Abstract Next to artificial intelligence and big data, blockchains have emerged as one of the most oft-cited technologies associated with the digital economy. Leading technology companies have recently contributed to making the technology used more widely by developing integrated blockchain offerings. The emergence of such services yet strikingly clashes with the original stated goal of the technology

Abstract As the consequences of a warming world intensify and actions to mitigate climate change remain persistently slow, demands for a more radical political economic transition focused on climate and justice have grown. ‘Just transition’ is one such counter-hegemony that has gained wide appeal within the field and practice of international political economy. Through document analysis and interviews

Abstract This article explores how practice theory can contribute towards a better understanding of the regular multilateral diplomacy that sustains the World Trade Organization (WTO). Based on interviews, participant observation and a systematic review of WTO documents, it demonstrates how state representatives define and contest the ways in which the many specialized WTO committees conduct their

Abstract Past research has shown that national language policies can attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and that potential FDI-host countries coordinate their domestic language policies in anticipation of this. While the increased FDI-inflows arising from such language policies may benefit some members of society, these shifts in policy can adversely affect those whose spoken languages are not

Abstract Many oil and gas firms claim they are going green. But are they actually walking the talk? We analyze the political and economic behavior of publicly traded oil majors to understand the degree to which they are decarbonizing. We collect a wide range of firm-level data from 2004 to 2019, including a novel measurement of political behavior based on original coding of corporate earnings calls

Abstract Many economies in the Western world have been through a regime shift towards fiscal austerity since the 1970s. Existing scholarship ascribes trends in austerity to globalisation or the influence of a new economic paradigm. This paper develops a different approach by stressing the strategic intervention of central banks in governments’ fiscal decisions. It analyses archival documents from the

Abstract Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) rejects the classical political economy distinction between productive and unproductive labor, the latter defined as all labor that does not produce surplus-value. Rather, much non-commodified labor, particularly that done in the domestic sphere, is not unproductive but necessary since it produces labor-power. Hence, SRT has proposed an alternative distinction:

Abstract This paper discusses interventions by Max Weber in order to consider how sociological understandings of societal differentiation – most importantly, between the state and the financial economy – can be framed in terms of ‘securitization’ as proposed by critical security studies (CSS). I engage with relevant IR and IPE literature in two ways. First, I refer to IR approaches to securitization

Abstract This paper reconceptualizes the impact of US finance on European banking as a process of ‘extroverted financialisation’. This impact is commonly associated with the rise of ‘market-based banking’ (MBB). While MBB exposes how commercial banking has been deeply transformed by disintermediation and borrowing from wholesale markets, the concept struggles to capture the distinct imperatives of

Abstract In the context of post-crisis global economic governance, the global financial inclusion agenda is widely supported by international organizations, states, and civil society organizations. Some scholars attribute the rise of this agenda to the logic of neoliberalism and power of global financial actors, yet these accounts often obscure the role of ambiguity in facilitating broad support. In

Abstract Choke points in transport and logistics have been identified as devices of the power of workers in these sectors. The 11 day long strike of around 400,000 Brazilian truck drivers at more than 750 blockades in May 2018 exercised an effective blockade of the national economy but only led to meagre results. The article asks how this mismatch between the power to block the flow of goods and the

Abstract With rare exception, political economists assume that developmental policies and developmental alliances between states and business result from top-down, state co-option or coercion of business. They also do not expect the subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) and their local, non-expat, managers – the ‘compradors’ – to press for developmentalism in host countries. Based on process

Abstract This paper analyzes the US Federal Reserve (Fed)’s landmark 2012 decision to adopt an explicit inflation target for the first time in its history. The paper focuses on explaining the dynamics of this policy shift. The relevant literatures authoritatively establish types of incremental change and the transformative nature of this kind of change. Using the case of the Fed’s policy shift, this

Abstract Recent years have seen vast sums of money invested in health, education and economic empowerment Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs for women and girls, particularly in the Global South. Feminist scholars of IPE have charted how transnational corporations (TNCs) have partnered with international institutions, donor governments and non-governmental organizations to position themselves

