Andrew M. Fischer

Erasmus University Rotterdam | EUR · International Institute of Social Studies (ISS)

Winner of the International Studies in Poverty Prize awarded by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books. Poverty has become the central focus of global development efforts, with a vast body of research and funding dedicated to its alleviation. And yet, the field of poverty studies remains deeply ideological and has been...

This Forum Debate explores the confluence of neoliberal, populist, conservative and reactionary influences on contemporary ideologies and practices of social policy, with a focus on the poorer peripheries of global capitalism. Several fundamental tensions are highlighted, which are largely overlooked by the social policy and development literatures...

In the aftermath of the COVID‐19 pandemic, much of the global South has been immersed in a debt crisis of a breadth and depth not seen since the early 1980s. The debt distress was apparent before the pandemic and the situation over the last decade is best described as a slow burn, which the pandemic and war in Ukraine ignited in often sudden and dr...

According to the national population censuses of China, Amdo has Tibetanised, at least in crude population terms. Han populations fell – sometimes sharply – in both number and share in the majority of counties of Amdo between the 2010 to 2020 censuses due to strong outmigration. In the minority of counties where Han populations increased, most were...

The idea of global reparations has received increasing attention in recent years, not only with respect to legacies of slavery and colonialism, but also to interrelated issues such as climate change, debt crisis, or ongoing financial transfers from the Global South to the Global North. This article, which introduces and sets the Debate for the 2024...

La COVID-19 ha tenido un impacto tan fuerte debido al modelo de desarrollo económico neoliberal hegemónico de los últimos 40 años. Buscar sociedades más sostenibles, justas, saludables, solidarias y resilientes para el futuro implica no pretender volver a la normalidad.

Posted at EADI blog 'Debating Development Research'. http://www.developmentresearch.eu/?p=935 ... ... COVID-19 has shaken the world. Early emergency responses across the world led to drastic changes in local and global development trajectories within a very short period of time, from food insecurity, schooling and gender inequality, to debt and e...

This article provides a corrective to the dominant celebratory narrative about the conditional cash transfer programme in the Philippines, the Pantawid, and its associated social registry, the Listahanan. Based on extensive documentary analysis and fieldwork in the Philippines in 2017 and 2018, we argue that the targeting system has in fact been un...

https://codesria.org/IMG/pdf/1-_adesina_fischer_hoffmann_codbul_online_21.pdf

This article challenges Horner and Hulme's call to move from ‘international development’ to ‘global development’ with a reaffirmation of the classical traditions of development studies. With some adaptation to fit the changing contemporary context, these traditions not only remain relevant but also recover vital insights that have been obscured in...

Current debates about the role of external finance in development mostly overlook the insights from early development economics that late industrialisation generates a structural tendency to run trade deficits, thereby exacerbating rather than relieving external foreign exchange constraints. The developmental role of external finance is therefore b...

Based on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferentiality within public employment recruitment across all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. While recruitment collapsed after the end of the job placement system ( fenpei ) in the early to mid-2000s, there was a strong increase in pu...

This paper exploits a new and exciting source of data on public employment recruitment in order to analyse the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferential hiring practices in public employment in all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. Despite the limitations of these data, they provide a far more substantiated understanding of recent conditi...

Despite repeated chronicles of a death foretold, centre–periphery analysis remains very relevant for understanding the challenges of contemporary development. It reveals certain common asymmetries and constraints that structure the integration, lagging and subordination of the global South in the current world order through ongoing technological, i...

This study estimates the extent of subsidization in the ten provinces of western China from 1990 to 2012 with the aim of highlighting the exceptionality of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) leading up to and following the widespread Tibetan protests that swept through four Chinese provinces in 2008. Although the Tibet development model was criticiz...

Although the issue of redistribution is glossed over by Marglin, there are three reasons why decarbonisation must be accompanied by a massive scaling up of redistribution from the global North to South if the agenda is to be founded on a social justice approach. First, constructing a capital infrastructure in the South in a manner that maximises th...

Since the central government of China started major campaigns for western development in the mid-1990s, the economies of the Tibetan areas in Western China have grown rapidly and living standards have improved. However, grievances and protests have also intensified, as dramatically evidenced by the protests that spread across most Tibetan areas in...

Despite the façade of precise estimates, we do not really know what has been happening to global poverty, all things considered. Despite the façade of moral consensus, we are not even certain whether the MDGs are leading us in the most appropriate policy directions to address poverty. Part of the problem lies in the fact that international and even...

In the wake of the global financial crisis, two ideas became new conventional wisdoms. One was that the mainstream economic consensus of the past decades had been shattered. The other was that the turbulence was beyond comparison to any other since the Great Depression. Both suppositions can be questioned, not for the sake of provocation but for re...

The articles in this special issue represent a selective output from the 2010 annual conference of the Development Studies Association on the theme of ‘Development Paths: Values, Ethics and Morality’. Following a brief introduction to the articles, we pose several future research challenges in the field of Development Studies with respect to this t...

Debates on the current financial crisis have been intense and ongoing, particularly among economists intent on squirming out from under the burden of responsibility with the convenient refrain that no one saw it coming (besides those whose work was being ignored by the mainstream). However, within this debate and despite its loosely substantiated e...

