, institutions, and socioeconomic challenges that are faced by the states that previously adopted the model. These studies, however, do not clearly identify when and how such legacies may be manifested in state behavior. This paper contributes to filling this gap in the literature by arguing that financial crises can serve as a trigger to more clearly reveal the structural evidence of the legacy in institutions that were previously established and utilized for developmental objectives. By conducting a rigorous case analysis using historical and market data on the crisis responses of South Korea's public pension fund, this paper finds that South Korea's developmental legacy remains passively embedded in the governance structure of the pension fund in non-crisis times but manifests during financial crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tackles one of the most recent issues in international and comparative political economy: the process of state financialization. Although research on global financial markets has revealed that states play a crucial role in private sector financialization, until recently, much less attention has been paid to state financialization itself. This includes both the measurement of cross-country variation and the question of why this process unfolds unevenly across political economies. We propose a perspective that focuses on two areas, the management of public debt and assets, and the various ways in which states are active in financial markets. Bridging material and cultural concepts in political economy, we differentiate between the reliance on financial markets as governance mechanism and the adoption of a sense-making framework grounded in financial economics and the shareholder-value model. We distill four indicators, trace cross-national and inter-temporal developments in 36 European countries since 1990, and explore how far this variation is associated with domestic and international political economic factors. The paper concludes that state and private sector financialization are mutually reinforcing processes. In addition, future research must pay strong attention to the tensions between finance and democracy as well as the distributive consequences of state financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many economies in the Western world have been through a regime shift towards fiscal austerity since the 1970s. Existing scholarship ascribes trends in austerity to globalisation or the influence of a new economic paradigm. This paper develops a different approach by stressing the strategic intervention of central banks in governments' fiscal decisions. It analyses archival documents from the German Federal Cabinet and the Bundesbank Council over more than two decades (1960–1981) and finds that the fiscal regime was shaped by changes in transnational institutions which the central bank used to strategically expand its institutional power within the larger macroeconomic framework. With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, the Bundesbank was able to greatly increase its power resources while the government's powers diminished. The Bundesbank used its new powers to strategically 'overreach' into the fiscal sphere and 'bargain' with the government to achieve fiscal reforms. By shedding light on the interactions of global legal and economic developments and the micro-level strategies of state actors, the paper proposes a more complex view of the role of the state and brings state-actor strategies into our understanding of the grand shifts in economic policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist political economy has illuminated the gendered dimensions of the globalisation of production. Whilst this literature provides essential insights on gendered exploitation in export-oriented industries, women's work in localised labour markets in the Global South remains underexplored. This paper seeks to address this gap by putting into dialogue three bodies of literature – feminist political economy of globalisation, political economy of development in southern Africa and the social reproduction of the everyday. It proposes an integrated conceptual framework to analyse women's working lives and applies it to northern Mozambique. It makes two key findings. First, the lives of those working in localised labour markets are shaped by global capitalism through extreme fragmentation of labour regimes forcing people into multiple precarious forms of work – a process that entails the appropriation of women's productive and reproductive labour. Second, the imperatives of social reproduction shape employment trajectories and expose differentiation among working women, seen for example through gendered constraints to mobility, care obligations and contributions to ceremonies. The implications are that the analysis of women's working lives needs to capture three key aspects: social differentiation among working women, temporal and spatial dynamics of the everyday and the centrality of the reproduction of the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconceptualizes the impact of US finance on European banking as a process of 'extroverted financialisation'. This impact is commonly associated with the rise of 'market-based banking' (MBB). While MBB exposes how commercial banking has been deeply transformed by disintermediation and borrowing from wholesale markets, the concept struggles to capture the distinct imperatives of this process, and its uneven nature. By contrast, the concept of extroverted financialization captures the problems European banks have faced while adapting to US-led financialization. More specifically, the concept portrays the financialization of European banking as an outcome of new funding practices, called liability management (LM), developed in US money markets from the 1960s onwards. I show how this put pressures on European lenders because it allowed US banks to leverage extensively. To catch up, European banks had to improve their access to liquid USD, which forced them to find a way into the Eurodollar markets and into the US money markets. To operate in