Abstract We are increasingly surrounded by talk of digitalization. Yet, we remain unsure about what impact this digitalization will have upon socio-economic institutions, how the introduction of this digitalization will be contested, the likely role of the state in managing the adoption of digital technology, and the likely consequences for the broader political economy if and when it is introduced

Abstract Explanations for slow global growth (secular stagnation) correctly focus on income inequality and wage formation but are incomplete. They ignore the source of wages and fail to ask why a rising profit share has not produced more investment. Older but essential insights on stagnation from Keynes, Schumpeter and Veblen complement orthodox and post-Keynesian analyses to generate a more robust

Abstract Despite the important International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship on the impact of neoliberal marketisation on women in the Global South, the linkages with reproductive and informal work are often neglected, as is its interaction with multi-level varieties of patriarchy. Developing a theoretical framework merging social reproduction theory and varieties of gender regimes, this article

Abstract In contrast to fields such as development, peace and security, and corporate governance, questions of gender equality have only recently begun entering into trade policymaking. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of initiatives aimed at leveraging trade for gender equality and addressing the adverse impacts of trade on women and other vulnerable populations. In this article, we

Abstract In a recent paper, Piketty argues that the vote for the left in France, the UK and the USA tends increasingly to be associated with a high education level whereas a traditional class- or income-based divide separated left from right individuals in the 1950s and 1960s. The current situation would be characterised by a dominance of ‘elites’ in left and right constituencies: financially rich

Abstract Scholars continue to debate why states repay their debts to foreign creditors. The existing literature stresses the short-term economic and political costs that deter default, focusing on reputational damage, creditor reprisals, spillover costs and loss of office. International Relations scholars and economists have largely tested these explanations using quantitative methods, framing their

Abstract The paper contributes to the recent growth models debate through a cross-country analysis of growth drivers before and after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). It argues that the widely used dichotomy of export-led versus (debt-financed) consumption-led growth has lost its usefulness since the GFC. Specifically, identifying growth models through growth contributions can give misleading

Abstract Recent analyses of international affairs highlight that states are increasingly exploiting the key position of some private industries in critical hubs of global economic networks to gain an advantage over their competitors. The key role of private companies in international competition has also significant implications in the cyber-domain, where private actors are the main owners of data

Abstract This paper studies research interests, paradigmatic orientation and political involvement among roughly 700 full professors of economics at universities located in German-speaking countries. We collect biographical and institutional information on these professorships to derive indicators for research orientation, paradigmatic stance and political involvement. The main contribution of this

Abstract We might be tempted to view the recent efforts by political leaders to cultivate certain convenient forms of economic ignorance as characteristic of a novel ‘post-truth’ age. This article suggests instead that we take this troubling trend as an invitation to examine the role of ignorance more generally in political economic thinking and practice. Whereas many scholars have treated uncertainty

Abstract The housing booms and busts in Ireland and Spain were among the most striking episodes of the Eurozone crisis. While asset price inflation and financialization of housing was gathering pace across the developed world, these two ‘most different’ cases converged on the same outcome as the most extreme forms of construction-based bubbles. The key contributions of this paper are threefold. Firstly

Abstract This article examines hidden costs of three prominent mineral supply chain ‘solutions’ that respectively aim to create ‘conflict-free’ minerals, curtail corruption, and reduce mercury pollution. Our analysis underscores the heterogeneous ways in which global capitalism shapes regulatory injustices spanning multiple scales, illustrating how ‘clean’ mineral supply chain schemes can hide inequitable

Abstract The growth models perspective analyzes the role of social blocs in crafting countries’ economic policies, but its treatment of business power as purely structural prevents it from addressing an important question in the politics of digital transformation: How have new sectors with miniscule economic footprints been able to influence economic policy? This article explores how tech and venture

Abstract Feminist political economy has illuminated the gendered dimensions of the globalisation of production. Whilst this literature provides essential insights on gendered exploitation in export-oriented industries, women’s work in localised labour markets in the Global South remains underexplored. This paper seeks to address this gap by putting into dialogue three bodies of literature – feminist

Abstract There are two main political economy explanations of the Eurocrisis. The labor market view regards cross-country differences in wage bargaining institutions as the root cause of the crisis. The finance view, instead, emphasizes cross-border financial flows and downplays labor market institutions. For the first time, we attempt to assess these two explanations jointly. We find that financial

Abstract How can we better understand how changes in global economic governance since the global financial crisis are gendered? In response to pleas for gender research that moves away from ‘somewhat stifling critiques of co-optation’ and the ‘dichotomization of co-optation and resistance’, this article ‘studies up’ to answer unresolved questions about ‘how feminist agendas have been absorbed into

(2021). Strengthening RIPE’s commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion in our field. Review of International Political Economy: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 1-6.

