Search

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]

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]

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]

Building from historical institutionalist contributions, this article explains why domestic regulators implement global rules to govern their banking markets. Although this question is not new, this paper tackles it with a novel approach. It frames regulatory globalization as an inside-out process in which domestic coalitions leverage international soft law's power resources to advance their local agendas. The article highlights how local players utilize Basel's power resources to build state regulatory capacities and market compliance conditions and, subsequently, strengthen those capacities and conditions to prompt regulatory convergence. To test this argument, the author conducts comparative case studies with Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, which challenge the conventional wisdom on rule harmonization. While the literature correlates convergence to externally driven, market-based economies and divergence to state-led, crony economies, case studies show the highest rate of convergence in Brazil's state-led economy and the lowest rate in Chile's market-based economy, with Mexico in between. The article concludes that regulatory politics is an iterative institutional process that does not necessarily coincide with a country's variety of capitalism. It also points out that local policymakers are not merely standard followers but political players who mobilize global resources to further their interests while governing finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the important International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship on the impact of neoliberal marketisation on women in the Global South, the linkages with reproductive and informal work are often neglected, as is its interaction with multi-level varieties of patriarchy. Developing a theoretical framework merging social reproduction theory and varieties of gender regimes, this article examines how women navigate market and non-market pressures during the ongoing processes of Uzbek agrarian marketisation. By applying the concept of domestic and public patriarchy to analyse the gendered practices of food production and reproduction in Uzbekistan, the article unpacks the household-led and state-led forms of dispossession and exploitation of women's work in everyday life and investigates why women's position has not improved as a result of marketisation. The paper contributes to feminist IPE in two ways. By bringing together two strands of gender theories, it explores the link between the institutional and cultural connotation and the economic 'valuation' of women's work. Along these lines, it examines the weaknesses of the policy solutions proposed by the neoliberal development governance in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability has become important in the operation of the global economy and its regulatory structure, leading significant shifts in the way powerful 'lead firms' in global value chains approach sustainability. In this paper, I argue that private, value chain-oriented forms of sustainability governance are not addressing the environmental problems they are putatively designed to solve. Through the analysis of how lead firms stimulate environmental upgrading along their value chains, I show that the mainstreaming of sustainability in business operations has allowed global buyers to accumulate 'green' profits and capital in ways that extract value from suppliers – especially those based in the global South. Drawing from analyses of the wine and coffee value chains, I show how lead firms push the hidden costs of sustainability compliance and related risks upstream towards producers. These processes have important redistributive repercussions as they raise entry barriers for smaller, less organized and/or more marginalized actors. Under the mantle of achieving environmental sustainability, lead firms in value chains stealthily capture value for themselves, while extracting more demands from their suppliers and promoting a further consolidation of their supply base. In the meanwhile, serious environmental challenges remain unaddressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay critically examines the discourse of participation in development finance directed at the poor in the Global South from national and international development agencies. This discourse, often termed financial inclusion, posits the ability of development actors to reach the poor involving them in important economic decisions affecting their lives, provides access to products that improve their material conditions, and ensures their credit worthiness through highly nuanced information technology and social media tools. The paper presents evidence from two ethnographically inspired studies undertaken by the author in India and Kenya to ascertain the ways in which the participatory discourse in finance is understood among societal participants themselves. The paper presents relevant epistemes for analyzing what 'grassroots' actors understand as their participation in development-oriented financial inclusion projects. The study forwards two major conclusions: (1) 'habits of authority' among various development actors thwart effective participation; (2) technology platforms that allow for successive innovations and interconnections from businesses and other organizations encourage financial inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom maintains that democracy promotes market-oriented economic reforms. This paper argues that democracy's effect on economic liberalization hinges on international-systemic factors. To develop this argument, we focus on one important reform issue: capital account liberalization. We hypothesize that the level of financial openness abroad moderates the relationship between democracy and financial policy at home. An open global financial system increases societal support for capital account liberalization and incentivizes democratic leaders to liberalize the capital account. Analyses of country-level panel data demonstrate that democracy is only positively associated with capital account openness when proximate countries maintain open capital markets. Firm-level survey data and an illustrative case study of Argentina provide support for the mechanisms by showing that policy choices abroad influence domestic support for capital account liberalization. Our findings suggest that integrating domestic- and international-level variables in a single framework improves our understanding of the political economy of reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concomitant with globalization, neoliberal tax reforms have spread across the globe since the early 1980s. In many countries, statutory rates, the number of tax brackets, and the incidence of tax allowances have been reduced for income taxes; in the developing world, international liberalization has also been associated with reduced revenues from trade taxes and increased pressures for expansion of the value added tax and income tax revenue intake. Yet, competition for mobile assets and new opportunities for tax avoidance potentially constrains taxation of corporate and personal income. Thus, contemporary conditions create especially severe challenges for the pursuit of greater income equality and enhanced public goods provision