Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

King's College London | KCL · International Dev

This article evaluates the relevance of dependency theory for understanding contemporary development challenges, especially in the light of changes in the global economy over the past 50 years. In order to do so, the article rectifies previous misunderstandings of the scholarship and offers a new definition of dependency theory as a research progra...

One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from productive economic pursuits. In this paper, we explore these...

This article critically discusses the scope for decolonizing economics teaching. It scrutinizes what it would entail in terms of theory, methods, and pedagogy, and its implications for scholars grappling with issues related to economics teaching. Based on a survey of 498 respondents, it explores how economists across different types of departments...

Whereas the field of International Political Economy (IPE) included a diversity of voices at its outset, histories of the field tend to marginalize certain contributions - particularly those from the Global South. The endeavor to decolonize IPE offers an opportunity to look back at IPE’s history, re-discover the marginalized voices, and imagine new...

This article critically assesses the economics discipline’s capacity to capture the structural features and political economy implications of contemporary financial processes in the global South, with a particular focus on South Africa. Delving into the complexities of financial processes in South Africa, the article proposes an alternative, anti-d...

This article examines the development and implications of local currency bond markets (LCBMs) in African countries in the context of international financial subordination (IFS). Despite the promotion of LCBMs as a solution to debt vulnerability, there is a dearth of research that offers a systematic empirical examination of their actual benefits al...

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven is Lecturer in International Development at King’s College, London, the United Kingdom. Her research is centred on the role of finance in development, structural features of underdevelopment, the political economy of development and critically assessing economics. She is a founder and editor of the blog Developing Economic...

In contrast to neo-classical mainstream approaches to economics, this innovative Modern Guide addresses the complex reality of economic development as an inherently uneven process, exploring the ways of theorizing and empirically exploring the mechanisms with which the unevenness manifests itself. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth...

Despite a varied picture in terms of their relative economic strength, Developing and Emerging Economies (DEEs) remain in a subordinate position in the global monetary and financial system. While the IPE and economics literatures provide rich insights about the significance of this phenomenon, research efforts remain fragmented. To address this pro...

With the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said would become one of the most influential scholars of our era. The book transformed the study of the history of the modern world, as it offered insights into how racist discourses created and maintained European empires. As much for his political activities, Said and his work attracted a numbe...

This article reviews two recent books on persistent inequalities in the global economy and the role of colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in explaining them. Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020) draw on the Black Radical Tradition and stra...

https://youtu.be/2WtvkzrH1NU

Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets - Facing the Liquidity Tsunami by Ilias Alami (2019) is an exciting book that develops a multi-disciplinary perspective on cross-border financial flows, grounded in Marxist political economy. While the book certainly speaks to a diverse set of literatures, in this brief review I’d like to relate...

The rise of the so-called Developing and Emerging Economies (DEEs) has been one of the most fundamental changes to the global economy in recent years. However, despite their rising economic power, DEEs remain in a subordinate position in global financial markets and the international monetary system, which shapes and constrains domestic economic ac...

This paper critically engages with various aspects of the decolonization movement in economics and its implications for the discipline. We operationalize the insights from this engagement using a survey of 498 economists that explores how faculty across different kinds of departments, disciplines, geographies, and identities perceive the problems o...

What are the implications of changes in measurement standards of GDP for global convergence debates? What are the political economy implications? To answer the former question, we examine the changes in national accounting standards from the early 1990s. Revisions to the System of National Accounts (SNA) – the international standard for constructin...

The financialization debate has not paid enough attention to the African continent. The continent's populations and governments have found creative ways of dealing with the capitalist world market and political power relations since decolonization in the late 1950s. However, several forms of structural dependence and subordination persist. We ask i...

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer were awarded the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their pioneering of randomized control trials (RCTs) to find reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. This article unpacks the laureates’ theoretical and methodological approach to d...

One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has begun to behave ‘abnormally’ towards production. It has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from ‘legi...

In this article, we argue that societies’ unpreparedness and inadequate responses to the Covid-19 pandemic expose weaknesses in the foundations of the dominant economic paradigm. We document how economics came to disembed itself from broader societal analysis and how this has influenced public policy in problematic ways, leading to privileging of e...

La economía es única entre las ciencias sociales en tener una sola corriente principal monolítica, la cual descono-ce o es activamente hostil a los enfoques alternativos". (John King, 2013, p. 17) ¿Qué significa economía heterodoxa? ¿Es una etiqueta útil o perjudicial? Al estar fuera de la corriente principal de la disciplina de la Economía, la for...

As COVID-19 exacerbates inequalities, Thomas Piketty’s analysis reads as timely, but inadequate. By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven. As COVID-19 exacerbates inequalities, Thomas Piketty’s analysis reads as timely, but inadequate.

This article situates the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in the history of thought on development, tracing how the focus, theory and methods have shifted in the field. The article evaluates theoretical and methodological critiques of the way randomized control trials (RCTs) are employed by the laureates,...

Samir Amin was a towering figure of radical political economy - known globally, but particularly recognized and appreciated in Africa. When Amin passed away on August 12th, 2018, the outpouring of grief in the form of the plentiful obituaries was moving. Notable in the many obituaries was the consistent reference to Amin’s infectious commitment and...

This paper considers common arguments that either dismiss or undermine the term 'heterodox economics' in order to show that the reluctance to use it stems in part from misunderstandings of (and sometimes disagreement over) what the term means and what it entails to do 'heterodox' research. The paper then develops a new definition of 'heterodox econ...