Several ambiguities in the social exclusion literature - in both the fields of social policy and development studies - fuel the common criticism that the concept is redundant with respect to already existing poverty approaches, particularly more multidimensional and processual approaches, such as relative or capability poverty. In order to resolve...

Rapid subsidy-sustained growth since the mid-1990s in the Tibetan areas of Western China has been associated with a rapid transition of the local (mostly Tibetan) labor force. In the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the proportion of the local labor force registered as employed in farming and herding dropped from 76 percent in 1999 (the most agrarian...

China's apparent escape from the external constraints of peripheral late industrialisation in the build up to the global economic crisis of 2007-2009 has been recent and remains tenuous. Before its spectacular trade surpluses of the 2000s, China's external accounts reflected many of these constraints. Even in the midst of the surplus surge, externa...

It is very difficult to know the impact of the MDGs on poverty reduction. On the one hand, poverty measurements are ambiguous, arbitrary and contested, even in the best of cases such as China and India. On the other hand, the mechanisms by which MDGs might have effected poverty reduction are not at all clear, particularly in light of the major glob...

Everyone is talking about China’s currency, it seems. Amidst months of building tension, there is an apparent consensus among most economists, the financial press, and leading economic policy makers in the West that the renminbi is hugely undervalued, making China’s exports unfairly competitive. The global imbalances created by such ‘mercantilist’...

This paper investigates whether China has escaped the vulnerabilities of peripheral and dependent late industrialisation in the build up to the current global economic crisis, with reference to structuralist critiques of Latin American industrialisation in the 1960s and examined through China’s balance of payments data. While it would seem that C...

Recent debates on aid and development are waged on narrow terms in comparison to earlier debates in the 1950s and 1960s. The principal concern of the ‘structuralist’ pioneers of development economics, and the key absence in the current debates, was an understanding of the structural impediments faced by countries going through late industrialisatio...

This paper addresses how Keynesian narratives are being used to reconstitute an orthodox policy paradigm in the face of the current economic crisis. Such ideological revisionism also occurred alongside the 1982 debt crisis and was crucial for the neoliberal ideological triumph that ensued. Similar revisionism can be observed now through narratives...

Cet article explique comment la contestation de la domination chinoise au Tibet est exacerbée par la croissance rapide que les régions tibétaines de Chine occidentale connaissent depuis le milieu des années 1990. Dans un contexte général où les populations tibétaines continuent à ne pas avoir accès au pouvoir politique, les stratégies de développem...

This article examines the confluence of local population transitions (demographic transition and urbanization) with non-local in-migration in the Tibetan areas of western China. The objective is to assess the validity of Tibetan perceptions of "population invasion" by Han Chinese and Chinese Muslims. The article argues that migration to Tibet from...

This chapter addresses these issues with a specific focus on the role of lamas and religious discourse, complementing my previous working paper on the political economy of recent anti-Muslim boycotts by Amdo Tibetans. Since the time of the Tibetan empire in the seventh century, Tibetan relations with Muslims have been fluid and contested, by no mea...

Well-intentioned protests in the west, most recently during the Olympic torch relay, could prompt a hardline crackdown in China that would do the Tibetan cause no good

This paper addresses several ambiguities in the social exclusion literature that fuel the common criticism that the concept is redundant with respect to already existing poverty approaches, particularly more multidimensional and processual approaches such as relative or capability deprivation. It is argued that these ambiguities arise from the fact...

This paper argues that contemporary experiences of social exclusion and interethnic conflict in the Tibetan areas of Western China are interrelated and revolve around three processes – population, growth and employment – all of which centre on the urban areas. In this setting, the critical factors generating exclusion and fuelling conflict are the...

Drawing from the case of Tibetan-Muslim relations from seventh century contact to present Tibetan boycott campaigns against Muslims in Northeast Tibet (Amdo), this paper questions the relevance of the mainstream theoretical disputes on ethnic conflict, i.e. primordialism, instrumentalism, constructivism and so forth, all of which primarily seek to...

This article examines how rapid growth in the Tibetan areas of West China since the mid-1990s has been a key factor exacerbating the unresolved contestations of Chinese rule in these areas. Amidst the continued political disempowerment of Tibetan locals, Beijing has used recent development strategies to channel massive amounts of subsidies through...

This independent analysis examines the rapid growth that has been generated in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) through the extremely heavy government spending and investment strategies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Online document. Incl. bibl.

Autonomy refers to a political arrangement that would offer Tibetans increased voice in the governance and management of the ethnic Tibetan areas in China. Nonetheless, the highly politicized impasse surrounding “The Tibet Question” clouds many of the more practical issues that are implicit in the concept of autonomy. This entrenched posturing can...

The issue of Tibet is an intensely debated topic with much of the polemic revolving around political autonomy and the abuse of civil, political, and cultural rights. Despite evident violations in these areas, the Chinese government counters that on the economic level it has been playing an important developmental and welfare role in Tibet. It argue...

This thesis proposes an original framework for the analysis of third world informal finance. It will be supported by a comprehensive survey of the associated literature. Specifically, most mainstream interpretations of informal finance adhere to a dualist paradigm that revolves around three key assumptions. First that informal firms are less effici...