Governance as ‘Kicking Away the Ladder'

The label ‘poor governance’ throws together real evils such as corruption and rent-seeking with a new group of alleged evils which are actually good for development, including a role for the state in the economy and support for domestic capital. Successful development policies of Europe in the late nineteenth century and the Asian Tigers and Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century are now labelled as ‘poor governance.’ This is what Ha-Joon Chang described as ‘kicking away the ladder’ by which rich countries climbed to development, so that today’s poor countries cannot follow. Mozambique is cited as an example of how the good governance rhetoric has been misused to retard development and poverty reduction.     

论世界银行与环境保护

随着可持续发展战略的提出,世界银行越来越强调将环境保护寓于其消除贫困、发展经济的宗旨之中,形成了一套独具特色的环境保护政策,给我国提供了有益的启示。本文从世界银行的环境保护机构、环境保护政策及我国的对策等方面予以论述。     

Neoliberalism with a Feminist Face: Crafting a new Hegemony at the World Bank

Neoliberalism has been discredited as a result of proliferating crises (financial, ecological, care) and mounting inequality. This paper examines the growing research on gender at the World Bank as a site for the construction of a new hegemonic consensus around neoliberalism. Drawing on a computer-assisted inductive analysis of thirty-four Bank publications on gender since 2001, the paper documents Bank efforts to establish a positive relationship between gender equality and growth; shows the expansion of the Bank’s definition of equality as equal opportunity; illustrates how the focus on institutions has enabled engagement with core feminist concerns, such as equality in the family; and traces how incorporating notions of women’s empowerment and agency has made possible a focus on domestic violence. The paper concludes by emphasizing the ambiguous effects of the Bank’s new neoliberalism, which continues to use the market as the arbiter of social values while providing openings for feminist agendas.     

家族企业代际传承研究视角综述

家族企业是世界范围内普遍存在的企业组织形式,并且在世界各国的经济中都占据了举足轻重的地位,家族企业的健康发展也是世界经济平稳发展的关键。我国改革开放以来,家族企业经过三十多年的发展,取得了令人瞩目的成就。然而,在我国的家族企业取得辉煌成就的同时,家族企业的创立者不可避免的步入了人生的老年阶段,家族企业的代际传承迫在眉睫。而家族企业的代际传承,又是家族企业能否持续发展的关键要素之一,因此,家族企业的代际传承的研究开始不断受到实践和理论界的关注,成为研究家族企业的热点问题之一。本文通过对目前家族企业代际传承的研究视角进行整理和汇总,借鉴前人的研究方法和思路,对我国的家族企业的代际传承研究提供有利的理论依据和研究基础。     

Regret theory and the banking firm: The optimal bank interest margin

This paper examines the optimal bank interest margin, i.e., the spread between the loan rate and the deposit rate of a bank, when the bank is not only risk-averse but also regret-averse. Regret-averse preferences are characterized by a utility function that includes disutility from having chosen ex-post suboptimal alternatives. We show that the presence of regret aversion raises or lowers the optimal bank interest margin than the one chosen by the purely risk-averse bank, depending on whether the probability of default is below or above a threshold value, respectively. Regret aversion as such makes the bank less prudent and more prone to risk-taking when the probability of default is high, thereby adversely affecting the stability of the banking system.     

Individual values and household finances

We create individual cultural values measures for households and show that this is an important determinant of their financial behaviour. To date, personal cultural values have only been indirectly measured through religion and trust. But these are, at best, an approximation of true cultural values. Applying a holistic framework from the World Values Survey (WVS), we create individual measures of cultural values, and show that the self-expression values of this framework are positively associated with households’ financial decisions. Examining the individual cultural values that make up the WVS model, we further show that happiness, trust, and playing an active role in society, are individually important determinants of household financial decision-making. Our study shows that cultural values can be brought from a generalized national level to the individual level in order to improve our understanding of household financial decision-making.     

