“About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.”
An economist’s words but not meant to be a description of where things stand today in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, though they might as well be. These are Keynes’s words from a 1937 article following the publication of his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936.Read More »
On 8th November, 2016, the Indian government announced that it was banning the use of 500 and 1000-rupees currency notes from midnight, effectively scrapping 86% of India’s currency notes by value. The Indian public would have to change the outlawed currency notes for new ones at bank counters by the end of the year.
In the following months and years, the move, which came to be known as demonetisation, caused immense suffering to the Indian public and damage to the Indian economy. So, why was it carried out? In an upcoming paper, Daniela Gabor and I seek to demystify demonetisation by locating it within wider changes in the Indian economy—changes that started in the financial inclusion space but are now reverberating across the entire financial sector. We refer to this process of change as digital financialisation.Read More »
A decade has passed since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) which seems an apt time to begin talking about the event that has pushed the concept of financial education to the core of global policymaking debates. Despite its growing popularity today, financial education has existed in the premise of global policymaking for the past few decades. The benefits of financial education seem endless; poor national financial literacy levels have been blamed for adverse socioeconomic effects such as high national household debt and/or a general irrational exuberance in financial consumption behaviour (see e.g. here). Along the same lines, low national financial literacy rates have been seen as indicative of overall financial instability, the types that have been argued and blamed as causal mechanisms of the GFC. Thus, financial education is held as an empowering dogma, its dissemination seen as providing citizens with the knowledge that would empower them to access financial services in a sustainable and meaningful manner. Read More »
“Financial inclusion is a key enabler to reducing poverty and boosting prosperity.”
– The World Bank (2018)
“[Policies of financial inclusion] serve to legitimize, normalize, and consolidate the claims of powerful, transnational capital interests that benefit from finance-led capitalism.”
Financial inclusion has been high on the agenda for policy-makers over the past decade, including the G20, international financial institutions, national governments and philanthropic foundations. According to Bateman and Chang (2013), it’s the international development community’s most generously funded poverty reduction policy. But what lies behind the buzzword? How can the two quotes above portray such starkly opposing views?Read More »
Why are poor people offered financial inclusion products? One answer to this question is that the poor have unique financial needs and require financial institutions and instruments tailored for their particular conditions. This explanation sees poverty as the driver of demand for inclusive finance, but engages only superficially with the question of why mainstream financial institutions are unable to accommodate the poor.
The alternative explanation, which I examine in my research, is that the demand for inclusive finance is driven by practices known as ‘financial infrastructure withdrawal’: this is the very same process behind the rise of predatory lending in the Anglosphere (Leyshon and Thrift, 1995) and reveals that financial systems have inbuilt tendencies to be exclusionary (Dymski and Veitch, 1992). Given these tendencies, scholars of financial exclusion in advanced capitalist countries, have argued for a concept of financial citizenship which notes that like countries, financial systems have an inside and an outside (Leyshon and Thrift, 1995). Those who can access finance only in the form of, for instance, high-cost loans and not through mainstream banking institutions are relegated to the outside and are hence not financial citizens. The processes that underlie this relegation include the tendency of mainstream banks to cross-sell products within groups, privileging ‘blue-chip’ clients by offering them subsidies in exchange for brand-loyalty. Less wealthy clients, as a result, inevitably pay more for the same products and services than their more affluent counterparts.
India’s opposition leader has recently floated minimum income support. The 1.5% GDP equivalent it requires can be financed through a 3% tax on the richest 3000. It is not just an idealized safety net for the poor – it has been done before, for the super elites. If it works, it can be a model for adoption in other emerging democracies. Read More »
In the fall of 2017, SPERI’s Matthew Bishop and Anthony Payne gathered essays from a group of nine development economists who produced essays on ‘Revisiting the developmental state’ (SPERI Paper No. 43). They drew upon a body of work published on the SPERI Comment blog and in other publications about the state’s appropriate role in development and the nature of a modern industrial strategy. The essays examined the current status of the notion of a ‘developmental state’ in today’s contemporary context of globalization. This article reviews the series, highlights some key takeaways, and considers some other elements that were not addressed by the essays.Read More »
Bradford deLong has recently argued that neoliberalism provides a way for former colonies to close the gaps with their erstwhile colonial masters. But this argument ignores the fact that several economic policies of colonial times were explicitly laissez-faire in nature.
The recognition of the dangers of allowing finance a free hand in the economy has led to a rethink of the soundness of neoliberalism as an economic and policy doctrine, from no less an organisation such as the IMF. Dani Rodrik has attacked the theoretical foundations of neoliberalism itself, judging that its insistence on allowing for unhindered market activity is bad economics itself, for economic models that make a theoretical case for markets cannot be easily transplanted into the real world in the way that advocates of neoliberalism believe.
Yet this is not to say that the concept is dead and buried. As Harvey (2007) points out, neoliberalism is a political economic process that ostensibly seeks to organise society and economies around the principle of free market activity, while primarily attempting to shift the balance of power towards dominant economic classes that control capital. Seen in this light, neoliberalism is still a powerful force shaping political and economic changes in much of the world today.
Bradford deLong’s blog post, first published in 1998 and re-published now shows that the term “neoliberalism” still carries intellectual currency. His is a curious argument; neoliberalism provides the only suitable path for countries of the developing world to close the gap with their former colonial powers. Access to the latest goods and technology allows developing economies – with low levels of productivity – to boost productivity and output growth, and consequently incomes. The reason the State should stay away from the economic sphere in the developing world is because democratic institutions have not been established yet, and hence the political sphere is vulnerable to capture by elites.Read More »
Developing Economics 