(2021). RIPE 2020 diversity statement. Review of International Political Economy: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 7-10.

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed massive failures of governance at the global and national levels. Global health governance failed rapidly, with action quickly becoming nationally based, uncoordinated, and often zero-sum. However, domestic health governance also often fared very poorly, even in some of the wealthiest countries, which were ostensibly best-prepared to deal with a pandemic.

Abstract Why do governments compete for investment through tax incentives when there is strong evidence that such packages are inconsequential to the locational decisions of foreign firms? Previous scholarship has attributed pro-business policies such as investment incentives to factors including the structural power of business in an era of international capital mobility, fiscal competition generated

Abstract Commodity trading firms occupy a central position in global supply chains and their activities have been associated with financial instability, social upheaval and manifold forms of ecological devastation. This paper examines these companies in the context of debates regarding corporate financialization. We find that since the 2003–2011 commodity boom, trading firms have become less financialized

Abstract This article uncovers the crisis of social reproduction in Occupied Palestine in the context of severe economic and political turmoil by specifically highlighting the ways in which impacts have been felt differently by men and women. It does so by considering the interactions of production and reproduction. The article confirms that, as a result of economic hardship, women, particularly married

Abstract Social reproduction and women’s unpaid reproductive labour are integral both to capitalist production and class relations, and to international and national political economies. Based on an original theoretical framework that combines a Thompsonian historical materialist class approach, a Marxist-feminist social reproduction approach and a feminist political economy approach to the everyday

Abstract Since the early 2000s transnational surrogacy has emerged as a new capitalist frontier founded on the intensification of the commodification of women’s reproductive labours, bodies and biologies. This has resulted in academic and policy debates on whether to outlaw surrogacy altogether or to ban commercial surrogacy in favour of altruistic forms of surrogacy. Rather than tackling surrogacy

Abstract The material conditions in which women provide breast milk range widely, on the basis of their class and geographical provenance. The commercialisation of breast milk provision throws up questions related to debates on the transnational reconfiguration of social reproduction as they intersect with discourses on motherhood and healthy child development as well as contemporary processes of commodification

Abstract This article explores ‘time’ as a crucial category of analysis shaping and shaped by the dynamics of exploitation and social reproduction across the global assembly line. Focusing on the Indian garment industry, the article develops a feminist political economy of time stressing the productive and reproductive temporalities of exploitation, which give rise to multiple forms of labour circulation

Abstract Global governance is widely perceived to be ‘gridlocked’, ‘unravelling’, and ‘unfit for purpose’. The legitimacy of old institutions is breaking down, yet new institutions struggle to establish themselves as viable alternatives. Though overlooked, global development governance is no exception. Heterogeneous development actors, approaches, and understandings increasingly characterize the field

Abstract One of the main objectives of EU trade policy is to establish wider protection for its regional specialty foods, known as Geographical Indications (GIs). In spite of US opposition, the EU has successfully considered additional protection for its GIs a red line in recent trade agreements. A key piece to the puzzle of this success is that whereas the literature has typically treated trade and

Abstract Forced displacement – the involuntary movement of people from their homes and livelihoods – has captured public attention through diverging discourses of humanitarianism and global xenophobia. 2.5 million asylum claims were lodged in the European Union (EU) in 2015–16 leading to national and region-wide strategies of border securitization. Refugee governance in the EU is marked by contradictory

Abstract This article argues that financial inclusion policy in Pakistan has been subsumed by the regulatory needs of the central bank, opening a divide between the ‘development approach’ of donors and the ‘regulatory approach’ of the central bank. This shift is identified in an emerging macro turn in central bank discourse and policy, which is steering the National Financial Inclusion Strategy away