in developing nations. The present paper situates this special issue's contributions within the theoretical and empirical literatures that seek to explain contemporary changes in taxation. I argue that we know quite a lot about the tax effects of globalization, domestic politics, and their interaction in rich democracies; we know much less about how international forces and domestic factors influence tax reforms in the developing world. In this context, I highlight how each paper in this volume contributes to our understanding of the impacts of globalization and domestic politics on tax policy choices and, in turn, the challenges and opportunities for revenue mobilization in developing nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the century, writings on globalization were rife with worry that transnational integration will strip states of the ability to direct industrial development. More recent literature suggests that industrial policy is alive and well, if thoroughly reshaped by the changes in the organisation as well as regulation of the economy. This paper contributes to this burgeoning body of research by examining the transformation of industrial policy toward automotive industry in Spain from the start of its integration into the European Economic Community in the 1970s until today. It argues, first, that the claims about globalization restricting the 'policy space' of individual states tend to understate the extent to which policy decisions of developing countries had always been restricted by the international environment. Second, it shows how transnational integration not only takes away certain tools but also helps development of others. To make use of them, however, countries have to restructure their systems of industrial governance to make space for a more regionalized, collaborative, and competence-based instead of firm-based policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is one of the most judicialized dispute settlement systems in international politics. While a general appreciation has developed that the system has worked quite well, research has not paid sufficient attention to the weakest actors in the system. This paper addresses the puzzle of missing cases of least-developed countries initiating WTO dispute settlement procedures. It challenges the existing literature on developing countries in WTO dispute settlement which predominantly focuses on legal capacity and economic interests. The paper provides an argument that the small universe of ‘actionable cases’, the option of free riding and the assessment of the perceived opportunity costs related to other foreign policy priorities better explain the absence of cases. In addition (and somewhat counterintuitively), we argue that the absence of cases is not necessarily bad news and shows how the weakest actors can use the dispute settlement system in a ‘lighter version’ or in indirect ways. The argument is empirically assessed by conducting a case study on four West African cotton-producing countries (C4) and their involvement in dispute settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Warnings that a breakdown in multilateral trade liberalization would bring about an upsurge in protectionist sentiment, the possible collapse of the multilateral trading system and, in the most doomsday of scenarios, the fragmentation of the global economy have been an intrinsic part of trade negotiations since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was first negotiated. What is seldom acknowledged, however, is the role that this language of crisis and collapse--what might be called a 'crisis discourse' --has had on framing trade negotiations and in maintaining forward momentum in the liberalization process. This discourse has played a role in facilitating the kind of institutional development that the GATT and the World Trade Organization (WTO) has undergone--helping to push through bargains among GATT contracting parties and WTO members that have been (and remain) deeply asymmetrical--and driving the trade agenda forward at moments when the institution appears deadlocked; and it has continued to play a role in the current round of negotiations. The aims of the paper are twofold. First, the paper explores the content of the crisis discourse. Second, it examines the way in which the discourse has been deployed as a means of reframing trade negotiations in such a way that the likelihood of their continuation and ultimate conclusion increases. The paper does this by focusing on the collapse and resumption of the negotiations in the wake of the WTO's 2005 Hong Kong ministerial meeting, though the crisis discourse and its intensification at moments of intransigence has been a key feature of trade negotiations since the Allies first sat down to develop a trade architecture in the wartime and early post-war years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the developmental trade-offs involved in multilateral versus regional-bilateral strategies of integration into the international economy. I contrast the regulations that guide policy in the areas of trade, investment, and intellectual property in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in regional-bilateral agreements between the US and developing countries. Both strategies of integration feature similar trade-offs, in that developing countries gain increased market access and opportunities for specialization in exchange for diminished space for use of industrial policy instruments to create new productive capacities. However, the trade-offs are intensified in the case of regional-bilateral agreements: countries receive more market access, but in exchange make significantly deeper concessions regarding the management of inward investment and intellectual policy. I argue that countries whose integration into the international economy is guided by their obligations as members of the WTO still have opportunities to implement industrial strategies that are designed to alter comparative advantages and achieve upward mobility in the international economic order, but the obligations under the regional-bilateral strategy greatly circumscribe these options. The paper thus points to the need for new terms of reference in the debate over ‘policy space’ in the international political economy. In analyzing contemporary development strategies, the most useful contrast is not between the alternatives that countries have under the WTO and the alternatives that countries had in the past under the WTO's predecessors, but between a constraining multilateral environment and even more constraining regional and bilateral environments that condition increased market access on the sacrifice of the very tools that countries have historically used to capture the developmental benefits of integration into the international economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the policy space open to developing countries under the WTO regime. It is apparent that industrial policy options in developing countries are limited by the TRIPs, GATS, TRIMs and SCMs agreements under the WTO. However, policy options are not fully closed, and a narrower range of policies is still available. Focusing particularly on TRIMs, this paper examines the contrasting development of the automotive industries in Thailand and Malaysia, showing the different ways these countries have carved out new industrial policies within the now available policy space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over