Recent work on rent and rentierism has offered a distinctive and fresh approach to understanding and explaining contemporary capitalism. Drawing on political economy, economics, geography and sociology, this research has brought together distinct theoretical traditions in original and fertile ways to reshape the study of issues related to class, political-economic change and environmental challenges. This book critically engages with these theoretical resources to analyse and evaluate economies in the Global North and South. It offers historical, theoretical and empirical accounts of rentierism, making important cross-disciplinary and global connections. Its four parts address global rentier capitalism under the headings of historical lessons, theoretical developments and empirical studies of rentierism in the Global North and South. It will be the first book of its kind to offer a global account of rentier capitalism. It will be of immense interest to readers in economics, political economy, sociology, geography and development studies.

Advocating for the importance of promoting openness in trade, this book highlights China and Peru’s unique relationship to prioritise fair and equitable growth for all.

The investment promotion puzzle remains unsolved. Nearly every country in the world has established an investment promotion agency (IPA) to attract and retain foreign direct investment (FDI) in both greater quantities and of higher “quality.” Meanwhile, the literature has been virtually silent on investment promotion and its effects on FDI. As a result, we know little about what such agencies look like in different countries, what they do, how they do it, and whether and to what extent they make a difference. How to Solve An Investment Promotion Puzzle aims to fill in this gap by providing detailed information on the organization, functions and activities, and operational modalities of IPAs across over 50 countries in LAC and OECD, distilling similarities and differences and creating a new basis for peer-to-peer benchmarking and analysis of their impact. As such, it can serve as a useful guide to professionals and policymakers interested in designing better policies for FDI.

For many countries, primarily in the Global South, extractivism – the exploiting and exporting of natural resources – is big business. For those exporting countries, natural resource rents create hope and promise for development which can be a seductive force. This book explores the depth of extractivism in economies around the world. The contributions to this book investigate the connection between the political economy of extractivism and its impact on the sociopolitical fabric of natural resource exporting societies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The book engages with a comparative perspective on the persistence of extractivism in these four different world regions. The book focuses on the formative power of rents and argues that rents are seductive. The individual contributions flesh out this seductive force of rents on different political scales and how this seduction affects a variety of actors. The book investigates how these actors react to the prevalence of rent, how they align or break with specific political and economic strategies, and how myths of resource-driven development play out on the ground. The book, therefore, underlines that rent theory bridges current debates in different area communities and offers fresh insights into extractivist societies’ social, economic, and political dynamics. This book will be of significant interest to readers in political economy, political science, development studies, and area studies.

This book focuses on EU-MERCOSUR relations from a diplomatic and trade perspective against the background of the political agreement between the two in 2019. The authors take into consideration that EU-MERCOSUR cooperation developed during recent decades has tried, on the one hand, to build a strategic partnership to respond to the main challenges of international agendas and, on the other, to incorporate in Latin American countries the European new vision of transatlantic regionalism. Starting from a historical perspective of the development of interregionalism between the EU and MERCOSUR, the book goes on to study the geopolitical impacts of Brexit, stagnation of the EU-USA relationship, the COVID-19 pandemic, and of new geopolitical players in EU-LAC interregionalism. It discusses the legal institutional framework of the EU-MERCOSUR relations and provides a comparative view of features of MERCOSUR countries vis-à-vis the European Union. The book also analyses and provides a comprehensive overview of various aspects of interregional trade in the context of the 2019 agreement. Highly topical and authored by experts in this field, this book is of interest to a wide readership in the social sciences and economics: from political sociology to international relations, diplomacy studies and international trade.

Connecting fundamental, theoretical, and empirical subjects with the most current scholarship on value, money, profit and capital today, this book makes sense of our increasingly interconnected global economy, highlighting key issues and proposing real-world solutions from the most knowledgeable researchers in the field.