Although many commentators hoped 2022 would be a ‘return to normal’, this year has been anything but that. On Developing Economics, contributors have been grappling with many fundamental issues, ranging from social reproduction, labour exploitation and unrest, the many failuers of contemporary development policies, decolonisation, the food regime, new debt crises and industrialisation. Among the most widely read posts are those that challenge hegemonic thinking about the crises unfolding this year on both the left and right. For example, Farwa Sial’s interview with Max Ajl, Bikrum Gil and Tinashe Nyamnuda challenges the uncritical use of sanctions by the West in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Güney Işıkara’s critique of polycrisis challenges what he deems to be superficial and ultimately inadequate efforts on the left to understand the contemporary crisis of capitalism. Amidst all the hype about returning to normal, contributors on DE also recognize both that pre-pandemic times were also deeply unequal, exploitative, and extractive, which calls for a deeper appreciation of critical scholarship that can help us understand the forces that produce this inequality even in allegedly normal times, and that the crisis responses have been highly unequal across the world.

This year we also launched a new podcast where you can listen to critical scholarship on development and economics in a conversational format. Season 1 is now out and you can listen to episodes on environmental issues, mining, labour, and global value chains.

Here are the top 10 most read posts of 2022:

1. Sanctions and the changing world Order: Some Views from the Global South (Farwa Sial interviews Max Ajl, Bikrum Gil and Tinashe Nyamunda)
2. Race to the bottom: Competition between Indonesian food delivery platform companies for cheap gig workers (by Arif Novianto)
3. (After) Neoliberalism? Rethinking the Return of the State (by Ishan Khurana and John Narayan)
4. Neoliberal capitalism and the commodification of social reproduction, from our home to our classroom (by Alessandra Mezzadri)
5. Feminist political economy, land, and decolonisation: Rama Salla Dieng in conversation with Lyn Ossome (by Lyn Ossome and Rama Salla Dieng)
6. Beating around the Bush: Polycrisis, Overlapping Emergencies, and Capitalism (by Güney Işıkara)
7. Marx and Colonialism (by Lucia Pradella)
8. Who’s in control? Wall Street Consensus, state capitalism, and spatialised industrial policy (by Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami and Nick Jepson)
9. On the perils of embedded experiments (by Jean Drèze)
10. Ignorance is Bliss: Why should we study Leontief? (by Thair Ahmad)

This is just a tiny, tiny sample of our around 40 posts on the blog this year, so please have a browse through the rest of the blogs too. You can also follow our active blog series on State Capitalism(s) and Pressure in the City, and delve into all COVID-19 related analysis here, and book reviews here. In 2023, Developing Economics will continue to provide much-needed critical perspectives on development and economics. Want to join the conversation?: Become a contributor.

It’s a wrap – the tumultous year of 2021 is almost behind us. As usual, it was a year full of critical anlyses on the blog that can help us make sense of the multiple crises unfolding before our eyes. This year, the most read posts were to a large extent those that explicitly challenge orthodox thinking about economics and development and provide alternative ways of framing the complex problems we face as a society. This may well reflect some important churning that is currently taking place in development economics. The top posts expose the limits to mainstream economics and global development discourses, debunk dominant views of the Washington Consensus and Chile as a ‘Free Market Mirace’, and excavate helpful insights from Marx, Sam Moyo, and scholars of imperialism. They also provide concrete ways of understanding contemporary issues such as intellectual monopoly capitalism and the gig economy.

Here are the top 10 most read posts of 2021:

1. We Need to Talk about Economics (by Paulo L. dos Santos and Noé Wiener)
2. Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo (by Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros and Walter Chambati)
3. The Washington Counterfactual: don’t believe the Washington Consensus resurrection (by Carolina Alves, Daniela Gabor and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven).
4. Debunking the ‘Free Market Miracle’: How industrial policy enabled Chile’s export diversification (by Amir Lebdioui)
5. The Changing Face of Imperialism: Colonialism to Contemporary Capitalism (by Sunanda Sen and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo)
6. Monetary policy is ultimately based on a theory of money: A Marxist critique of MMT (by Costas Lapavitsas and Nicolás Aguila)
7. Intellectual monopoly capitalism and its effects on development (by Cecilia Rikap)
8. The Uncomfortable Opportunism of Global Development Discourses (by Pritish Behuria)
9. The partnership trap in the Indonesian gig economy (by Arif Novianto)
10. From Post-Marxism back to Marxism? (by Lucia Pradella)

This is just a tiny, tiny sample of the over eighty posts on the blog this year. You can also follow our active blog series on State Capitalism(s) and Pressure in the City, and delve into all COVID-19 related analysis here, and book reviews here (see also our book symposum on Max Ajl’s new book A People’s Green New Deal here).

In 2022, Developing Economics will continue to provide much-needed critical perspectives on development and economics. Want to join the conversation?: Become a contributor.

We know, we know, most people would rather forget everything about 2020. However, before you go into 2021, we want to remind you of some of the important analyses that emerged this year, including insights that had not been adequately appreciated before. These include insights about the links between ecology and capitalism, the fragility of economies that rely heavily on precarious labor, the role of the state in shaping health systems, and how structural racism is embedded in the economy. We were honoured to be able to host important contributions to these debates on the blog this year, along with other posts on economics, politics and development.