a third of international trade happens within, rather than between, corporations. This makes establishing transfer prices – the price of transactions within and between related corporations – pivotal, as it defines corporations' tax bills. Tax authorities worldwide follow the OECD transfer pricing guidelines and its accompanying methods for taxing corporations. This despite the guidelines' well-documented weaknesses and even though alternative and potentially simpler methods exist. Existing literature helps explain why the OECD guidelines continue to dominate but not how those in favor of the status quo will go about defending them. We offer a novel, theory-based framework, to explain how supporters of the status quo – the epistemic community – will respond, using a combination of strategies targeting the policy discourse but also policy makers, in an effort to bolster the legitimacy of the OECD guidelines. We use discourse network analysis to study the debate on simplified transfer pricing methods from 1995 to 2018 and the positions of actors engaged. Our data confirms that the epistemic community deploys a hypothesized mix of strategies to ensure the durability of the OECD guidelines and accompanying methods, at the same time undermining the position of alternative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to governance, comparison and evaluation—and evolving at the intersection of economic ideas, interests and institutions—official statistics are far from neutral artifacts in both the global north and south. This article investigates the case of South Africa. Building on primary sources and interviews, I distinguish between three periods in the history of the country's official economic statistics. This history—and the nation's statistical self-presentation—have been shaped by the legacy of apartheid, the construction of the new democratic state, the influence of international standards setters, and heated political struggles in a nation divided along racial and class lines. Although the South African case is unique in many ways, it offers valuable insights into the evolution of official statistics outside of the global north more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims that investors dislike political uncertainty about future policies and value stability in the political environment. We test the validity of this hypothesis by first studying variations in equity flows from global investment funds to emerging markets in periods surrounding elections. Second, we interpret changes in democracy score as another event potentially creating political uncertainty and assess their effects on equity flows. Our results corroborate our hypothesis. They indicate that the period following an election is generally characterized by a fall in equity flows, and that this occurs only where the incumbent is not re-elected, suggesting continuity is valued by investors. We also find that this effect is confined to presidential regimes, a result we interpret as further evidence that potentially radical swings in policy affect investors’ choices. Finally, a decrease in the democracy score implies lower equity flows, while democracy in itself does not affect equity flows, which is consistent with our view that equity funds are vigilant when potentially adverse changes in the political environment arise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Doha Round negotiations at the World Trade Organization have come to a halt. The vast majority of analyses of the (at least temporary) demise of the Doha Round have focused on the lack of the United States and the European Union to reach consensus on the agricultural proposals that were tabled during the round. Relatively little attention has focused on explaining the rationale for why a large part of the developing world would not agree to proposals on the table as well. Many developing country negotiators claim that the potential benefits of the Doha Round were relatively small while the potential costs in terms of a loss of sovereignty to deploy effective development policies were significant. This paper argues that developing countries took a respite from the negotiations because the possible gains from market access were not large enough to trade for giving up domestic policy space for development policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on poverty reduction and social inclusion strategies used in Third World countries. Generic discussion of inclusive liberalism in historical and ideological context; History and core dimensions of poverty reduction strategies, especially in their contemporary expressions in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers of third world countries and their mechanisms of representing poverty and disciplining governance; Comparison of the poverty reduction strategies with Third way social policy.

This paper examines the Lomé Convention, an institutional relationship linking the twelve members of the European Community (EC) with sixtynine countries from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP). The immediate aim of the paper is to take stock of the EC-ACP relationship now that Lomé has been in effect for nearly two decades and has recently been the subject of extensive renegotiations. More broadly, Lomé provides a window on one of the most important processes of the contemporary global system, the growing isolation of large parts of the less developed world from the broader international economy. The paper is divided into three parts. The first describes the major elements of the Lomé relationship: preferential access to the EC market for most ACP exports; a compensation scheme for ACP primary product producers who have suffered short-term declines in their export earnings; and a program of development assistance, including both traditional long-term project grants and, more recently, assistance in coping with immediate problems of structural adjustment. The second part examines the convention from a broader perspective, contrasting the liberal institutionalist perspective on international political economy, which emphasizes the importance of building viable international institutions, with the more critical dominance! dependence perspective. Finally, the paper considers the future prospects of the Lomé relationship in light of the major changes that have occurred in recent years within the European Community and the global economy as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing countries are being confronted with severe fiscal challenges in the global economy. Over the last two decades, governments have been accepting significant reductions in trade taxes to support trade liberalization. This is particularly problematic for developing economies because trade taxes have been a key source of government revenues. In this paper, we investigate the conditions under which international financial institutions (IFIs) successfully assist developing countries with recovering the lost revenue from trade liberalization by implementing various domestic tax reforms. We argue that regime type mediates the effectiveness of IFI assistance in developing economies, after trade reforms have been adopted. More specifically, IFIs will be more effective at assisting authoritarian regimes with domestic tax reforms as a substitute for trade taxes than they will be in poor democracies. Democratically elected leaders inadvertently undermine multilateral assistance with