Ilene Grabel

• University of Denver

Uncertainty, where we do not know the likelihood of future events, dominates our world. This article examines how economics as a profession and discipline can address uncertainty. From Frank Knight to John Maynard Keynes to Friedrich von Hayek to George Shackle, economics has highlighted the importance of uncertain knowledge and distinguished this...

I offer this article as a small way of honoring my friend, mentor, and role model Jim Crotty, whose intellectual legacy, commitment to engaged scholarship, lived experience, and warmth and generosity continue to influence me profoundly. Here, I offer several observations and speculations on the state of play in the global and US financial systems i...

The crises of 1997–98, 2008, and the pandemic accelerated contradictory changes in global financial governance. Taken together, the change and stasis propelled by these crises is coalescing around a fragmented “post-American financial order.” The war in Ukraine represents another inflection point. The war has facilitated the reassertion of American...

Feminists and other progressives have long argued that global macroeconomic governance is deeply deficient. The deficiencies have been revealed and amplified by the COVID-19 crisis. The need to radically reconstruct the global economic governance architecture is therefore pressing. Albert Hirschman’s conception of “possibilism” is particularly rele...

This article examines the effects of the Asian crisis and especially the global financial crisis on developmental finance (that is, long‐term project finance and counter‐cyclical liquidity support) and the global financial architecture. In this connection three claims are advanced. The first is positive: that the crises occasioned meaningful althou...

p align="right"> Este trabajo está dirigido a responder una pregunta. ¿Cómo podría Albert O. Hirschman tener una teoría del papel de la profesión de los economistas en los impulsos no-liberales que han surgido en muchas partes del mundo? Se argumenta que Hirschman consideraría que la profesión está significativa-mente implicada en haber creado la...

The rebranding of capital controls during the global crisis has widened the policy space in the financial arena to a greater, more consistent degree than following the Asian crisis. How are we to account for this extraordinary ideational and policy evolution? The paper highlights five factors that contribute to the evolving rebranding of capital co...

An anniversary issue provides an inescapably inviting opportunity to reflect on the past, evaluate the present, and contemplate the future. Eschewing the self-congratulatory rhetoric of traditional anniversary celebrations, we have devoted this 20th anniversary issue of RIPE to contributions that critically examine the academic discipline of intern...

This study examines three related questions. How has the global financial crisis of 2008 affected the influence that developing countries have within the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? What new policy space is available to developing countries? What alternative financial architectures will emerge as competitors or complements to the IMF? The st...

La crisis actual está resultando productiva en cuanto a experimentación institucional, en el debate y puesta en práctica de arquitecturas financieras delmundo en desarrollo. El empuje hacia tal experimentación surgió desde la crisis financiera de Asia del Este de 1997-98, la cual provocó que algunos países en desarrollo tomaran medidas para protege...

The current crisis is proving to be productive of institutional experimentation in the realm of financial architecture(s) in the developing world. The drive toward experimentation arose out of the East Asian financial crisis of 1997‐98, which provoked some developing countries to take steps to insulate themselves from future turbulence, IMF sanctio...

The response by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (and developing country national governments) to the current global financial crisis represents a moment of what I term ‘productive incoherence’, which has displaced the constraining ‘neoliberal coherence’ of the past several decades. Productive incoherence refers to the proliferation of inconsi...

Grabel addresses three related questions. How is the crisis affecting the governance of the IMF and the influence that developing countries have within the institution; the policy space available to developing countries; and the prospects that alternative financial architectures will emerge as competitors or complements to the Fund? At this point i...

Malcolm Sawyer’s illustrious career is marked by his profound engagement with Keynesian and Kaleckian macroeconomic theory and by his critically important interventions in debates over economic policies, particularly in the European context. He has been a leading force in the revitalisation and increased professional standing of heterodox economics...

Much work in finance, money and macroeconomics is dominated by neo-classical theoretical models and by empirical tests that are built on assumptions that yield formal tractability but that do little to illuminate the complexities of the economy. This work also tells us little about the political economy effects of the phenomena under consideration....

This paper explores the contribution of Keynesian economics to the matter of finance and development. It does so in several steps. First, the paper presents an account of the mainstream neoclassical approach to finance and development and traces through its historical evolution since the early 1970s. Second, the paper demonstrates that the failure...

