Making Politics Work for Development

Making Politics Work for Development
Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2016-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1464807744

Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

Towards a New Political Economy of Development

Towards a New Political Economy of Development
Author: G. Strange
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137277378

The author examines new development strategies in the context of globalisation and the crisis of the Washington Consensus. Critiquing both protectionism and the free market he points to the influence and evolution of Keynesian ideas for the management and stabilisation of development in an era marked by the unravelling of neoliberal prosperity.

The American Political Economy

The American Political Economy
Author: Jacob S. Hacker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316516369

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

The Political Economy of Third World Intervention

The Political Economy of Third World Intervention
Author: David N. Gibbs
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1991-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226290713

Interventionism—the manipulation of the internal politics of one country by another—has long been a feature of international relations. The practice shows no signs of abating, despite the recent collapse of Communism and the decline of the Cold War. In The Political Economy of Third World Intervention, David Gibbs explores the factors that motivate intervention, especially the influence of business interests. He challenges conventional views of international relations, eschewing both the popular "realist" view that the state is influenced by diverse national interests and the "dependency" approach that stresses conflicts between industrialized countries and the Third World. Instead, Gibbs proposes a new theoretical model of "business conflict" which stresses divisions between different business interests and shows how such divisions can influence foreign policy and interventionism. Moreover, he focuses on the conflicts among the core countries, highlighting friction among private interests within these countries. Drawing on U.S. government documents—including a wealth of newly declassified materials—he applies his new model to a detailed case study of the Congo Crisis of the 1960s. Gibbs demonstrates that the Crisis is more accurately characterized by competition among Western interests for access to the Congo's mineral wealth, than by Cold War competition, as has been previously argued. Offering a fresh perspective for understanding the roots of any international conflict, this remarkably accessible volume will be of special interest to students of international political economy, comparative politics, and business-government relations. "This book is an extremely important contribution to the study of international relations theory; Gibbs' treatment of the Congo case is superb. He effectively takes the "statists" to task and presents a compelling new way of analyzing external interventions in the Third World."—Michael G. Schatzberg, University of Wisconsin "David Gibbs makes an original and important contribution to our understanding of the influence of business interests in the making of U.S. foreign policy. His business conflict model provides a synthetic theoretical framework for the analysis of business-government relations, one which yields fresh insights, overcomes inconsistencies in other approaches, and opens new ground for important research. . . . [Gibbs] provides a sophisticated analysis of the conflicts within the U.S. business community and identifies the complex ways in which they interacted with agencies within the government to form U.S. foreign policy toward the Congo. . . . This is a well-crafted analysis of a critical case of U.S. postwar intervention which should be of general interest to scholars and others concerned with the domestic bases of foreign policy."—Thomas J. Biersteker, Director, School of International Relations, University of Southern California

The Political Economy of Education

The Political Economy of Education
Author: Mark Gradstein
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2004-10-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262262880

A theoretical framework for analyzing the complex relationship of education, growth, and income distribution. The dominant role played by the state in the financing, regulation, and provision of primary and secondary education reflects the widely-held belief that education is necessary for personal and societal well-being. The economic organization of education depends on political as well as market mechanisms to resolve issues that arise because of contrasting views on such matters as income inequality, social mobility, and diversity. This book provides the theoretical framework necessary for understanding the political economy of education—the complex relationship of education, economic growth, and income distribution—and for formulating effective policies to improve the financing and provision of education. The relatively simple models developed illustrate the use of analytical tools for understanding central policy issues. After offering a historical overview of the development of public education and a review of current econometric evidence on education, growth, and income distribution, the authors lay the theoretical groundwork for the main body of analysis. First they develop a basic static model of how political decisions determine education spending; then they extend this model dynamically. Applying this framework to a comparison of education financing under different regimes, the authors explore fiscal decentralization; individual choice between public and private schooling, including the use of education vouchers to combine public financing of education with private provision; and the social dimension of education—its role in state-building, the traditional "melting pot" that promotes cohesion in a culturally diverse society.

