China's initiative to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), attracting membership from G7 countries against the vocal opposition of the United States, has been recognised as a significant moment in an ongoing hegemonic transition. This book examines how power transitions have played out in the World Bank over the last five decades, offering the first authentic account of the international diplomacy behind donor financing of the World Bank's International Development As...

This Element proposes an alternative framework for rethinking the role of finance in serving the real economy from the perspective of New Structural Financial Economics. It challenges the conventional wisdom that developing countries should take the financial structure of developed countries as the benchmark and financial structure does not matter in spurring long-run economic development. As a sub-discipline of New Structural Economics, New Structural Financial Economics has three tenets....

This book shares Chinese scholars’ philosophical views on artificial intelligence. The discussions range from the foundations of AI—the Turing test and creation of machine intelligence—to recent applications of AI, including decisions in games, natural languages, pattern recognition, prediction in economic contexts, autonomous behaviors, and collaborative intelligence, with the examples of AlphaGo, Microsoft’s Xiao Bing, medical robots, etc. The book’s closing chapter focuses on Chinese ma...

Development finance institutions (DFIs), also known as public development banks (PDBs) are public financial institutions initiated and steered by governments with explicit official missions to promote public policy objectives, and public development banks (PDBs) are the main category. DFIs are experiencing a renaissance worldwide, but there is limited academic research examining their roles, operations, and effectiveness.This book attempts to fill this gap by bringing together worl...

In this informative critique of contemporary leadership, renowned political scientist Donald Savoie poses and answers the crucial questions: where is power located, and who is in charge? In recent years it has become extremely difficult to pinpoint the location of political and economic power, making it complicated to determine who is to blame for political and economic catastrophes and leading to increased disenchantment with Western politicians and bureaucrats. Power considers how forces...

Politicians, financiers and bureaucrats claim to believe in free competitive markets, yet they have built the most unfree market system ever created. In this Gilded Age, income is funnelled to the owners of property – financial, physical and intellectual – at the expense of society. Wages stagnate as labour markets are transformed by outsourcing, automation and the on-demand economy, generating more rental income while broadening the precariat.Now fully updated with an introduction...

Picture South Africa ten years from now: Are the angry poor rising up and seizing land and businesses? Or has economic reform created jobs and growth? Is an increasingly desperate government clamping down on freedoms? Or do the middle classes still braai in suburban bliss? South Africa is at a tipping point, and small shifts in political and economic conditions can bring about dramatic changes. Unemployment, slow growth, threats to freedom of speech, and poor education can send the country...

Regulation by public and private organizations can be hijacked by special interests or small groups of powerful firms, and nowhere is this easier than at the global level. In whose interest is the global economy being regulated? Under what conditions can global regulation be made to serve broader interests? This is the first book to examine systematically how and why such hijacking or "regulatory capture" happens, and how it can be averted.Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods bring toget...

“[This new edition of] The Scramble for Africa uses tools of international political economy to clarify the challenges of development in today’s Africa from managing mounting demand for the region’s natural resources and land, to navigating the turbulence of global capital and trade flows. It critically analyses the sources and sustainability of the current African growth path and explains why they are crucial for South Africa’s foreign and economic policy debates.”As the title of ...

Only a dramatic, imaginatively crafted intervention - a massive redistribution programme managed by the private sector, far-reaching policy changes in schooling, housing and health, and better, disciplined governance - will deliver the genuine liberation South Africa's still-poor millions expected from the 1994 settlement. Without it, without the real promise of a free, meritocratic society, South Africa will flounder and fail as corruption, crime, social decay, hopelessness and anger engu...

Africa is poor. If we send it money it will be less poor. It seems perfectly logical, doesn't it? Millions of people in the rich world, moved by images on television and appalled by the miserable conditions endured by so many in other countries, have joined campaigns to persuade their governments to double aid to Africa and help put an end to such shameful inequality.It seems simple. But it isn't. In this book, Jonathan Glennie argues that, along with its many benefits, government ...

Globalization is characterised by persistent poverty and growing inequality. Conventional wisdom has it that this global poverty is residual – as globalization deepens, the poor will be lifted out of destitution. The policies of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO echo this belief and push developing countries ever deeper into the global economy.Globalization, Poverty and Inequality provides an alternative viewpoint. It argues that for many – particularly for those living in Latin ...