Financializations of Development brings together cutting-edge perspectives on socio-political, socio-historical and institutional analyses of the evolving multiple and intertwined financialization processes of developmental institutions, programs and policies. In recent years, the development landscape has seen a radical transformation in the partaking actors, which have moved beyond just multilateral or bilateral public development banks and aid agencies. The issue of financing for sustainable development is now at the top of the agenda for multilateral development actors. Increasingly, development institutions aim to include private actors and to lever in private money to support development projects. Drawing on case studies conducted in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, this book examines the ways in which these private finance actors are enrolled and associated with the conception and implementation of development policies. Beginning with a focus on global actors and private foundations, this book considers the ways in which development funding is raised, managed and distributed, as well as debates at the center of global forums where financialized policies and solutions for development are conceived or discussed. The book assembles empirical research on development programs and demonstrates the social consequences of the financializations of development to the people on the ground. Highlighting the plurality of processes and outcomes of modern-day relations, tools, actors and practices in financing development around the world, this book is key reading for advanced students, researchers and practitioners in all areas of finance, development and sustainability.

In this volume a collection of leading authors critically analyse the emergence and increasing dominance of financialisation as a dominant policy instrument driving the development trajectories of emerging economies in Asia. Drawing upon a series of country and sector case studies, contributors explore the application of financialised development initiatives, assessing critically their implications in terms of the emergent risks, costs and inequalities that often accompany them. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Asian Studies Review.

The term financialization is a term that has become popular to describe developments within the global economy, and particularly within developed industrialized economies, over the past thirty years. The book is divided into four sections, which together give a comprehensive treatment of the economics and political economy of financialization.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 was supposed to be the death knell for the developmental state. The International Monetary Fund supplied emergency funds for shattered economies but demanded that states liberalize financial markets and withdraw from direct involvement in the economy. Financial liberalization was meant to spell the end of strategic industry policy and the state-directed "policy lending" it involved. Yet, largely unremarked by analysts, South Korea has since seen a striking revival of financial activism. Policy lending by state-owned development banks has returned the state to the core of the financial system. Korean development banks now account for one quarter of all loans and take the lead in providing low-cost finance to local manufacturing firms in strategic industries.Elizabeth Thurbon argues that an ideational analysis can help explain this renewed financial activism. She demonstrates the presence of a "developmental mindset" on the part of political leaders and policy elites in Korea. This mindset involves shared ways of thinking about the purpose of finance and its relationship to the productive economy. The developmental mindset has a long history in Korea but is subject to the vicissitudes of political and economic circumstances. Thurbon traces the structural, institutional, political, and ideational factors that have strengthened and at times weakened the developmental consensus, culminating in the revival of financial activism in Korea. In doing so, Thurbon offers a novel defense of the developmental state idea and a new framework for investigating the emergence and evolution of developmental states. She also canvasses the implications of the Korean experience for wider debates concerning the future of financial activism in an era of financialization, energy insecurity, and climate change.

Financialization has become the go-to term for scholars grappling with the growth of finance. This Handbook offers the first comprehensive survey of the scholarship on financialization, connecting finance with changes in politics, technology, culture, society and the economy. It takes stock of the diverse avenues of research that comprise financialization studies and the contributions they have made to understanding the changes in contemporary societies driven by the rise of finance. The chapters chart the field’s evolution from research describing and critiquing the manifestations of financialization towards scholarship that pinpoints the driving forces, mechanisms and boundaries of financialization. Written for researchers and students not only in economics but from across the social sciences and the humanities, this book offers a decidedly global and pluri-disciplinary view on financialization for those who are looking to understand the changing face of finance and its consequences.

This book critically addresses the model of social inclusion that prevailed in Brazil under the rule of the Workers Party from the early 2000s until 2015. It examines how the emergence of a mass consumer society proved insufficient, not only to overcome underdevelopment, but also to consolidate the comprehensive social protection system inherited from Brazil’s 1988 Constitution. By juxtaposing different theoretical frameworks, this book scrutinizes how the current finance-dominated capitalism has reshaped the role of social policy, away from rights-based decommodified benefits and towards further commodification. This constitutes the Brazilian paradox: how a center-left government has promoted and boosted financialization through a market incorporation strategy using credit as a lever for expanding financial inclusion. In so doing, it has pushed the subjection of social policy further into the logic of financial markets.

Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship, how it adapts to non-Western religious traditions, and how it reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization, and urban social relations in general. Central themes include the indebtedness of individuals and households, the impact of digital technologies, the struggle for housing, financial education, and political contestation.

The inadequacies of many past studies that have tried to highlight the causes of the persistent underdevelopment in developing countries—such as Nigeria—have been noted to derive mainly from the focus and, in some cases, the methodologies adopted by the researchers. It has been suggested that, although many researchers recognize the inability to reproduce sufficient profit as undermining the capitalist accumulation process (and as a result the development of an economy), they have nevertheless often tended to ignore the importance of the political-economic arrangement and historical factors in the formation of expectations about the rate of profit. Indeed, in some cases, they have failed to provide a substantive account of these critical variables. This book highlights how the inherent contradictions of the contemporary political-economic arrangement and some historical factors undermined the peculiar capital accumulation processes in Nigeria, which, in turn, has slowed economic development in the country. This book contributes to the field of Nigeria studies by filling gaps that exist in both theoretical and empirical literature on growth and development in the country, deviating from the orthodox approach of analysing the nation’s problems purely based on the factors internal to the country and by imposing ready-made theoretical logics on history. Rather, it studies Nigeria’s problems in juxtaposition with the world system and imposes historical evidence on theoretical logics. This book represents a good resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses on area studies. Researchers and policy-makers will also find it useful as a reference.

The first fifteen years of the 21st century have thrown into sharp relief the challenges of growth, equity, stability, and sustainability facing the world economy. In addition, they have exposed the inadequacies of mainstream economics in providing answers to these challenges. This volume gathers over 50 leading scholars from around the world to offer a forward-looking perspective of economic geography to understanding the various building blocks, relationships, and trajectories in the world economy. The perspective is at the same time grounded in theory and in the experiences of particular places. Reviewing state-of-the-art of economic geography, setting agendas, and with illustrations and empirical evidence from all over the world, the book should be an essential reference for students, researchers, as well as strategists and policy makers. Building on the success of the first edition, this volume offers a radically revised, updated, and broader approach to economic geography. With the backdrop of the global financial crisis, finance is investigated in chapters on financial stability, financial innovation, global financial networks, the global map of savings and investments, and financialization. Environmental challenges are addressed in chapters on resource economies, vulnerability of regions to climate change, carbon markets, and energy transitions. Distribution and consumption feature alongside more established topics on the firm, innovation, and work. The handbook also captures the theoretical and conceptual innovations of the last fifteen years, including evolutionary economic geography and the global production networks approach. Addressing the dangers of inequality, instability, and environmental crisis head-on, the volume concludes with strategies for growth and new ways of envisioning the spatiality of economy for the future.

Infrastructure and its effects on economic growth, social welfare, and sustainability receive a great deal of attention today. There is widespread agreement that infrastructure is a key dimension of global development and that its impact reaches deep into the broader economy with important and multifaceted implications for social progress. At the same time, infrastructure finance is among the most complex and challenging areas in the global financial architecture. Ingo Walter, Professor Emeritus of Finance, Corporate Governance and Ethics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and his team of experts tackle the issue by focussing on key findings backed by serious theoretical and empirical research. The result is a set of viable guideposts for researchers, policy-makers, students and anybody interested in the varied challenges of the contemporary economy.