Development and Change最新文献

{"title":"Pakistan, China and the Structures of Debt Distress: Resisting Bretton Woods","authors":"Farwa Sial,&nbsp;Juvaria Jafri,&nbsp;Abdul Khaliq","doi":"10.1111/dech.12798","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12798","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Pakistan has received a total of 23 loan packages from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) between 1958 and 2023, and recurrent indebtedness has hindered structural transformation. Recent crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, surging commodity prices, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and diplomatic tensions between the United States and China, have exacerbated Pakistan's indebtedness. This debt has geopolitical importance given the rivalry between the US and China. Multilateral support for restructuring has been complicated by Pakistan's unique alliance with China through the China‒Pakistan Economic Corridor, pivotal to the Belt and Road Initiative. This analysis of Pakistan's debt crisis explores this complexity by considering the Pakistani government's attempts to resist the IMF, particularly between 2018 and 2022, when the potential of China as an alternative source of financial support looked increasingly viable. Unlike less critical political analyses on debt, which tend to be preoccupied with endogenous governance failures and fiscal profligacy, this article focuses on the external drivers of debt. In doing so, it highlights the role of a hostile international legal system, standard-setting arrangements, rating agencies and arbitrary charges that impose huge economic burdens and undermine financial stability, as well as the constraints embedded in the global investment and financial architecture that persistently limit Pakistan's policy space.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 5","pages":"1226-1263"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12798","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136212047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery in the Context of the International Debt Crisis","authors":"Robert H. Wade","doi":"10.1111/dech.12796","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12796","url":null,"abstract":"<p><b>World Bank Group, <i>World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery</i>. Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2022. xix + 248 pp</b>. www.worldbank/org/en/publication/wdr2022</p><p>As if the climate crisis was not enough, the world's economic system is now in a full-blown development crisis, with debt distress at its core. It threatens another ‘lost decade’, with economic insecurity, political instability and further erosion of democratic institutions for much of the world's population. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects the weakest global medium-term growth prospects in more than 30 years. Developing countries have amassed enormous debts dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, and face high food and energy costs, exacerbated by a high US dollar. A slowing global economy, rising interest rates and depreciating currencies have come together to tip at least 60 countries into debt distress or close to it — more than twice as many as there were in 2015. The Institute of International Finance (IIF) estimates that total developing world debt rose to a record of US$ 98 trillion at the end of 2022.</p><p>Global debt relative to global output was already at unusually high levels before the pandemic. Moreover, global growth had slowed down in 2011‒21, compared to the previous decade. In the later period, 80 per cent of developed countries experienced slower growth than in 2000–10, as did 75 per cent of developing countries. Then came the exogenous event of the global COVID-19 shock which began in early 2020. As the World Bank's <i>World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery</i> states, ‘The COVID-19 pandemic is possibly the largest shock to the global economy in over a century’ (p. 20). In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the global economy shrank by 3 per cent; economic activity contracted in about 90 per cent of countries. This is a higher percentage of countries experiencing negative growth in per capita GDP than in any year since 1901, when the data started — a higher proportion even than during two World Wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the emerging markets debt crisis of the 1980s, and the 2007‒10 North Atlantic financial crisis.</p><p>Major economies administered the largest double dose of fiscal and monetary expansion in history, and major firms exploited the uncertainty of the pandemic to mark up their prices far above the cost of labour and non-labour inputs, making a combined demand- and sellers-inflation at the highest rate in decades. Central banks are now frantically trying to rein it in. Governments and private entities were forced to borrow even more than before in order to stay afloat as business activity ground to a halt; and they deferred payments on existing debt while borrowing more.</p><p>In 2020, the average total debt burden (both public and private) of low- and middle-income countries leapt by 9 percentage points, compared with an annual increase of 1.9 per cent in the ","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 5","pages":"1354-1373"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12796","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135247155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Alternative View of Sri Lanka's Debt Crisis","authors":"Howard Nicholas,&nbsp;Bram Nicholas","doi":"10.1111/dech.12794","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12794","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article questions the validity of widely promulgated claims that Sri Lanka's debt crisis is the result of a combination of Chinese debt diplomacy and economic mismanagement in the form of fiscal and monetary excesses. The authors argue that if Sri Lanka has fallen into any kind of debt trap, it is an international sovereign bond debt trap. They further argue that the fundamental cause of the country's debt crisis is the failure of successive Sri Lankan administrations to transition towards an export-oriented manufacturing economy focused on producing increasingly technologically sophisticated manufactured products, and lay the blame for this failure on a combination of external and domestic forces operating in tandem with one another. Since the remedial action taken by the Sri Lankan government in the context of an extended fund facility arrangement with the International Monetary Fund is premised on the contention that the source of the crisis is the protracted fiscal and monetary excesses of successive Sri Lankan administrations, this action is unlikely to offer a permanent solution to Sri Lanka's debt problem — just as similar attempts to remedy previous debt and currency crises have failed.