Here are the top 10 most read posts of 2020:

1. A crisis like no other: social reproduction and the regeneration of capitalist life during the COVID-19 pandemic (by Alessandra Mezzadri)
2. The currency hierarchy and the role of the dollar as world money (by Giovanni Villavicencio)
3. Is Degrowth an Alternative to Capitalism? (by Güney Işıkara)
4. Abolition Will Not Be Randomized (by Anastasia Wilson and Casey Buchholz)
5. The return of State planning (by André Roncaglia and João Romero)
6. Privatization and the Pandemic (by Jacob Assa)
7. Haemorrhaging Zambia: Prequel to the Current Debt Crisis (by Andrew M. Fischer)
8. Pandemics and the State of Welfare (by Rahul Menon)
9. The Economics of being ‘Interesting’: Many kinds of exclusions (by Farwa Sial)
10. Time for a Rethink on the Worth of Work (by Paulo dos Santos)

This is just a tiny, tiny sample of the eighty posts on the blog this year. You can also follow our active blog series on State Capitalism(s) and Pressure in the City, and delve into all COVID-19 related analysis here, and book reviews here. In 2021, Developing Economics will continue to provide much-needed critical perspectives on development and economics. Want to join the conversation? Become a contributor!

As the year comes to a close, we look back on our most read posts of the year. It’s been a busy year, with over 40 blog posts and two blog series (on financial inclusion and state capitalism) published. The readership of the blog has grown rapidly, the editorial board has expanded, and this year the blog was included in the Top 100 Economics Blogs of 2019 by Intelligent Economist for the first time.

Most read posts of 2019:

1. Why so Hostile? Busting Myths about Heterodox Economics (by Ingrid H. Kvangraven and Carolina Alves)
2. The Curious Case of M-Pesa’s Miraculous Poverty Reduction Powers (by Milford Bateman, Maren Duvendack and Nicholas Loubere)
3. Using Marx as a Pejorative to Defend the Ease of Doing Business: Analysing The World Bank’s attack on CGD (by Dissenting Voices)
4. The Green New Deal: Whither Capitalism? (by Güney Işıkara and Ying Chen)
5. Neoliberalism or Neocolonialism? Evaluating Neoliberalism as a Policy Prescription for Convergence (by Rahul Menon)
6. Rethinking the Failures of Mining Industrialisation in the African Periphery (by Ben Radley)
7. An Alternative Economics Summer Reading List, 2019 (by members of Decolonising and Diversifying Economics)
8. Philanthrocapitalism: How to Legitimize the Hegemony of the Rich with a “Good Vibes” Discourse (by Jorge Garcia-Arias)
9. Mind the Gap: Addressing the Class Dimension in Higher Education (by Lorena Lombardozzi)
10. Advocates of the SDGs have a monetarism problem (by Rick Rowden)

While many of you may want to forget about 2018, we promise there are some good things that happened that you might want to remember. Here are the top 10 most read posts of the year. Happy new year and enjoy!

1. An Alternative Economics Summer Reading List (by Carolina Alves, Besiana Balla, Devika Dutt and Ingrid H. Kvangraven)
2. Not just r > g but r + q >> g: Piketty meets Ricardo in the long run of Indian history (by Rishabh Kumar, California State University, San Bernardino)
3. Historicising the Aid Debate: South Korea as a Successful Aid Recipient (by Farwa Sial, School of Oriental and African Studies)
4. Consuming development: Capitalism, economic growth and everyday life (by Arve Hansen, University of Oslo)
5. The World Bank Pushes Shadow Banking in the Name of Development (Daniela Gabor, University of the West of England, Bristol, and others).
6. Keynes or New-Keynesian: Why Not Teach Both? (by Rohit Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
7. Think Positive, Climb out of Poverty? It’s Just Not So Easy! (by Svenja Flechtner, University of Siegen)
8. Revisiting Hirschman’s Tunnel Effect and Its Relevance for China (by Wannaphong Durongkaveroj, Australian National University)
9. Why I refuse to rethink development – again (and again, and again…) (by Julia Schöneberg, University of Kassel)
10. Marx’s Birthday and the Dismal Science (by Carolina Alves, University of Cambridge, and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, University of York)

Want to be a contributor to this blog too next year? Shoot an e-mail to Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven and she’ll guide you through the submission process.

2017 was a dramatic year in many ways. But before it completely flies by, let’s not forget the important contributions made to the development debate on this blog this year! Here are the top 10 most read posts of 2017:

1. Kicking Away the (Statistical) Ladder (Jacob Assa, UN)
2. An Economic Strategy for The Gambia? (Sanjay Reddy, The New School)
3. Is ‘Imperialism’ a Relevant Concept Today? A Debate Among Marxists (Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, The New School)
4. 80 Economic Bestsellers before 1850: A Fresh Look at the History of Economic Thought (Erik Reinert, Tallinn University of Technology)
5. Re-centering Inequality in African Economic History (Alden Young, Drexel University)
6. e-Book Launch: Can Dependency Theory Explain Our World Today? (editorial)
7. The Financialization of Africa’s Development (Richard Itaman, SOAS)
8. Towards a Critical Pluralist Research Agenda in Development Economics: Some Bricks from Berlin to Build Upon (Svenja Flechtner, Freie Universität Berlin, Jakob Hafele, Vienna University, and Theresa Neef, Freie Universität Berlin)
9. 200 Years of Ricardian Trade Theory: How Is This Still A Thing? (Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, The New School)
10. Advancing a Research Agenda of Scarcity, Abundance, and Sufficiency (Adel Daoud, University of Cambridge)

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