The Political Economy of International Shipping in Developing Countries

The Political Economy of International Shipping in Developing Countries
Author: Okechukwu Chris Iheduru
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1996
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780874135527

Shipping has played a pivotal role as the vector or artery through which this trade is conducted and in which this pattern of inequality has only recently been challenged by the South.

The Political Economy of Clean Energy Transitions

The Political Economy of Clean Energy Transitions
Author: Douglas Arent
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2017
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198802242

A volume on the political economy of clean energy transition in developed and developing regions, with a focus on the issues that different countries face as they transition from fossil fuels to lower carbon technologies.

The Political Economy of Natural Resources and Development

The Political Economy of Natural Resources and Development
Author: Paul A. Haslam
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2016-02-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317418905

The Political Economy of Resources and Development offers a unique and multidisciplinary perspective on how the commodity boom of the mid-2000s reshaped the model of development throughout Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world. Governments increased taxes and royalties on the resource sector, the nationalization of foreign firms returned to the mainstream economic policy agenda, and public spending on social and developmental goals surged. These trends, often described as resource nationalism, have developed into a strategy for economic development, generated a re-imagining of the state and its institutional possibilities, and created a new but very significant political risk for extractive enterprises. However, these innovations, which constitute the most dramatic change in development policy in Latin America since the advent of neoliberalism, have so far received little attention from either academic or policy-oriented publications. This book explores the reasons behind these policies, and their effects on states, firms, and development trajectories. This text brings together renowned thematic experts to examine the political-economic causes of resource nationalism, as well as its manifestation in six Latin American countries. The causal variables considered by the contributors to this collection include a range of political-economic determinants of policy including commodity prices; the influence of ideology and national politics; ideas about industrial policy; relations between host governments and investors; and how countries respond to opportunities provided by regional initiatives and the new geography of the global economy. This volume is essential reading in development economics, political economy, and Latin American studies, as well as for those who want to understand what economic development means after neoliberalism.

The Political Economy of Bank Regulation in Developing Countries

The Political Economy of Bank Regulation in Developing Countries
Author: Emily Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2020
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 019884199X

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.International banking standards are intended for the regulation of large, complex, risk-taking international banks with trillions of dollars in assets and operations across the globe. Yet they are being implemented in countries with nascent financial markets and small banks that have yet to ventureinto international markets. Why is this? This book develops a new framework to explain regulatory interdependence between countries in the core and the periphery of the global financial system. Drawing on in-depth analysis of eleven countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it shows howfinancial globalisation generates strong reputational and competitive incentives for developing countries to converge on international standards. It explains how specific cross-border relations between regulators, politicians, and banks within developing countries, and international actors includinginvestors, peer regulators, and international financial institutions, generate regulatory interdependence. It explains why some configurations of domestic politics and forms of integration into global finance generate convergence with international standards, while other configurations lead todivergence. This book contributes to our understanding of the ways in which governments and firms in the core of global finance powerfully shape regulatory decisions in the periphery, and the ways that governments and firms from peripheral developing countries manoeuvre within the constraints andopportunities created by financial globalisation.

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development
Author: William D. Ferguson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1503611973

This book examines how a society that is trapped in stagnation might initiate and sustain economic and political development. In this context, progress requires the reform of existing arrangements, along with the complementary evolution of informal institutions. It involves enhancing state capacity, balancing broad avenues for political input, and limiting concentrated private and public power. This juggling act can only be accomplished by resolving collective-action problems (CAPs), which arise when individuals pursue interests that generate undesirable outcomes for society at large. Merging and extending key perspectives on CAPs, inequality, and development, this book constructs a flexible framework to investigate these complex issues. By probing four basic hypotheses related to knowledge production, distribution, power, and innovation, William D. Ferguson offers an analytical foundation for comparing and evaluating approaches to development policy. Navigating the theoretical terrain that lies between simplistic hierarchies of causality and idiosyncratic case studies, this book promises an analytical lens for examining the interactions between inequality and development. Scholars and researchers across economic development and political economy will find it to be a highly useful guide.