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 5","pages":"1114-1135"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12794","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135200120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ghana's Debt Crisis and the Political Economy of Financial Dependence in Africa: History Repeating Itself?","authors":"Isaac Abotebuno Akolgo","doi":"10.1111/dech.12791","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12791","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recent accounts of the re-emergence of debt distress in Africa, while offering significant insights, fail to provide the historical political-economic context within which African indebtedness is set. On the surface, spending induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, economic fallout from the Russia–Ukraine war, and repeated examples of fiscal indiscipline by African governments appear to be the causes of the current wave of debt crises. Beyond these factors, however, this article argues that the present indebtedness, like previous episodes, is rooted in the economic and financial subordination of African economies. Specifically, the article places Ghana's extensive debt within the country's post-independence political-economic context, and thus traces the structural factors and external constraints that underlie its economic vulnerability and financial dependence. These include the collapse of developmentalism in the 1970s, the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s, and an exploitative transnational lending system dominated by Western commercial creditors. Internally, recent fiscal mistakes by the government, within its limited policy space, have exacerbated Ghana's indebtedness. The Ghanaian experience shows that unconditional debt cancellation, widely called for, is a necessary but insufficient measure to address the recurring cycles of indebtedness. Debt cancellation should be followed by broader economic and financial reforms, globally and domestically.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 5","pages":"1264-1295"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12791","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135419973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Turkey in Turbulence: Heterodoxy or a New Chapter in Neoliberal Peripheral Development?","authors":"Özgür Orhangazi,&nbsp;A. Erinç Yeldan","doi":"10.1111/dech.12792","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12792","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>While global monetary tightening by central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, has heightened concerns about a slowdown in the world's economy and an increased likelihood of debt crises across developing countries, Turkey has attracted attention for doing the opposite. Indeed, the country's economic policy makers have intensified monetary easing towards credit expansion at the risk of increased exchange rate instability. This article analyses the Turkish case and makes four contributions. First, it establishes a framework through which we can understand and interpret the policy choices of the government. Second, it shows the binding effects of the trilemma in the context of an economy fully integrated in the global economy and discusses how the government tried to tackle these effects through a series of ad hoc policy measures. Third, the article discloses the distributional consequences of such policy manoeuvres and argues that the burden of adjustment fell on the shoulders of wage labour, while various competing rentier interests benefited from these policies. Fourth, the authors analyse these policies from a broader perspective of whether they can be interpreted as a courageous attempt by a peripheral developing economy to claim some policy space, or whether these policy choices in essence only amount to a deepening of neoliberal peripheralization.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 5","pages":"1197-1225"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135924982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Price (and Costs) of Macroeconomic Stability in Peru: Some Lessons on the Implications of FDI-driven Growth","authors":"Samuele Bibi,&nbsp;Sebastian Valdecantos","doi":"10.1111/dech.12793","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12793","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the period 2000–2019, Peru enjoyed sustained GDP growth and a long period of macroeconomic stability; as a result, poverty was reduced markedly in comparison to the 1980s and early 1990s, when the country faced severe recessions and hyperinflation. This positive economic performance coincided with the implementation of a mainstream macroeconomic framework which, alongside favourable external conditions, allowed for continuous external financing of current account deficits, mainly through foreign direct investment (FDI). Against the background of current debates regarding the resurgence of debt crises and the advocacy of FDI as a way to avoid such crises, this article uses balance of payments and international investment position statistics to assess whether Peru's acquired macroeconomic stability can be deemed sustainable. Drawing on the contributions of the Latin American structuralist school and more recent analyses that have raised concerns, the article shows that Peru's external position has taken on a Ponzi profile, casting doubt on the idea that FDI is a superior way of external financing compared to external debt. It concludes with a discussion of the social and environmental implications of Peru's widely praised macroeconomic framework, highlighting the limits that peripheral economies face when their growth relies excessively on external financing.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 5","pages":"1136-1168"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12793","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135924333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Common Framework and its Discontents","authors":"Brad W. Setser","doi":"10.1111/dech.12787","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12787","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The Common Framework is the internationally agreed process for coordinating the restructuring of the debt of low-income countries. To date, this process, which was established by the G20 in late 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, has failed to provide an efficient path toward agreement with new bilateral creditors (such as China), market creditors and the traditional bilateral creditors. An analysis of the key country cases demonstrates how tensions between different creditors have complicated the application of the Common Framework and delayed agreement on new financial terms. The Common Framework was built on a case-by-case judgement of the scale of debt relief needed. It has become a case-by-case negotiation on the format for carrying out a restructuring, as well as the terms of the restructuring. China's participation in official creditor committees, the clear innovation in the Common Framework, has proved to be a source of delay rather than a mechanism for creating consensus. Almost three years after the initial agreement on the Common Framework, there still is no model for an internationally coordinated restructuring that both delivers significant debt relief and includes the Chinese policy banks.