tax reforms because they are more susceptible to middle- and upper-class demands for lower taxes in a competitive global economy. In authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, IFIs such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund tend to be more effective because dictators are likely to experience far fewer political consequences for accepting IFI assistance and implementing tax reform in the global economy than their democratic counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short piece, I return to the articles in this special issue to examine the relationship between the material reality of the concept of BRICs and its symbolic place in the world economy today. Aside from the facts that the BRIC countries have been ready to depart from the Washington consensus on certain key elements (state intervention), while maintaining other aspects (fiscal discipline), there isn't much support for the notion that these countries somehow share specific development strategies. If anything, the papers in this special issue show that these four countries have rather different etiologies of growth. The notion of BRICs, I argue, is thus better apprehended through its symbolic and political dimensions, as an effort by well-placed actors in the financial markets to drum up excitement about investment opportunities, as well as reorient the governance structures of the world economy away from the traditional stronghold of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the origins and trajectory of the Washington Consensus – the ideas associated with the developing countries’ move to free markets in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that the Consensus was a transnational policy paradigm, shaped by both scholarly and political forces (Hall, 1993). At the core of the Consensus was the international financial institutions’ practice of conditionality – making loans to governments in exchange for policy reforms. The Consensus was subsequently weakened by its own unintended consequences, by political forces both within Washington and worldwide and by intellectual changes in the field of economics. However, I argue that the Consensus has yet to encounter any serious rivals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quantitative assessments of ‘country risk’ produced by private rating agencies have become influential among multinational firms considering investment in the developing world. This article considers whether developing countries exhibiting more labour rights violations are associated with higher risk ratings. It draws from existing literature on the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the relationship between labour rights and FDI to illuminate the ways in which labour repression may indicate increased risk for potential investors. It implements a set of time series of cross-sections models for 95 developing countries, from 1985 to 2003. These models present predictors of a long-established risk index, plus an additional latent risk measure created through factor analysis of three separate and distinct risk ratings. Results indicate a consistent association between increased labour rights violations and increased risk ratings. The article extends the analysis to highlight the heterogeneous nature of FDI and possible sector-specific relationships between labour rights and risk ratings. The paper argues that the economic profile of a country may condition the relationship between labour rights and risk ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the wake of frank neo-liberalism, and in the context of rising security fears, ways are being found to provide market liberalism with a more inclusive face. The Poverty Reduction Strategies currently prominent in international development, and Thirdway OECD 'Social Inclusion' policy frames claim common purpose to promote 'opportunity, empowerment and security' for people and places on the peripheries of global economies and societies. They share commitments to global economic integration and openness, market led growth, 'good' and 'joined up' governance, local and social partnerships, and wide-ranging activation of 'capacities'. But the high rhetorical aspirations of liberalism to social 'inclusivity' have so far overreached empirical gains for the poor. Drawing on developing country examples of Poverty Reduction Strategy and public policy in New Zealand's current Labour government, this paper sketches salient features of 'inclusive' liberalism. It critically examines its status as a Polanyian turn within a wider liberal project, which seeks to re-embed and legitimate a liberal social and economic order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recognizing the importance of a wide range of influences on current patterns of globalization in developing countries, this paper focuses on the role played by information technologies of various kinds. It is argued that these technologies are associated with a number of powerful cumulative mechanisms causing some countries to grow rapidly and others to become increasingly marginalized from the global economy. These differential effects of information technology on patterns of globalization are better viewed from the perspective of Myrdal's notion of cumulative causation than from the standpoint of standard economic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up recent calls to further problematize race in international political economy by focusing on money at the frontier of global finance. We draw upon the Black radical tradition's theoretical formulations of racial capitalism, which we bring into dialogue with conceptualizations of money and finance as developed within the critique of political economy. Money is the most supreme and abstract incarnation of wealth and class power, yet it is also suffused with racial and colonial logics of differentiation. To explore this tension, we offer a relational-comparison of two sites of frontier finance, namely cross-border investment and digital financial inclusion in developing countries. We trace the mechanisms through which race affects the operations of money and finance across these two sites. We argue that racialized difference is mobilized and reproduced at three key moments in the construction of investibility at the financial frontier: (1) the re/making of a development 'problem'; (2) the construction of racialized ideal-typical financial subjects; and (3) processes of risk valuation and the legitimation of surveillance, discipline, and extraction. This allows us to characterize the color of money at the financial frontier as a particularly potent and violent combination of the abstractive powers of race and money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Western-led institutions of global governance adapt to global power shifts, the question of which countries dominate, and how, increasingly animates scholarship. Yet while attention has shifted from 'Great' to 'Rising' Powers, the underlying focus on market power has changed little. In this article, we shift the focus to alternative forms of power that developing countries can wield in global governance, specifically in highly technical transnational negotiations. Reconceptualising the notion of 'regulatory capacity', we argue that states can overcome limited market power through socio-technical resources: expertise and professional networks. These resources form the basis through which policy claims become