This book asks the important question of whether public banks are a better alternative to profit-seeking private banks. Do public banks provide finance for development? Do they serve as stability anchors in financial markets? What kind of governance keeps public banks accountable to the public? Theoretically the book draws on the works of Minsky for the question on stability and on interpretative policy analysis for the issue of governance. It compares empirically three countries with significant public banks: Brazil, Germany, and India.

Public banks are banks located within the public sphere of a state. They are pervasive, with more than 900 institutions worldwide, and powerful, with tens of trillions in assets. Public banks are neither essentially good nor bad. Rather, they are dynamic institutions, made and remade by contentious social forces. As the first single-authored book on public banks, this timely intervention examines how these institutions can confront the crisis of climate finance and catalyse a green and just transition. The author explores six case studies across the globe, demonstrating that public banks have acquired the representative structures, financial capacity, institutional knowledge, collaborative networks, and geographical reach to tackle decarbonisation, definancialisation, and democratisation. These institutions are not without contradictions, torn as they are between contending public and private interests in class-divided society. Ultimately, social forces and struggles shape how and if public banks serve the public good.

This is a book in search of an alternative to the discredited investor-owned banks that have brought the rich countries into crisis and the world economy into a long period of austerity. It finds customer-owned banks Ð credit unions, co-operative banks, building societies Ð have hardly been affected by the crisis and continue to operate according to their organisational DNA: low-risk, close to the customer, underpinned by real savings, and still lending to SMEs to protect jobs and local economies. They are big business Ð in some countries with over 40% of the market Ð but networked in smaller, democratic societies whose origins go back to 1850s Germany. The book explores their history and current situation, measures the impact of the banking crisis, makes a systematic study of their advantages, compares them to alternatives (savings banks and micro-finance institutions), and investigates their supervision and governance structures. It provides hard evidence for the superiority of customer-owned banks. Finance in an Age of Austerity will appeal to public policy analysts and political commentators, academics and students interested in current issues concerning banking regulation, supervision and governance. Social commentators and campaigners concerned with providing an ethical alternative to Ôcasino capitalismÕ and social economists wanting to develop a critique of the investor-owned banking system will also find this book invaluable. It will be essential reading for banking specialists interested in broadening their understanding of a hidden sector that, since the crisis, has become much more significant.

In Public Health Systems in the Age of Financialization, Ana Carolina Cordilha unpacks policy shifts that have transformed public health systems into vehicles for financial speculation and capital accumulation. While it is commonly thought that these systems are being cut back in the period of financialization, the author shows that current changes in public health financing go far beyond budget cuts and privatization measures. She examines how public health systems are adopting financial instruments and participating in financial accumulation strategies, with harmful impacts on transparency, democratic accountability, and health service provision. With an in-depth study of both the French and Brazilian systems, Cordilha explores the different ways in which this process unfolds in central and peripheral countries.

The first fifteen years of the 21st century have thrown into sharp relief the challenges of growth, equity, stability, and sustainability facing the world economy. In addition, they have exposed the inadequacies of mainstream economics in providing answers to these challenges. This volume gathers over 50 leading scholars from around the world to offer a forward-looking perspective of economic geography to understanding the various building blocks, relationships, and trajectories in the world economy. The perspective is at the same time grounded in theory and in the experiences of particular places. Reviewing state-of-the-art of economic geography, setting agendas, and with illustrations and empirical evidence from all over the world, the book should be an essential reference for students, researchers, as well as strategists and policy makers. Building on the success of the first edition, this volume offers a radically revised, updated, and broader approach to economic geography. With the backdrop of the global financial crisis, finance is investigated in chapters on financial stability, financial innovation, global financial networks, the global map of savings and investments, and financialization. Environmental challenges are addressed in chapters on resource economies, vulnerability of regions to climate change, carbon markets, and energy transitions. Distribution and consumption feature alongside more established topics on the firm, innovation, and work. The handbook also captures the theoretical and conceptual innovations of the last fifteen years, including evolutionary economic geography and the global production networks approach. Addressing the dangers of inequality, instability, and environmental crisis head-on, the volume concludes with strategies for growth and new ways of envisioning the spatiality of economy for the future.

"Beck, Cull, and Jerome assess the effect of privatization on performance in a panel of Nigerian banks for the period 1990--2001. They find evidence of performance improvement in nine banks that were privatized, which is remarkable given the inhospitable environment for true financial intermediation. Their results also suggest negative effects of the continuing minority government ownership on the performance of many Nigerian banks. The authors' results complement aggregate indications of decreasing financial intermediation over the 1990s. Banks that focused on investment in government bonds and non-lending activities enjoyed a relatively higher performance. This paper--a product of the Finance Team, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to study the effects of bank privatization in developing countries"--World Bank web site.