these markets, they had to gradually implement the practices of LM. This process of extroversion made their own banking models highly fragile and dependent on US money market funding. Despite adopting LM, they could not reduce their structural disadvantages vis-à-vis US banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractFor centuries, international reparations were commonly exacted as a form of victor’s justice after war. Following World War II, however, the bitter legacy of the Treaty of Versailles and West Germany’s compensation of Nazism’s victim shifted this practice, ushering in a novel moral economy of international reparations. Yet, while recent decades have seen increased transnational activism around reparations, as well as interstate aid payments and official apologies, international reparations remain infrequent, and agreements often fail to end financial claims. This paper argues that one explanation for this lackluster record is a central paradox relating to finality. Though international reparations are designed to settle accounts and provide a basis for deeper reconciliation, by opening issues of traumatic memory to public debate, they often achieve the opposite effect and inspire a cascade of further financial claims. As evidence, we examine three cases of international reparations’ occurrence and rejection: Germany’s reparations for Nazi-era crimes, the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) formation following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and reparations negotiated but removed from the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Employing process tracing methods on archival documents, we demonstrate in each case how this paradox helps explain international reparations’ limitations as a practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst growing financial internationalization, public banks are a reemerging mode of financial governance that can serve as a policy tool for counter-cyclical crisis financing, proactive investment (e.g. green finance), or protectionist lending. Yet no systematic studies examine what leads governments to form public banks in the first place, in part due to a lack of data. This paper introduces an original dataset, conceptual framework, and descriptive empirical insights to serve as the basis for future research. I discuss contending definitions of public banks to advance the more targeted conceptualization of 'government-initiated public banks' (G-Pubs), or banks that are formed by governments and remain under government control through ownership and/or management. The dataset includes 1,355 banks and spans 195 countries for the period 1401–2020. Using these data, I test prevailing assumptions suggesting G-Pubs are more likely to form in less developed or more autocratic countries. I show that for the period 1970–2020, G-Pub formation is instead associated with developed democracies. Descriptive analysis prior to the 1970s further supports a more complex view. These findings underscore the need for a renewed research agenda on public banking that considers both domestic and international political economic dynamics, including international diffusion, financial integration, and crisis mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWhile states have accelerated the energy transition in some sectors, they have also obstructed fossil phase-out in other sectors. Aviation has an outsized and rapidly growing climate impact, and associated policy decisions have perpetuated fossil fuel use. Since aviation is dependent on high energy density that only fossil fuels can (currently) provide, the industry faces fundamental constraints to green its capital. Yet, the industry does not operate in isolation. In this paper, we show how the state performs a variety of roles that benefit from and support aviation, creating conflicts with the state’s climate targets. We analyze state–industry relations as they relate to the emergence of air transport and its ongoing carbon-dependent formulations. Combining a relational account of the state and the method of critical problem-solving, we characterize the roles of the state vis-à-vis the industry as owner, sponsor and customer and point to strategies of how the associated capacities can be leveraged to drive fossil phase-out in aviation. Since a rapid and comprehensive phase-out of fossil fuels is required for climate stabilization, we argue that political economists can make important contributions by focusing on the socio-material relations that constrain state agency to phase-out fossil fuels in specific sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Piketty argues that the vote for the left in France, the UK and the USA tends increasingly to be associated with a high education level whereas a traditional class- or income-based divide separated left from right individuals in the 1950s and 1960s. The current situation would be characterised by a dominance of 'elites' in left and right constituencies: financially rich elites vote for the right (merchant right), high-education elites vote for the left (brahmin left). Using ISSP data for 17 countries, this paper tests the influence of income and education inequalities on political leaning and a variety of policy preferences: the support for redistribution, for investment in public education, for globalisation and immigration. Results show that income levels are still relevant for the left-right divide, but the influence differs across education levels. Our findings also point to a certain convergence of opinion among the Brahmin left and the merchant right, which could lead to a new political divide beyond the left and the right, uniting a bloc bourgeois. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to the recent growth models debate through a cross-country analysis of growth drivers before and after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). It argues that the widely used dichotomy of export-led versus (debt-financed) consumption-led growth has lost its usefulness since the GFC. Specifically, identifying growth models through growth contributions can give misleading results when the drivers of economic growth change. The paper contends that Comparative Political Economy (CPE) has neglected the unstable nature of financial growth drivers, effectively ignores fiscal policy, and overemphasizes price competitiveness as a growth driver. It shows empirically that, first, debt-financed growth is cyclical and financial booms come with busts and debt overhang; second, post-GFC growth dynamics are strongly shaped by the fiscal policy reaction; third, price competitiveness through wage deflation has played a negligible role in driving growth. We conclude that CPE needs to broaden its analysis of growth drivers in order to understand how the GFC transformed growth models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper sets out to explain why the European Central Bank and the European Commission relaxed their opposition to debt restructuring and fiscal accommodation for Greece in the shift from the first to second adjustment program. Using the findings of the empirical analysis, the paper shows that EU institutions’ repositioning cannot easily be ascribed to the mechanisms that are typically at play in international negotiations, namely exogenous pressures and internalization of new beliefs through persuasion. Instead, the paper argues that a more nuanced and complete explanation of the relaxation of opposition to the change in the program strategy requires taking into account the institutional and temporal dimensions of the Troika negotiations. Specifically, the paper shows that the evolution of European actors’ preferences was shaped by the layering of new crisis management rules into the machinery of the monetary union. Layering allowed political actors in favor of the status quo achieving their preferences under changed external circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances a critical gendered analysis of the ways in which food-producing identities are constructed and mobilized in Trinidad. Utilizing a historical and intersectional feminist lens, it shows how gendered identities and subjectivities both shape and are shaped by the political economy, and are intimately intertwined with race, class, and nation. The research draws on fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2016. Through historical analysis of secondary literature and visual analysis of a billboard campaign that attempted to cultivate 'new' images of farmers and agriculture, it shows how traditional Caribbean identities – informed by distinctive colonial legacies – are both reproduced and reformulated in the contemporary neoliberal era. The paper argues that the construction of food-producing identities is a complex combination of colonial history, positionality, self-making and aspiration, and how actors encounter, experience and engender these has implications for how we understand relations between the state, capital and food producers. It makes three key contributions. Firstly, it enriches Feminist IPE scholarship with an intersectional analysis of situated gendered identities and their relationship to political-economic processes beyond class. Secondly, it highlights the importance of studying peripheralized regions in the global South and applying the insights of their feminist scholars for understanding broader power relations in the Global Political Economy (GPE). Finally, it demonstrates how an intersectional framework can shed light on why local food and agricultural policy plays out in distinct ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent critical studies in International Political Economy (IPE) have engaged with the 'temporal turn' in International Relations. However, outside of postcolonial critiques, this temporal turn in IPE has not considered how subjects share time or how coevalness is produced. This paper explores the problem of coevalness by asking how music produces shared time and plural temporalities. It analyses a collection of experimental electronic music, 4 Women No Cry, arguing that mobilising vulnerabilities through the co-presence of bodies in 'musicking' points towards possibilities for subjectivity beyond the individuated, sovereign, autonomous individual subject and for an intercorporeal subjectivity emerging from the intertwining of material and social relations. This article thus does not offer an 'IPE of music' but rather asserts, via music, a deepening of the critique of temporality and of subjectivity, opening further possibilities for political critique in IPE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amsterdam Rainproof emerged in 2014 to manage the risks posed by a novel environmental hazard threatening European cities: pluvial flooding, locally called cloudbursts. Amsterdam Rainproof's primary policy goal is to enhance Amsterdam's resilience to pluvial flooding. This paper examines the emergence of climate resilience and its execution on the ground in Amsterdam. In so doing, I draw on tools from economic geography – including the role of urban space and inter-scalar state restructuring – to contribute to debates in International Political Economy and the Environment (IPEE) on the relationship between resilience and neoliberal urbanism in global capitalism. I argue that there are inherent tensions between the rhetoric of sustainable urbanization put forth by Amsterdam Rainproof and its reality on the ground, namely that it ineffectively adapts urban spaces to increasing and unpredictable flooding while attempting to manage forms of capital accumulation at the urban scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on development has long underscored the importance of knowledge-based assets and innovation for economic growth and competitiveness. This paper explores an apparent paradox: why did Argentine regulators initially demur in approving the commercialization of genetically-modified (GM) wheat, one of very few products innovated by the country's biotech sector? The answer lies in risk mitigation, but the risks Argentine regulators sought to avoid were not the environmental and health risks typically associated with GM products. Rather, they