The Politics of Canadian Monetary Policy: Reassessing Canadian Inflation,Part II

This is the second installment of a two-part article on Canadian inflation. This article builds on the traditional conflict theory of inflation by applying insights from the post-Keynesian and micro-politics theories of money and central bank policy. It argues that the Bank of Canada’s inflation targets — not just inflation itself — have to be understood in terms of social conflict and power. This analysis extends the evidence on the distributive implications of Canadian inflation offered in Part I.     

外资进入、国内市场导向与中国本土企业创新——基于制造业企业微观数据的实证

东道国国内市场优势是影响外资创新溢出效应的重要因素之一。基于国内市场导向视角,利用中国制造业企业微观数据,实证分析外资进入对本土企业创新的影响及作用机制。结果表明：(1)行业外资进入显著促进了中国本土企业创新,外资国内市场导向对该促进效应存在强烈的正向调节作用,该结论在考虑了内生性问题和一系列稳健性检验后依然成立。(2)机制分析发现,外资国内市场导向通过生产本地化效应和市场结构效应强化外资进入对本土企业创新的促进作用。(3)异质性分析发现,资本技术密集型、与外资技术差距较小的本土企业,外资进入的创新促进作用更大;对于不同要素密集度的本土企业,外资国内市场导向均能发挥正向调节作用;但与外资技术差距较小的本土企业,外资国内市场导向的调节效应更强。在“双循环”新发展格局背景下,本文对充分发挥强大国内市场优势高水平引进外资、吸聚全球资源要素建设创新型国家提供了理论参考与政策启示。     

Economic beliefs and institutional politics: Human capital theory and the changing views of the World Bank about education (1950–1985)

One of the main characteristics of economic policy-making in the postwar period was the rise of international agencies and their influence in setting the agenda in various policy aspects. Education was one of the areas that became very important to the activity of international agencies. This article analyses the changing views about education of the World Bank, from the late forties to the mid-eighties, and the way its priorities and approach to education were moulded by the dissemination of human capital theory. The analysis will emphasise the difficulties faced to the diffusion of this approach in a context largely favourable and dominated by manpower planning and different policy views about education, providing an interesting example about the complexities of the dissemination of economic ideas within international organisations.     

Return of industrial policy?

For the sake of freedom, economic growth and poverty reduction the state in market economies should limit itself to regulating markets and (sometimes) correcting ‘market failures’. This neoliberal conception has been the near-consensus for the past two to three decades in the West and in western-led international organizations such as the World Bank. But as of recently, the consensus has been challenged by circumstances with which it cannot contend. This article spells out key ideas behind the consensus – in particular, its rejection of industrial policy. It then argues that the US government has long practised – to good effect – a hitherto little noticed type of industrial policy focused neither on the individual firm nor on the geographic region but on networks of firms, and that a (small) change in the American normative climate has occurred post 2008 in favour of a government steering role in markets. Moreover, some middle-income countries, with manufacturing sectors shrinking in the face of East Asian competition, have recently shown renewed interest in industrial policy. Finally, parts of the World Bank have recently begun to operationalize industrial policy, under the banner of ‘building competitive industries’ (industrial policy by another name), as has not been the case since the mid 1980s. The combination of these several forces may herald the emergence of new global norms in favour of a more ‘developmental’ role of the state.     

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

ABSTRACT

Founded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank’s Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the notion of resilience, which ties together the various activities proposed under the Plan. Resilience must respectively be strengthened, empowered and enabled in order for African countries to withstand climate change impacts. In this paper we subject this new climate-resilient development discourse to critical scrutiny. Using the theoretical lens of post-politics, we caution how the ill-defined category of resilience is deployed to reinforce a profoundly depoliticising agenda in which climate change is posited as an external threat to an otherwise seamless narrative of African advancement. In so doing, we illustrate how the Bank obscures the contested histories of African development and uses the discourse of climate-resilient development to perpetuate its neoliberal agenda within the continent.     

The World Bank and the persistence of poverty in poor countries

William Easterly has written a book about why extensive development assistance over the course of decades failed to alleviate poverty in poor countries. As an economist at the World Bank, Easterly observed how resources and advice provided by the Bank failed to improve the lives of the poor in poor countries. Easterly considers different explanations for the development failures. He places the blame for persistence of poverty in poor countries on governments and political elites, who use their poor as hostages to personally benefit from aid resources and debt relief.     

Culture matters: what cultural values influence budget transparency?

This article empirically examines whether cultural values significantly influence budget transparency. We employ data for budget transparency from the Open Budget Index, and data for national culture from Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the Global Leadership and Behavioral Effectiveness Research Project and the World Values Survey to explore this question. We find evidence that individualism positively influences budget transparency. We also find that stronger preferences for institutional collectivism, masculinity and authoritarian rule lower budget transparency. These results suggest that national culture shapes preferences for budget transparency and influences the possibility of success for attempts to improve budget transparency across countries.     

The World Bank and Emerging Powers: Beyond the Multipolarity–Multilateralism Conundrum

The discrepancy between the increasingly multipolar world economy of the recent decades and the stubbornly limited representativeness of the organisations mandated with its governance causes much strain in global politics. Some scholars suggest that this chronic mismatch will undermine existing multilateral bodies, while others expect the present architecture to persist. This article contends that the outcomes of this challenge are institution-specific. In settings where significant operational realignments are possible within existing mandates and governance structures, the multipolarity–multilateralism conundrum could be partly mitigated. The argument is based on a thematic analysis of all IBRD-IDA loan commitments between 2002 and 2015 in the World Bank’s seven all-time top borrowers: Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey (collectively, the Big Seven). The key finding is that while these emerging countries remain the Bank’s biggest clients, the terms of their engagement have shifted precisely along the lines where they had already differed from the rest of the Bank’s clientele: away from politically onerous governance and institutional reforms, and towards developing physical and market infrastructure while attaining social sustainability. This implicit realignment is facilitated by the Bank’s diverse policy repertoire, which allows considerable inter-regional and intra-regional variation in lending patterns to accommodate member preferences.     

World Bank trade loans and export performance of recipient countries

Since 1980 several developing countries have received World Bank structural loans, aimed at opening their economy to international trade. By estimating a gravity equation on a panel of 180 countries, observed from 1962 to 2010, we investigate whether the Bank’s programs have affected the export performance of beneficiaries in the subsequent years. According to our results, trade loans have been ineffective in the shorter run while, in the longer, they appear to have hindered the export performance of recipient countries. The Bank’s new trade policy approach, however, seems to have some potential for inverting the negative influence that we have detected.     

Resource Accounting in Measures of Unsustainability: Challenging the World Bank's Conclusions

The World Bank has recently published acomprehensive study of environmental and resourceaccounting, covering 103 countries (World Bank1997a). The study concludes that many Sub-Saharan,Northern African and Middle East countries have hadnegative `genuine' saving rates over the last 20years and therefore fail to pass the test of weaksustainability. This paper argues that the Bank'sconclusions depend on a method for computing usercosts from resource exploitation that is challengedby two competing ones (the `El Serafy'-method andthe method of Repetto et al.) and is inferior to oneof its rivals. Resource rents are re-computed usingthe `El Serafy'-method for 14 countries and theSub-Saharan and Northern African and Middle Eastregions. The results are that both regions andalmost all countries either stop exhibiting signs ofunsustainability or their unsustainability can beexplained without having recourse to resourceaccounting. However, for Congo, Ecuador, Gabon,Nigeria, Mauritania and Trinidad and Tobago there isa lesson: These countries did not adequately use theopportunities they were given through their naturalresource endowments and should learn from theirmistake for the future depletion of their remainingreserves of natural resources.