authoritative and they enable emerging state coalitions to influence policy-making. To demonstrate this, we analyse developing countries' involvement in standard-setting for international corporate taxation. Specifically, we study the newly established G20/OECD Inclusive Framework, an experiment where more than 140 jurisdictions participate in negotiations that were previously the preserve of OECD states. Based on unique attendance data and interviews with dozens of participants, we perform a detailed analysis of specific policy decisions, interrogating the extent and sources of developing countries' influence. We find that socio-technical resources allow individuals from lower-income countries to achieve narrow yet significant successes, punching above their weight in global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic analyses of the 2011 protests in Libya often isolate them from the US-led imperialist system and the dynamics of the world market. Drawing on a collection of interviews, archival documents, and secondary sources, this article examines the social imaginaries for Libya's future from the late 1980s. These were largely constructed from ideals of individual freedom, consumerism, and the success story of Dubai. The article demonstrates how these everyday imaginaries of the 'good life' mirrored the gradual reintegration of the Libyan social formation – and its ruling class – into the global capitalist economy during the struggle against US-led imperialism under the threat of war and sanctions. Dissecting the role of these cultural experiences in the Libyan microcosm, the article contributes to the debate on cultural political economy and imperialism in relation to the Global South. It shows the inherent limits to mobilising for political change in the periphery of the world where a framework upholding capitalist modernity emerged as an alternative to socio-economic inequalities and failing infrastructural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some democratic governments prefer a more ambitious and generous development policy than others. These governments hold stronger preferences for realizing the sustainable development goals defined by the UN, including the eradication of poverty, the right to education, the protection of human rights, and the safeguarding of the environment in developing countries. Yet, the extent to which democratic governments can realize their preferred development policies varies significantly. In this article, I analyze the discrepancies between governments' development policy preferences and the level of official development assistance (ODA) they provide. On the theoretical side, I analyze governments' discretion to increase their level of ODA. Specifically, I argue that unified governments that face weak institutional constraints find it easier to transfer their ambitious development policy preferences into higher levels of ODA. On the empirical side, I study the level of ODA in 33 OECD countries over a period of 23 years. Analyzing speeches at the UN General Assembly, I apply an innovative operationalization of governments' concern for global development. My findings support the argument that governments' discretion in domestic politics facilitates an increase of ODA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the relevance of social reproduction as a key analytical lens to interrogate contemporary capitalist processes. Building on insights from distinct theoretical traditions, in this introductory contribution to the special issue in Feminist Global Political Economies of Work we propose social reproduction as a prism to examine labour and work in the Global South from a feminist standpoint. We develop a social reproduction-centred methodology to the study of labour processes and relations, based on combined insights from Feminist IPE (FIPE), Feminist Economics (FE), and Feminist Political Economy of Development (FPED). Insights from these three disciplinary frontiers of feminist work are well-equipped to analyse the complexities of labouring in the Global South and how reproductive dynamics co-constitute the 'everyday' in the global economy in manifold ways. These include relations with the state and ('crisis' of) care provisions; the blending of productive and reproductive temporalities of work across labour processes; the continuum of paid/unpaid work within and beyond the household; and novel global processes of commodification of life and the everyday. In setting the contours of this ambitious agenda, we reflects on the complexity of feminist research methods; on positionality and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that not all preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are alike. Trade agreements between developed and developing countries (North-South PTAs) tend to be characterized by great depth, such that they include chapters for many trade-related regulatory issues, including intellectual property, foreign investment, and investor-state dispute settlement, among other things. In this way, North-South PTAs are thought to be different from South-South PTAs (between developing countries), which are shallower and focus on removing traditional tariff barriers to trade, as opposed to tackling trade-related regulatory issues. However, some developing countries appear to prefer deeper trade agreements, which begs the questions: How deep are South-South PTAs and what explains the variation in their depth? We address these questions using statistical analysis and interviews with current and former trade officials from developing countries. Our findings show that developing countries form deep trade agreements with one another when both are parties to North-South PTAs, as each are familiar and comfortable with the sorts of provisions in deep agreements. Our findings suggest that the formation of deep trade agreements between developing countries reflects socialization into the liberal international order through policy learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen vast sums of money invested in health, education and economic empowerment Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs for women and girls, particularly in the Global South. Feminist scholars of IPE have charted how transnational corporations (TNCs) have partnered with international institutions, donor governments and non-governmental organizations to position themselves as champions of gender equality. There is some debate in the literature over whether this phenomenon constitutes a co-optation or an appropriation of feminism. In this article, I focus on the behavior of TNCs, arguing that it can be conceptualized as 'gender wash.' Drawing on the extensive environmental literature on the 'greenwashing' of corporations' public images, I outline a framework for analyzing CSR as 'gender washing.' Adapting Lyon and Montgomery's summary of the greenwashing literature, I present seven varieties of gender wash – selective disclosure, empty gender claims and policies, dubious certifications and labels, co-opted NGO endorsements and partnerships, ineffective public voluntary programs, misleading narrative and discourse, and misleading branding – giving illustrative examples for each. In doing so, I aim to put forward a useful tool for critiquing contradictory claims made by corporations whose products, business model or employment practices are inherently damaging to women and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many works