How are things 鈥渄atafied?鈥� This blog post aims to answer this question by offering a critical reflection on a wide range of recent initiatives that attempt to 鈥渄atafy鈥� remittances, i.e. leverage migrants鈥� and recipients鈥� money as a means to facilitate access to digital financial products and services for individuals and households, with a specific focus on Ghana. A handful of scholars have started to critically assess the political economy of the 鈥渇inancialisation of remittances鈥�, calling into question an agenda that is animated not by the needs of migrant men and women but rather the political and financial concerns of a broad coalition of global and national actors relating to the socio-spatial expansion of markets (Datta, ; Cross, 聽; Kunz, ; Hudson, ; Zapata, ). Here, I want to focus on the yet neglected aspect of the construction of these remittance markets, rather than treating financialization as 鈥渁n explanation in and of itself鈥� (Fields, :119).
Category: Institutions
Does one size fit all when it comes to financial inclusion? Scrutinising the effects of class, race, gender, and age
In recent decades, market-based solutions such as financial inclusion have become more popular in developed countries to reduce inequalities and boost wealth and incomes of the poor. There is no better example of this than the recent thrust of low-income families, women, ethnic minorities, and the young into the subprime mortgage lending expansion in the USA since the early 2000s. Higher access to formal loans for these households was argued to enable them to climb the magical ladder of homeownership and achieve their American Dream. But as we know, the picture didn鈥檛 turn out to be quite so rosy.
10 years since the Great Recession, many families are not seeing recovery as the impact of the crisis was substantially harsher for the subprime borrowers (Young 2010; Henry, Reese, and Torres 2013). Financial inclusion in the subprime period turned out to be predatory. In this post, I explore how things went wrong when policy makers failed to account for the institutional conditions in the US economy, which led to dramatically different experiences of financial inclusion across social classes, gender, race, and generations.Read More »
From Addis to Davos: International Development Finance gets Conspicuous
The theme of the 2018 World Economic Forum was, 鈥淐reating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.鈥� Its six richest attendees each boasted an estimated net worth of, or the same amount as the total burden of Somalia鈥檚 outstanding debt, which, amid the splendor of the event, Somali Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khayre to discuss . In this era of extreme global inequality, it is estimated that the United Nations agenda of seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs) known as, will require of investment per year to be realized, or more than twice the amount expected to be available from traditional official development assistance (ODA) alone. Due to the increasing concentration of private wealth in the global economy, discussions around development finance have focused on private sector engagement, rather than more traditional, ODA from predominantly Western donor governments and multilateral institutions.Read More »
The Case Against the Universal Liberalisation Model for Economic Growth
For years, policy-makers have used the , based on per capita gross national income, as the measurement of their country鈥檚 development. The aspiration to move up the scale assumes that: 1) economic growth is the international standard measurement of development; and 2) the more one produces, the better one鈥檚 quality of life will be. The history of political movements and economic policies has witnessed both successful and failed attempts to move up the scale. The countries that have accelerated their economic growth have been celebrated worldwide and the general perception is that the people in these countries now enjoy a more resourceful life. This attitude towards economic growth has created a presumption that pro-growth policies observed in more developed countries and actively promoted by international institutions could be applicable in other developing countries. Can this classification ever be misleading?Read More »
鈥淧rivate Property鈥� and the Dakota Access Pipeline
Since the announcement of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2014, which was planned by Energy Transfer Partners for the transport and access of the Bakken oil fields, it has gained traction as a controversial initiative because of its environmental impact, the threat it poses to water supply and its effect on Native American sacred lands. Since August 2016, a group of protestors have been organizing on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation petitioning against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and protesting at the actual site of the pipeline (). While the violence surrounding the pipeline is within itself shocking, the media coverage has been extremely polarized on the issue. Often falling along partisan lines, 鈥渓iberal鈥� news sources oppose the pipeline on humanitarian grounds and 鈥渃onservative鈥� sources support it, but both forms of media glean their conclusions about the pipeline from uncritical understandings of the conflict. Both sources ignore that, at the heart of the issue, are issues surrounding what private property is and the consequences of our chosen definition. Instead of taking for granted colloquial definitions of property we can see the underlying distributional inequality inherent to the pipeline by critically assessing how property and law interact.Read More »
Beyond the Third Moment in Law and Development: New Insights from Legal Political Economy
This blog post provides insights from what I have come to call the legal political economy perspective to critique the World Bank and neoclassical economics more generally. At the heart of what has been called the World Bank鈥檚 Third Moment in Law and Development is the claim that government involvement is necessary to eliminate 鈥渕arket failures鈥� and promote both business development and social justice.
In contrast to the mainstream Law and Economics (L & E) approach, which informs the Third Moment, my position, derived from the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) tradition (and its historical ancestor, Legal Realism), is:
- Property is fundamentally a bundle of rights and thus property ownership at its core entails coercive power struggles between rivals and between owners and non-owners; coercion at its core.
- The interrelatedness of law and power relations (鈥淚f the program of Realists was to lift the veil of legal Form to reveal living essences of power and need, the program of the Critics is to lift the veil of power and need to expose the legal elements in their composition鈥� (, 109)). These power struggles over economic outcomes occur within the context of background laws that determine property, contracts, and torts.
- The notion of an economic seesaw in with potential for instability in property and contractual relations.
- If the goal is to understand how legal structures shape power struggles then the question becomes how are the laws themselves to be determined? Following the CLS perspective, I would emphasize the role of ideational factors determining the intellectual underpinnings of neoliberal policies鈥攆actors that have consciously been created by the financiers of the L & E tradition.
Rethinking the Law and Economics Paradigm
鈥�As a step toward that ideal it seems to me that every lawyer ought to seek an understanding of economics. The present divorce between the schools of political economy and law seems to me an evidence of how much progress in philosophical study still remains to be made. In the present state of political economy indeed, we come again upon history on a larger scale, but there we are called on to consider and weight the ends of legislation, the means of attaining them, and the cost.鈥� (Oliver Wendell Holmes; 1897) [1]
The World Bank鈥檚 policy focus shifted in the 1990s from a market-oriented paradigm to other issues such as social justice, poverty reduction and 鈥渕arket failures鈥�, where institutions had to play a greater role [2]. Known as the Post-Washington Consensus or the Third Moment in Law and Development, this new paradigm emphasizes the importance of 鈥済ood governance鈥�, the implementation of property rights for economic growth, and makes the following proposition: well-defined and formalized property rights lead to market efficiency, economic growth and development. Hence, since then the establishment of the 鈥渞ule of law鈥� has become the new goal to reach for developing countries.
However, this Law and Economics paradigm relies on a narrow set of theoretical assumptions and is heavily influenced by neoclassical views of the state, the market and overall competition. But this framework raises some questions: (a) are these assumptions empirically valid, namely is the implementation of property rights a necessary condition for economic growth and development? And (b) are 鈥減erfect competition鈥� and 鈥渕arket failures鈥� reliable concepts one should start from to cope with development 鈥� if by such term we mean a social and economic process that will ultimately increase human well being?Read More »
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