worried about possible disruptions to agricultural trade if exports were found to be contaminated by an unapproved GM product. I define the kind of risk that Argentine regulators sought to minimize as structural risk—that is, risk issuing from structural constraints a country faces given an unfavorable or dependent position in trade relations. By illuminating how risks emanating from structural constraints particular to Southern states shape regulatory frameworks, this analysis advances our understanding of the Regulatory State of the South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions do high levels of export concentration in a single market generate vulnerability to coercive economic power? This paper investigates that question by examining the experiences of Australian export-oriented industries that lost access to the Chinese market during a sanctions episode beginning in May 2020. Despite China being a dominant and highly valuable export market for many affected industries, the economic – and accordingly political – impacts of sanctions were more modest than anticipated. We argue the reason for this lies in autonomous market adjustments. Theoretically, we extend insights from research on how market dynamics condition the impact of sanctions that generate 'supply shocks' (such as oil embargoes) to the new domain of 'demand shocks', and present a model of the process of responding to unilateral import sanctions from the perspective of target exporters. We argue impacts can be diminished by three mechanisms: reallocation (selling sanctioned products to alternative markets), deflection (circumventing sanctions via intermediaries), and transformation (adjusting production processes to produce and sell different products). Empirically, we document variation in adjustment processes undertaken in nine Australian industries, and explore the conditions under which adjustments are viable depending upon differences in market dynamics across products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing ecological crises such as climate change within the current International Monetary System (IMS) will likely be impossible. International monetary relations are built upon a hierarchy between currencies, which generates structural Core-Periphery imbalances and prevents Peripheral countries from attracting the long-term investments necessary for an ecological transition. While propositions have emerged to reform the IMS in order to address both global imbalances and ecological crises, they typically approach these issues as separate phenomena. In contrast, this paper develops a political ecology of global imbalances to explore how currency hierarchies are constituted and maintained through ecological hierarchies: monetary dominance depends upon the continuous and uneven flow of resources from Peripheral to Core countries. This connection between monetary and ecological hierarchies is particularly visible through the Chimerica relationship, which linked the international dominance of the US dollar to China's coal-powered development. While China is now transitioning away from its Peripheral status by seeking to reconfigure currency and ecological hierarchies to support its own resource-intensive growth, this trend also increases the likelihood of systemic ecological crises. This suggests that the quest for a balanced and green IMS requires a dramatic shift away from the Core-driven imperial modes of production, consumption and living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes an important and unique contribution to the Special Issue by problematizing the neglected role of law in the governance of global supply chains and the hidden costs resulting from this neglect. In Part I we argue that existing efforts within domestic and international law are ineffectual in holding transnational corporations accountable along their supply chains. The turn to private transnational mechanisms of governance, such as arbitration, is a direct response to this governance gap. However, in Part II we criticize international investment law and arbitration for their one-sided nature that privileges corporations over states and civil society. Adopting a critical political economy approach, this paper examines how efforts to address corporate social responsibility through international investment law and arbitration do not substantively uproot dominant ontologies or restructure power relations between corporations, states, and civil societies. Instead, we argue that these reforms contain hidden costs to transparency, participation, and accountability by empowering private transnational governance through arbitration, while further locking-in states to the operations of foreign corporations and the dictates of transnational capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dual emphasis on the benefits of global supply chain integration and private governance to address its ethical gaps have given prominence to an inclusive vision of chains which, this paper argues, drawing on the case of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), has been greatly exaggerated. In the post-war era, SVG built a successful banana industry under a preferential agreement with the EU. When the agreement collapsed under free trade reforms, the burden of finding new forms of reintegration fell on the state and laboring classes. The paper argues that conventional supply chain approaches have adopted a static understanding of the relationship between inclusion and exclusion, overlooking the exclusionary nature of supply chains and placing too much emphasis on assessing the possibilities for private supply chain initiatives to address their negative social and environmental impacts. The effect has been to obscure the centrality of the state and laboring classes in continuing, out of necessity, to confront, manage, and address the many costs that corporations are not willing to pay. It is their centrality to managing the uneven and unpredictable nature of supply chain integration/reintegration, that is often the most hidden of all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]