have examined the variables driving the formation of North-South free trade agreements (FTAs) between developed and developing countries. This study analyzes the determinants shaping their utilization in the contexts of their political economy and of Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) schemes that are unilaterally granted by developed economies to developing countries' exports. Most of the goods liberalized through GSP are liberalized from early on in North-South FTAs; however, since FTA concessions are legally binding, goods that are excluded or only partially liberalized in GSP will be also excluded or protected in FTAs. As GSP schemes are subject to unilateral restriction/elimination by the developed country, exporters using GSP tariffs will lobby for the non-removable liberalization of their exports through an FTA and subsequently will have a high FTA utilization. These scenarios result in North-South FTAs being used to a great extent to export goods covered by and exported through GSP, thus consolidating pre-FTA trade patterns. These arguments were tested by analyzing disaggregated and rarely accessed data on Thailand's and Malaysia's exports through the Japanese GSP and their bilateral FTAs with Japan, as well as interviews with key actors involved in the policymaking of these FTAs. Most sectors in Thailand and Malaysia that benefited from GSP lobbied for FTA liberalization with Japan. Goods previously exported through GSP account for most of FTA utilization and the previous use of GSP preferences has a higher predictive value of subsequent FTA utilization than FTA tariff savings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the international political economy (IPE) literature on global supply chains, there is growing debate about the effectiveness of private global supply chain solutions to address social and environmental problems. Most scholarship takes supply chain solutions at face value, investigating the circumstances under which they are effective, lacking, and how effectiveness could be incrementally improved. These studies have helpfully investigated operational and procedural issues associated with private governance and relationships between stakeholders in standard-setting processes. But the literature often loses sight of broader and more fundamental questions about whether or not private governance initiatives are actually working to solve the problems they've been established to address, like pollution, modern slavery, and global North and South inequalities. In this introduction to the Review of International Political Economy special issue on the hidden costs of global supply chains, we analyse key trends in the effectiveness of private governance solutions, drawing on our literature review of 290 academic journal articles and contributions within this collection. We argue that not only are global supply chain solutions falling short when it comes to many of the indicators that matter most, but they come with hidden costs – including unintended consequences, perverse effects, and unacknowledged impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the power of large technology corporations has become a focus of public debate in both developed and developing countries. This growing chorus brings together complaints about breaches of privacy and data protection, competition and market consolidation, and electoral and other political interference. The most powerful of these companies have grown into behemoths by establishing themselves both as purveyors of their own products, and as the hosts of "platforms" that circumscribe, and profit from, the activities of other organizations. This platform function gives these companies substantial power over their commercial rivals, who depend upon these platforms to operate. More fundamentally, this article argues, the dual function of these "platform companies" allows them to straddle the very categories that we use to organize our understanding of the political and economic world. They are at once product companies, service companies and infrastructure companies; players in the market and markets of the marketplace; private platforms and public spheres. The straddling of these categories places these companies in the institutional cracks of the regulatory system. Moreover, companies consciously exploit this regulatory straddling to thwart challenges to their power. This article argues that such deliberate shape-shifting has allowed these companies to control the political and economic stage on which their own power must be contested, and compromised the ability of scholars, the public and ultimately states to see clearly, and therefore constrain, that power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global risk management (GRM) has become a central organizing framework in global development governance, yet despite its ubiquity, it has received little attention. Relatedly, few scholars have explored the connection between GRM and what has become an influential private international organization, namely: the World Economic Forum (WEF). Contributing to this Special Issue on managerialism, we explore GRM as an emerging development paradigm linked tightly to the WEF. Drawing on a historical materialist lens, we examine how the WEF employs GRM to encourage the role of businesses in the sustainable development goals (SDG)s. We focus on SDG 11, safe, inclusive and resilient cities, or what the WEF refers to as well managed cities. We argue that GRM is as a dynamic, uneven and incomplete strategy that serves to consolidate and normalize the role of business as an active development agent, whilst depoliticizing the social and environmental disruptions tied to this arrangement. In pursuing this argument, we historically trace the rise of GRM within the wider backdrop of global political economy of development before exploring the mismanaged urbanization trope employed by the WEF in the global South, and its proposed managerial solutions embodied in GRM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the oil price collapsed in 2014, debates in oil-producing nations emerged around the importance of doing away with commodity dependence. Modernization plans and developmental projects sprung up among large and small producers alike. Nevertheless, some countries remain dramatically committed to rentier practices, and many in Latin America and Africa have engaged in new forms of resource dependence by expanding their mining frontiers. Further, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, new forms of online payments entered the global political economy and generated discussion among policymakers about the legality and implications of these payment mechanisms. In this article, I explain the linkages of two apparently disconnected forms of mining. Drawing on the case of Venezuela, I argue that the spread of small-scale, irregular and artisanal gold extraction and cryptocurrency mining is the result of the decaying rentier state in crisis. These originally decentralized and irregular activities were later endorsed and transformed by the state with the Orinoco Mining Arc project and the launching of the commodity-backed cryptocurrency, the 'petro'. The state's endorsement of these forms of mining translate into the collateralization of primary commodities and the emergence of new forms of authority in a radicalized form of rentierism connected with global financial circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolution of the sociotechnical systems that is leading to a massive increase in the overall indebtedness of marginalized populations in the Global South. I analyze the processes through which Big Data (or alternative data) technologies are transforming the infrastructure of fringe finance, the nature of its power relations, and its capacities. The article identifies the consequences of these technological transformations on financial practices and illustrates the qualitative nature of the changes involved. I propose that while these innovations have increased the power of this market to capture value, they have also increased risks to indebted populations and the infrastructure's stability. I argue that these financial practices, enhanced by the power of Big Data, have made the infrastructure of fringe finance dangerously hermetic to careful consideration of the productive capacities of those being targeted for inclusion into the formal financial system, thereby making it potentially dysfunctional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global economic governance outcomes in areas such as corporate taxation may be influenced by transnational policy communities acting at national and transnational levels. Yet, while transnational tax policy processes are increasingly analyzed through the politics of expertise, national preferences have usually been derived from domestic interest group preferences. We know little about how technical expertise interacts with interest group politics at national level, an important deficit given the sovereignty-preserving, decentralized way in which transnational tax norms become hard law. This article examines the drivers of expansion of the UK's bilateral tax treaty network in the 1970s, which cannot be explained solely through monolithic interest group politics. Evidence from the British national archives demonstrates how tax experts in the civil service and the private sector, members of a transnational policy community, used tax treaties to impose OECD standards for taxing British firms on host countries, at times overruling the preferences of other political, bureaucratic and business actors. Expertise politics and business power may shape the development of norms and focal points within a transnational policy community, but it is often their interaction at domestic level that determines the implementation of transnational norms as hard law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We map trends of tax policy change in developing countries and transition economies since the 1980s, compare them to tax trends in the advanced Western democracies and review some of the explanations offered by the contributions to this volume. We find that non-Western countries follow the lead of Western countries in some important respects but not in others. While non-Western countries brought their general revenues closer to Western levels and copied important features of Western consumption taxation including higher value added tax revenues and lower revenues from trade taxation, they failed to emulate the hallmark of 20th-century Western taxation: a strong and progressive personal income tax. The taxation trends are closely associated with socio-economic changes (as summarized by GDP per capita) and structural factors (as summarized by country size). Yet the impact of political institutions on taxation is non-linear and complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many developing countries use tax incentives to attract foreign direct investment, sacrificing immediate revenue from foreign capital, even though the effects of tax incentives on investment, growth, and revenue are empirically dubious. This leads to the puzzle of why states adopt tax incentives. Extant studies of tax incentive adoption overlook the fact that many countries have decentralized fiscal authority, allowing subnational governments to offer tax incentives. Public finance scholars argue that fiscal federalism intensifies tax competition among regions. Hence, drawing on the public finance scholarship, one may ask: Does fiscal decentralization lead to a race to the top among subnational governments and an oversupply of tax incentives in a country? This article argues that fiscal decentralization affects tax incentives in complex ways. When subnational governments are authorized to set tax policies, their politicians have economic and political incentives to engage in tax competition for mobile capital, providing more tax incentives in a country. However, the politicians are less likely to do so if they are held accountable and have to fund most expenditures through own-source tax revenues. An empirical analysis of over 50 developing countries in early 2000s produces robust supporting evidence. This research challenges both the view that fiscal decentralization is always beneficial and the view that horizontal competition invariably produces inefficiently low tax rates. The impact of fiscal decentralization on tax incentives and by implication, revenue mobilization depends on the design of the central–local government relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Staff play a key part in designing IMF conditionality, and yet the literature provides a narrow view of their motivations. This article shows how the design of IMF conditionality is linked to the normative orientations of the staff and their common professional training. Professional ties from similar training help to bind the staff together around a shared set of normative orientations that inform the IMF's policy goals. When borrowing-country officials do not share these orientations, the staff are motivated to tighten conditionality. This behaviour also fits with staff concerns about time-inconsistency and moral hazard. I find robust statistical support for this argument using a dataset based on the professional ties that exist between the IMF staff and borrowing-country officials. Yet conditionality is not found to be more lenient when country officials share the normative orientations of the IMF staff. Staff concerns about time-inconsistent preferences and moral hazard likely weigh against more lenient treatment where normative adherence is stronger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pace of financial globalization across the developing world grew rapidly after developing country governments started reducing restrictions on foreign ownership of domestic equities. Studies suggest that the emergence of democracy in developing states played a critical role in facilitating the reduction of controls on foreign investment in domestic equities. Yet, the data reveals that although some developing country democracies have curtailed equity market restrictions, a significant share of developing democracies have increased barriers on foreign ownership of domestic equities. This raises an important question: when do democratic governments in the developing world raise restrictions on foreign ownership of the equities of domestic firms? We suggest that policymakers in candidate-centred developing democracies will increase equity market restrictions in response to pressure from market concentrated public sector banks. Specifically, we claim that highly market concentrated public banks have incentives and the capacity to lobby policymakers to keep the domestic equity market closed to foreign investors. We then argue that policymakers from candidate-centred—but not party-centred—developing democracies have