Abstract Recent electoral successes for candidates with anti-globalization platforms highlight the need to understand globalization’s effects on voting behavior. To understand how globalization affects whether people vote, we posit that it is necessary to consider both globalization’s distributional effects on individuals and individuals’ beliefs about the general view of globalization among their

Abstract The dual emphasis on the benefits of global supply chain integration and private governance to address its ethical gaps have given prominence to an inclusive vision of chains which, this paper argues, drawing on the case of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), has been greatly exaggerated. In the post-war era, SVG built a successful banana industry under a preferential agreement with the

Abstract Dealing with uncertainty has become a matter of great concern for policy makers and scientific research in a world facing global, epochal and complex changes. But in essence, you cannot entirely predict the future. This article aims at conceptualizing the limits to anticipate the future – or what is often referred as the substitution of risk for uncertainty. In contrast to most theories examining

Abstract This article starts from the premise that International Political Economy (IPE) literature – with some notable exceptions – has a blind spot for the colonial and contested histories of financial infrastructures. Often considered to be the mere ‘plumbing’ of international finance, financial infrastructures instead are profoundly political and rooted in long-term colonial histories. To start

Abstract The encompassing scale and scope of International Political Economy (IPE) is rare in the social sciences. Our subject matter affects the way our field organizes and produces knowledge: we study complex overlapping systems where the challenges of adequate description and causal explanation are especially difficult, and as such IPE scholarship borrows from a vast range of social theory and methods

Abstract Political Economy is inundated with foundational dichotomies, which constitute central concepts in its theorizing. Feminist scholarship has problematized the gender subtext of these dichotomies and the resulting blind spots, including the positioning of women’s labour, processes of reproduction, and private households as marginal to the economy. The paper offers a reading of contemporary writings

Abstract In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–09, political economists have typically identified and interrogated speculative logics and credit-debt relations as the markers of financialized capitalism. This paper argues that assets, and the contingent processes which turn all manner of things into assets (i.e. ‘assetization’), can also be usefully foregrounded to understand the character

Abstract How are the tools that govern the world economy legitimated? Here we discuss how governance tools - such as policy scripts, templates, and benchmarks - are developed to contain particular types of knowledge. Such tools contain blueprints of how the world economy should work. Understanding how they are produced and legitimated is important if we are to comprehend how they replicate particular

Abstract The dynamics of climate change politics have thrown up two fundamental, and entirely contradictory, challenges for political economy in the last 10 years. On the one hand, the new science of ‘net zero emissions’ has produced a growing recognition that a world without fossil fuels is both absolutely necessary and utterly transformative. On the other hand, civilizational collapse (absolute declines

Abstract Which blind spots shape scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE)? That question animates the contributions to a double special issue—one in the Review of International Political Economy, and a companion one in New Political Economy. The global financial crisis had seemed to vindicate broad-ranging IPE perspectives at the expense of narrow economics theories. Yet the tumultuous

Abstract Standard accounts of the emergence of the modern global economic order posit its origins in the expansion of markets or in the changing nature of the social relations of capitalist production. Each fails to acknowledge the significance of colonial relations underpinning these processes, as formative of, and continuous with them. This is a consequence of the dominant understandings (across

Abstract A full understanding of the development and re-production of IPE is only possible with an appreciation of its disciplinary politics. This institutionalises four aspects of academic inquiry: (a) what is considered admissible work in the field, (b) how work should be conducted and where it should be published (c) where the field’s legitimate boundaries are, and (d) ‘external relations’ with

Abstract Macroeconomic statistics simultaneously shape and try to capture the political economy we study. Their biases mold social and political dynamics; they also infect academic and policy analysis. Political economy can both benefit from and advance an understanding of economic statistics as political artefacts. To help unlock that potential, this article builds on scholarship dispersed across

(2020). To the Memory of Wade Jacoby. Review of International Political Economy: Vol. 27, Special issue: Market integration and room for development in the peripheries. Guest Editors: László Bruszt and Julia Langbein, pp. 995-995.