This paper critically evaluates the recent trends of rising foreign and local currency indebtedness in smaller economies in a broad emerging markets group—across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The paper develops a unique dataset for representative countries from each region and empirically assesses evidence...

This data contains two different data-sets used in our paper "Imputing Away the Ladder". The first part - 'SNA's - contains multiple time-series (for all countries where available) for GDP under different systems of national accounts (SNA 68, SNA 93 and SNA 2008). Growth rates are also calculated for each series, to show the difference between the...

Over the last half century, a large literature has developed on both the nature and the drivers of uneven development. While different methodologies and theoretical approaches to the issue of convergence abound, the use of GDP growth as a measure of economic growth has, remarkably, gone unquestioned. This paper reviews the convergence debates to da...

This edited volume by Matias Margulis examines Raúl Prebisch’s ideas, agency, and influence in an interdisciplinary manner, with a particular emphasis on his relevance for Global Political Economy (GPE). This interdisciplinary approach reminds the reader that Prebisch was indeed much more than just an economic theorist and that his influence on dev...

This edited volume by Matias Margulis examines Raúl Prebisch’s ideas, agency, and influence in an interdisciplinary manner, with a particular emphasis on his relevance for Global Political Economy (GPE). This interdisciplinary approach reminds the reader that Prebisch was indeed much more than just an economic theorist and that his influence on dev...

The Graduation Approach to poverty reduction is inextricably bound up with programmes promoting financial inclusion. Proponents for the approach see it guiding a series of interventions that encourage poor households to ‘graduate’ into ‘mainstream development programmes’ which are centred on the provision of credit and other financial services (BRA...

How did you get involved with dependency theory as a European scholar? Bruszt explains that he first got involved with dependency theory after 1989 when he started studying post-socialist economic development. With David Stark and some other colleagues from economic sociology, he was studying the possible choices these countries had and what potent...

Is it time for dependency theory to make a comeback? Its central idea is that developed (”core”) countries benefit from the global system at the expense of developing (”periphery”) countries—which face structural barriers that make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to develop in the same way that the already developed countries did. As neo-...

Matías Vernengo is one of few modern economists to apply concepts of dependency in his academic work, particularly to his study of Latin American economies. Vernengo encountered variations of dependency theory while conducting his studies in Brazil. He completed both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, w...

According to Peter Evans, theorists today can draw insights from the way dependency scholars formulated theories and thought about the world. However, it is important to keep in mind that those theories emerged in very particular contexts and that today's context is different. Evans therefore encourages young scholars to learn from the spirit of de...

This month, four prominent Marxists met at The New School in New York to debate the relevance of imperialism. The debate was related to the publication of Prabhat Patnaik’s (Jawaharlal Nehru University) new book A Theory of Imperialism (written with Utsa Patnaik). With him in the panel were geographer David Harvey (CUNY), political scientist Nancy...

This article considers current proposals for using electronic payments systems to promote financial inclusion — that is, to widen the availability of financial and monetary services in developing countries. While such systems can generate significant savings in the operation of monetary systems, payment services markets are typically uncompetitive...

As people across the world are struggling to understand the rise of Trumpism, anti-establishment and anti-free trade movements, Erik Reinert (Tallinn University of Technology), Jayati Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and Rainer Kattel (Tallinn University of Technology) have put together an impressive Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic...

This study explores macroeconomic implications of the sovereign bond rush that has been taking place in sub-Saharan Africa since 2006. The focus is on the sub-Saharan sovereign bond yields as proxies for the region's ability to raise new funds on international markets. Despite the subcontinent's tour-de-force entrance to the international bond mark...

Over the past decade, the Sub-Saharan African countries’ ability to draw on new debt in international capital markets has become a central characteristic of their development experience. Yet, the determinants of the borrowing costs are driven by external factors where investor perception plays a key role. This raises concerns over the sustainabilit...

This week it became clear that the World Bank has chosen Paul Romer as its next Chief Economist. As Chief Economist he’ll have the overall responsibility of the Bank’s research program and be able to shape the developments of the highly influential development institution. Commentators have named the choice of Chief Economist impressive , great, hu...

The chapter analyzes the changing nature of capital flows to sub-Saharan Africa and related opportunities and risks given the characteristics of the sub-Saharan economies and the global environment in which they find themselves. The subcontinent has received unprecedented financial flows over the past decade, but some country groups are more expose...

Financial inclusion has been embraced as an important development priority by a broad range of policy markers over the past decade. National governments, the G20, international financial institutions, and philanthropic foundations have all publicly committed themselves to strategies for financial inclusion in developing economies.[1] This commitmen...

Last month, the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) were launched at the UN in New York. This is the outcome of two years of consultations, lobbying, and debate about what the “post-2015” agenda should look like. This agenda is likely to have far-reaching implications both for development finance and for the promotion of social and economic righ...

We raise some basic conceptual questions regarding global development goals: Why have them at all? What function, if any, might they serve, and under what conditions could they do so successfully? Based on our answers to these questions, we identify serious inadequacies in the contemporary approach to development goals and relate these to weaknesse...

This paper reviews the methodology and theory supporting Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson's (2001) famous “Reversal of Fortune” thesis. Their thesis provides a simple and linear explanation to why some countries are rich today, while some are poor. It argues that European colonialists settled and introduced “good” institutions in countries that were...