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 5","pages":"1065-1086"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136061816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Myth of Counter-modern Ontologies: Indigenous People and the Modern Politics of Extractivism in Ecuador","authors":"Christian Tym","doi":"10.1111/dech.12790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12790","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Anti-extractivist critique still positions Indigenous people as protagonists of counter-modern political sentiment, whether as opponents of modernity's processes of productive rationalization and economic integration, or as embodying ontologies that reject modernity's conceptual separation of humanity from natural resources. Indigenous anti-extractivism is thus said to represent a rupture of modern politics in that it exceeds politics as we know it. Yet the calculus of modern politics remains central to Indigenous responses to resource extraction, even in social contexts where non-modern ontological suppositions are widely adhered to. This is illustrated through an ethnography of Indigenous mining in the southern Ecuadorean Amazon and national-level electoral data showing the sweeping support of Indigenous people for former leftist President Rafael Correa's ‘neo-extractivist’ programme. This persistent modernity of Indigenous resource politics exposes the fallacy of projecting counter-modern sentiments onto Indigenous peoples.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 4","pages":"714-738"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12790","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50153473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Multiple Deprivations to Exploitation: Politicizing the Multidimensional Poverty Index","authors":"Nick Bernards","doi":"10.1111/dech.12788","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12788","url":null,"abstract":"<p><b>OPHI and UNDP, <i>Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022: Unpacking Deprivation Bundles to Reduce Multidimensional Poverty</i>. Oxford and New York: Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and United Nations Development Programme, 2022. 39 pp</b>. https://ophi.org.uk/global-mpi-report-2022/</p><p>Few questions are more fraught, or more consequential, than the number of people in the world who are poor, and whether that number is rising or falling. There is no shortage of high-profile liberal ideologues who, in recent years, have been happy to claim that global capitalism has managed to drive down the global poverty rate from some 90 per cent at the turn of the 19th century to around 10–15 per cent today. This claim was made perhaps most (in)famously in recent years by Steven Pinker in his <span>2018</span> bestselling book <i>Enlightenment Now</i>. Pinker's data and claims about poverty draw heavily on economist Martin Ravallion's work,1 although he notably brushes aside the latter's caveats and methodological caution in favour of burnishing a teleological narrative of inexorable rationalization, enlightenment and progress.</p><p>Such claims echo a longer history of optimistic readings of the capacity of neoliberal capitalism to counter poverty2 and are overwhelmingly based on income-threshold measures of extreme poverty that Ravallion and colleagues originally helped to develop and popularize in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Ravallion et al., <span>1991</span>). This approach to measuring poverty has long been contested (see Wade, <span>2004</span>). For instance, based on other measures of poverty such as estimates of real wages and data on height and mortality rates, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel (<span>2023</span>) have recently argued that the rise of capitalism has in fact worsened extreme poverty globally.</p><p>Such divergent assessments of the level and trajectory of global poverty are possible in part because measuring poverty is slippery business. Analysts must deal with patchy data, alongside thorny methodological and measurement problems, which are ultimately grafted on top of foundationally contested normative and political questions about what exactly poverty entails (see Fischer, <span>2018</span>). Whether income thresholds are an adequate or meaningful way of understanding and counting poverty, especially on a world–historical scale, is first and foremost a normative question, even though it often masquerades as a technical problem.</p><p>Poverty measures are no less contested at lower levels of aggregation, however. They are invariably both objects of political contention and tools of statecraft. Katharina Lenner, for instance, shows how the contested construction of poverty measures in Jordan simultaneously renders poverty intelligible to the state while also ‘obscur[ing] worsening socio-economic situations, and deflect[ing] responsibility for the situation away from government offices’ (Lenner, <span>202","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 5","pages":"1374-1395"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12788","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136071779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"State Life: Land, Welfare and Management of the Landless in Kerala, India","authors":"R.C. Sudheesh","doi":"10.1111/dech.12789","DOIUrl":"10.1111/dech.12789","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The pressing need to manage the spiralling number of landless people around the world has compelled several states to experiment with scattered land distribution programmes in combination with welfare transfers, instead of comprehensive land reform. This article examines the chasm between land demands and state responses in such contexts. Focusing on the Aralam resettlement site for the landless Adivasis in Kerala, India, it argues that management of the landless could take the form of ‘state life’ — a life envisaged by the state rather than the life the people wish to lead. Three interlinked processes are shown to shape state life in Kerala: the reduction of land to welfare, amplified welfare transfers and the mobilization of assumptions about the target population. State life enables states to extinguish simmering land struggles in the short term, but ultimately it reproduces landlessness.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"54 4","pages":"870-891"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45873359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}