Private remittances are becoming an increasingly important part of the financial landscape of many developing countries. Indeed, for some such countries, these flows are the single most important type of international capital inflowâpublic or privateâand they have become an important source of purchasing power and foreign exchange. The growing impo...

Private remittances are becoming an increasingly important part of the financial landscape of many developing countries. Indeed, for some such countries, these flows are the single most important type of international capital inflow—public or private--and they have become an importance source of purchasing power and foreign exchange. The growing im...

This article traces the concept of "policy coherence" in new debates over development policy space, explores the codification of coherence through International Monetary Fund World Bank World Trade Organization cooperation and recent bi- and multilateral trade agreements, and critiques the abuse of this concept. Today, coherence is code for "policy...

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This paper examines policies to tax international private capital flows and securities transactions in developing countries. Many recent studies focus on the macroeconomic dividends associated with these policies (namely, their contribution to macroeconomic and financial stability and lengthened investor time horizons). In this paper I explore whet...

This paper summarizes our new book, Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual (Chang and Grabel, 2004). It begins from the premise that the view that there is no alternative to neoliberal economic policies in developing countries is fundamentally and dangerously incorrect. The "no alternative" dictum has commonly been associated...

This paper investigates the shortcomings of the “early warning systems” (EWS) that are currently being promoted with such vigour in the multilateral and academic community. It then advocates an integrated “trip wire-speed bump” regime to reduce financial risk and, as a consequence, to reduce the frequency and depth of financial crises in developing...

This paper uses the term, capital management techniques, to refer to two complementary (and often overlapping) types of financial policies: policies that govern international private capital flows and those that enforce prudential management of domestic financial institutions. The paper shows that regimes of capital management take diverse forms an...

We examine the experiences of five developing countries that employed various capital management techniques during the 1990s. By ‘capital management techniques’ we refer to policies of prudential financial regulation and controls that affect international capital flows to achieve national economic goals. One key finding is that by employing a diver...

This paper explores two proposals to tax financial flows in developing economies—the package of policies implemented to various degrees by Chile and Colombia during the 1990s, widely referred to today as the Chilean model—and securities transactions taxes (STTs). I find that each provides a viable mechanism to raise revenue in some developing count...

The Asian crisis provides heterodox economists with the opportunity to investigate counterfactually whether the financial policies they have proposed would have averted the crisis. The paper argues that neo-liberal financial integration introduces distinct risks to emerging economies--currency, flight, fragility, contagion and sovereignty risks. Th...

In the aftermath of the European currency crisis of 1992-3, the Mexican financial crisis of 1994-5 and the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8, neoclassical economists in the academy and policy community have been engaged in a project to develop predictors or indicators of currency, banking and generalized financial crises in developing economies. Thi...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

The criterion of "policy credibility" is invoked with increasing frequency today by new-classical development economists in debates over economic and institutional reform in developing and transitional countries. The paper argues that the credibility criterion is used to privilege neoliberal economic policies and associated institutions. The paper...

This chapter presents a post-Keynesian interpretation of the consequences of financial liberalization (FL) programs in less developed countries (LDCs). It is argued that FL can lead to a particular kind of development, “speculation-led economic development,” which is characterized by a preponderance of risky investment practices and shaky financial...

This paper examines how 12 "major depreciations" between 1997 and 2000 affected different measures of firm performance in a sample of over 13,500 companies from around the world. Results suggest that in the year after depreciations, firms have significantly higher growth in market capitalization, but significantly lower growth in net income (when m...

This article argues for the importance of measuring stock market volatility following financial liberalisation in developing countries. Three alternative indices for measuring volatility are developed; these are used to examine the view that financial liberalisation induces increased asset price volatility. Based on the limited data available, this...

The paper presents a post-Keynesian interpretation of the consequences of financial liberalization (FL) programs in less developed countries (LDCs). The interpretation advanced here incorporates the new-Keynesian concepts of adverse selection and credit rationing into a post-Keynesian framework. It is argued that FL can lead to a particular kind of...

The Asian crisis provides heterodox economists with the opportunity to investigate counterfactually whether the financial policies they have proposed would have averted the crisis. The paper argues that neoliberal financial integration (both a cause and effect of global financialization) introduces distinct risks to emerging economies—currency, fli...

Since the Mexican financial crisis of 1994-95, a large number of developing and newly industrialized countries have experienced financial crises. During 1997-8, the economies of many countries in South East Asia (e.g., Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand), Russia and Brazil confronted serious declines in their currency an...