political incentives to be responsive to such pressure, which will induce them to raise barriers on foreign ownership of domestic equities. Statistical results obtained from a comprehensive sample of developing country democracies support our hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In less developed countries, the higher individuals’ labor skills are, the more they support free trade. This recurrent statistical finding is problematic for extant analytical models used to explain and interpret people's positions on free trade. This article proposes an analytical framework that challenges the dominant full-information factor-endowment approach to public opinion on free trade. The dominant approach assumes informed individuals who relate expectations about how free trade will affect them to their work skills. We propose that most individuals lack information and that their positions reflect the influence of information, frames, economic vulnerability, and political endorsements. We test this alternative approach with a Spanish survey conducted in May 2009 and the ISSP survey conducted in 2003 in a large number of less developed and more developed countries. The Spanish data demonstrate that the population is largely uninformed and that their ideas about the consequences of free trade do not explain contrasts among different socio-demographic groups. Meanwhile, the ISSP data contradict important aspects of the traditional approach and are consistent our alternative approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most dramatic instances of international market regulation in the twentieth century was the adoption of a multilateral, enforceable, intellectual property protection regime at the end of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1994. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) ushered in a new era of high standards of intellectual property protection, requiring profound and costly domestic institutional changes in many, many countries. International market regulation has increasingly penetrated domestic regulatory environments in ways that have compromised domestic political bargains. Historical institutionalism can help to explain the emergence of a global regime for intellectual property protection as a product of institutional change in the US. Historical institutionalism provides a lens to examine the directly political (rather than technocratic or efficiency maximizing) processes establishing domestic and international power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of North-South bilateral investment treaties (BITs), which provide investors with favorable treatment and legal protections, is one of the most remarkable trends of the contemporary global economy. Presumably, developing countries conclude these agreements in order to attract much-needed capital to their economies. Although the positive effect of BITs on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows may seem straightforward, the findings produced by extant research are mixed. This article advances the study of the relationship between BITs and FDI in two manners. First, it draws attention to the often underappreciated distinction between signed and mutually-ratified treaties. It argues that only BITs in force function as a costly signal of pro-investment climate and a credible commitment to the protection of FDI. Second, it employs a comprehensive data set on American investment in developing countries to empirically evaluate the effect of BITs on FDI inflows. Employing a variety of model specifications and accounting for potential endogeneity, the findings indicate that BITs have the expected positive effect on FDI inflows, but only to the extent that they are in force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Export-oriented development strategies and trade regimes encourage the incorporation of developing country exports into northern markets, often bringing them into competition with domestic suppliers. While studies of transnational commodity flows focus on the organization and coordination of economic activities over geographic space, little research has been done on their competitive relations. In this article, I focus on the political economy of disputes over market access by linking trade regimes to the economic and political activities of actors in the rival Colombian and US cut flower commodity chains. I argue that the regulation of the Colombian and US cut flower commodity chains is a process marked by institutional mediation and political and economic contestation. In shaping their economic spaces, a combination of shifting discourses, litigation, and political lobbying in sites of power are used by economic actors to meet their interests. The examination of rivalry over market access shows variation in the configuration of economic activity in the US cut flower market over time while drawing attention to the dynamic interaction among economic actors, institutions, and markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that rentier states stand in contrast to states that have to rely on domestic resource extraction. They display a particular path to state-formation that by and large defies the European path of state-formation: natural resource dependence (mainly oil dependence) has created weak states that are autonomous from societal demands and that do not rely on domestic taxation. State-formation has not been accompanied by political accountability, transparency, or what Charles Tilly has termed the 'civilianisation of government'. In rentier states the expenditure side of public revenues is most clearly linked to a state-building agenda of creating societal peace and political acquiescence. On a theoretical level, this article offers a new reading of state-formation based on the form and the performance of the state. Focusing on a functional understanding of statehood, it thereby highlight where Arab states are strong (security function and in times of oil booms, welfare function) and where they are weak (representation function, and in times of fiscal crisis, welfare function). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Monetary Fund spends most of its time monitoring its member states' economic performance and advising on institutional change. While much of the literature sees the Fund as a policy enforcer in 'emerging market' and 'frontier' economies, little attention has been paid to exploring the Fund's bilateral surveillance of its Western member states. This article proposes that 'seeing like the IMF' provides a dynamic view of how the Fund frames its advice for institutional change. It does so through 'associational templates' that do not blindly promote institutional convergence, but appeal for change on the basis of like-characteristics among economies. Many Western states, particularly small open economies, consider the Fund's advice as important not only for technical know-how, but because Fund assessments are significant to international and domestic political audiences. This article traces the Fund's advice on taxation and monetary reform to two coordinated market economies, Denmark and Sweden, and two liberal market economies, Australia and New Zealand, from 1975 to 2004. It maps how the Fund advocated 'policy revolutions' and 'policy recombinations' during this period, advice that coincided with important institutional changes within these small open economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]