In 2011 the World Bank—with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—launched the Global Findex database, the world's most comprehensive data set on how adults save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. Drawing on survey data collected in collaboration with Gallup, Inc., the Global Findex database covers more than 140 economies around the world. The initial survey round was followed by a second one in 2014 and by a third in 2017. Compiled using nationally representative surveys of more than 150,000 adults age 15 and above in over 140 economies, The Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution includes updated indicators on access to and use of formal and informal financial services. It has additional data on the use of financial technology (or fintech), including the use of mobile phones and the Internet to conduct financial transactions. The data reveal opportunities to expand access to financial services among people who do not have an account—the unbanked—as well as to promote greater use of digital financial services among those who do have an account. The Global Findex database has become a mainstay of global efforts to promote financial inclusion. In addition to being widely cited by scholars and development practitioners, Global Findex data are used to track progress toward the World Bank goal of Universal Financial Access by 2020 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The database, the full text of the report, and the underlying country-level data for all figures—along with the questionnaire, the survey methodology, and other relevant materials—are available at www.worldbank.org/globalfindex.

This book explores the gendered nature of the historical emergence of modern finance markets and their expansion to a now global scale. It analyses the ways in which women were and still are marginalized in terms of financial activity and associated structures of power which play a critical role in shaping the contemporary global political economy.

Feminist Erasures presents a collection of essays that examines the state of feminism in North America and Western Europe by focusing on multiple sites such as media, politics and activism. Through individual examples, the essays reveal the extent to which feminism has been made (in)visible and (ir)relevant in contemporary Western culture.

In Dance of the Trillions, David Lubin tells the story of what makes money flow from high-income countries to lower-income ones; what makes it flow out again; and how developing countries have sought protection against the volatility of international capital flows. The book traces an arc from the 1970s, when developing countries first gained access to international financial markets, to the present day. Underlying this story is a discussion of how the relationship between developing countries and global finance appears to be moving from one governed by the “Washington Consensus” to one more likely to be shaped by Beijing.

Global Finance on Screen is the first collection exclusively dedicated to a growing body of multi-format and multimedia audiovisual work that this book designates as the finance film. Finance film provides critical visualizations of the secretive, elitist, PR firewalled, and gender and race-biased world of finance, and its mysterious characters, jargon and products. It reconstructs for the screen and for broader audiences finance’s logics, responsibilities, practices, and ethos, and traces the effects of money, markets, investment, credit, debt, bubbles, and crashes on our well-being, desires, values, and actions. The chapters for this interdisciplinary collection are written by European and North American scholars in film studies, anthropology, business ethics, cultural studies, political economy, and sociology. They reveal and evaluate the ability of film to document financial cultures; reflect economic, cultural and political transformations related to financialization; indicate the alienating and exploitative consequences of the growing role played by financial services in the global economy; mobilize social action against finance’s excesses; as well as spread finance and capitalist mythology. The collection offers in-depth investigations of feature films such as Wall Street, Freefall, Margin Call, Justice&Co, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short, and documentaries such as Inside Job, Capitalism: A Love Story and In a Strange Land.

Focusing on Kenya’s path-breaking mobile money project M-Pesa, this book examines and critiques the narratives and institutions of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality, arguing for a politics of redistribution to guide future digital financial inclusion projects. One of the most-discussed digital financial inclusion projects, M-Pesa facilitates the transfer of money and access to formal financial services via the mobile phone infrastructure and has grown at a phenomenal rate since its launch in 2007 to reach about 80 per cent of the Kenyan population. Through a socio-legal enquiry drawing on feminist political economy, law and development scholarship and postcolonial feminist debate, this book unravels the narratives and institutional arrangements that frame M-Pesa’s success while interrogating the relationship between digital financial inclusion and gender equality in development discourse. Natile argues that M-Pesa is premised on and regulated according to a logic of opportunity rather than a politics of redistribution, favouring the expansion of the mobile money market in preference to contributing to substantive gender equality via a redistribution of the revenue and funding deriving from its development. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in Global Political Economy, Socio-Legal Studies, Gender Studies, Law & Development, Finance and International Relations.

Around the world, there are concerns that many tax codes are biased against women, and that contemporary tax reforms tend to increase the incidence of taxation on the poorest women while failing to generate enough revenue to fund the programs needed to improve these women's lives. Because taxes are the key source of revenue governments themselves raise, understanding the nature and composition of taxation and current tax reform efforts is key to reducing poverty, providing sufficient revenue for public expenditure, and achieving social justice. This is the first book to systematically examine gender and taxation within and across countries at different levels of development. It presents original research on the gender dimensions of personal income taxes, and value-added, excise, and fuel taxes in Argentina, Ghana, India, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Uganda and the United Kingdom. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers studying Public Finance, International Economics, Development Studies, Gender Studies, and International Relations, among other disciplines.