The UK overseas territories: A decade of progress and prosperity?

This article analyses the relationship between the UK and its Overseas Territories since the publication of the 1999 White Paper Partnership for Progress and Prosperity. The article considers the efforts by the UK government to improve links with the territories via a new partnership based on mutual obligations and responsibilities. It focuses on the two most important aspects of the White Paper - governance and economic growth and sustainability. Much has been achieved, but fundamental structural problems in the relationship remain unattended. The article concludes by recommending how the relationship can be improved over the coming years. © 2011 Taylor & Francis

The normativity of numbers: World Bank and IMF conditionality

Good governance reforms aim at transforming African state bureaucracies into efficient, transparent, and accountable institutions. These policies are inserted into the national administrative apparatus by means of conditions attached to the financial support of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although the conditions exactly match the priorities of these international financial institutions (IFIs), they are not set by them; paradoxically they are (in theory) set by the government requesting a loan. This paradox, the article argues, has to be understood primarily in legal terms. A close reading of a number of loan documents signed by the representatives of the IFIs and the government of Malawi demonstrates how responsibility for good governance reforms is ascribed to the government of Malawi, which "owns" the reforms. The article further shows that the elaborate conditionality attached to loans fuses legal logic and economics in a characteristic "normativity of numbers." By normativity of numbers I refer to the use of economic data, and the introduction of systems of personnel management and expenditure monitoring, as conditions in the loan documents

Economic Sanctions and the Politics of IMF Lending

What effect do economic sanctions have on the IMF lending decisions? Though countries under economic sanctions often face significant economic and financial difficulties, no comprehensive research to date has explored whether the IMF as a de facto lender of last resort intervenes in those countries in need. We posit that economic coercion is likely to hinder the target’s access to IMF credits as sanctioning (sender) countries are likely to use their political influence in the IMF to deny funds to the destabilized target economies. To assess the empirical merits of the hypothesis, we combine data on the IMF lending with the economic sanctions data for 120 emerging market economies from 1975 to 2005. Results indicate that target countries are less likely to receive IMF funds, especially when under sanctions by the United States and international institutions. Our findings contradict the conventional wisdom that the IMF is tasked with providing lifelines to member governments in need of help to ease their short-term balance of payment problems. Further, as much as IMF loans can be used as positive inducements to acquire a country’s strategic cooperation, we show that they might also be used by sender countries as a punishment tool against target countries to amplify the impact of sanctions regimes

Quasi-world money and international reserves

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understanding modern monetary arrangements from a Marxist perspective that takes into account recent developments in the Marxist theory of world money. The paper treats the US dollar as a primus inter pares quasi-world money and challenges the argument of US hegemony by exploring the behavior of major capitalist states and selected developing countries, the BRICS, in so far as their official international reserves are concerned. The findings reveal a clear pattern in the behavior of major capitalist states in terms of the size and form of their reserves with the variations in them implying a hierarchical structure of the corresponding quasi-world moneys. The analysis focuses on developed countries and treats them individually. The merit of this approach, distinctive in the literature on international reserves, is that it reveals the above-mentioned pattern which is blurred when Japan is included. The results imply that current international monetary arrangements reflect and promote multipolarity and competition on the geopolitical scene, the evolution of which is historical. © Copyright 2016 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited