National development banks are back in fashion and here to stay. A number of countries benefited from the global economic boom during the 2000s as exports and commodity revenues surged. These countries’ governments stored some of the current and fiscal account surpluses and used the capital to expand state financial institutions. Two prominent types of institutions have grown rapidly, namely sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and national development banks (NDBs), which often have financial return and development stimulation as their core mandates, respectively. Much attention has been afforded to how these organisations’ activities have turned into a global force. For example, the Norwegian SWF’s investment spans across 73 countries, including shares in more than 9,000 companies, and China’s NDBs have emerged as the developing world’s leading project backer.
More recently, NDBs have been identified as important agents in funding domestic development projects in a wide range of developing and advanced countries. The perceived role of NDBs is shifting from a reactive counter-cyclical role towards a proactive patient capitalist role. Popularity in NDBs may appear to be obvious due to the rising interest in pursuing state-designed development planning and industrial strategies over the past decade. While many observations have focused on the growing inclination towards state activism as catalyst to NDBs’ expansion around the world, this piece examines three structural challenges incentivising developing countries to mobilise NDBs. Read More »
In this article I remind readers about the existence of “sacrificial generations” within global capitalist history. By sacrificial generation I mean a group of people at a point in time that experiences suffering with the immanent or intentional effect of changing economic, political or social conditions, which are in turn disproportionately enjoyed by another group of people at a later period in time. I identify four areas in which there systematically exists sacrificial generations: three stages of capitalist development (state formation, capitalist property rights transition and early industrialization) and a cyclical aspect of capitalism (Polanyian-Marxian cycles). It could also be argued that the future generations which would disproportionately experience the environmental costs of past and present generations’ consumption are “climatic sacrificial generations”, but this will not be explored.
Nobel Laureate 
During the high period of global neoliberalism (1980-2008) the international development community essentially banned the heterodox concept of the ‘developmental state’ from polite discussion. One of the reactions to the global financial crisis and the Great Recession that ensued after 2008, however, was a growing call for the 
Developing Economics 