Since the inception of the HIPC Initiative, the story of the design and implementation of poverty alleviation strategies has largely been told through the filters of development partners and the Bretton Woods Institutions. Poverty Reduction Strategies in Action examines the efforts in Ghana to reduce poverty and initiate changes that it believes are essential to ensure a prosperous future for its citizens in the 21st century. It chronicles the achievements, pitfalls, and looming challenges of a government, its people, and its external partners in fashioning out and implementing anti-poverty and pro-growth policies. This edited volume, by a group of independent researchers, examines Ghana's experience: what was done, how it was done, what was left undone, the lessons learned, and fills the void in the development literature.

The global financial system has proven increasingly unstable and crisis-prone since the early 1980s. The system has failed to serve either creditors or debtors well. This has been reinforced by the global financial crisis of 2008, where we have seen systemic weaknesses bring rich countries to the brink of bankruptcy and visit appalling suffering on the poorest citizens of poor countries. Yet the regulatory responses to this crisis have involved little thinking from outside the box in which the crisis was delivered to the world. This book presents a powerful indictment of this regulatory failure and calls for greatly increased attention to international financial law and analyses new regulatory measures with the potential to make a new recognition of the principles that ought to underlie it. Using a historical approach that compares the various financial crises of the past three decades, the authors clearly show how misconceived economic policy responses have paved the way for each next ‘crash’. Among the numerous topics that arise in the course of this revealing analysis are the following: overvalued exchange rates; excess liquidity in rich countries; premature liberalisation of local financial markets; capital controls; derivatives markets; accounting standards; credit ratings and the conflicts in the role of credit rating agencies; investor protection arrangements; insurance companies; and payment, clearing and settlement activities. The authors offer detailed commentary on: the role of multilateral development banks, the IMF and the WTO in responding to crises; the role of the Basel Accords, the Financial Stability Forum and Board, and the responses of the European Commission, the US, and the G20 to the most recent crisis. The book concludes by exploring systemic game-changing reforms such as bank levies, financial activities taxes and financial transaction taxes, and a global sovereign bankruptcy regime; as well as measures to remove the currency mismatches from the balance sheets of developing countries. Apart from its great usefulness as a detailed introduction to the international financial system and its regulation, the book is enormously valuable for its clear identification of the areas of regulatory failure, and its analysis of new regulatory approaches that offer the potential for a genuinely more stable system. Banking and investment policymakers at every level, the lawyers that serve these markets and the regulators that seek to regulate them, cannot afford to neglect this book.

In a powerful demonstration of how we can learn from history, Professor Buckley provides deep analyses of some of the devastating financial crises of the last quarter-century. He shows how such factors as the origins and destinations of loans, bank behaviour, bad timing, ignorance of history, trade regimes, capital flight, and corruption coalesce under certain circumstances to trigger a financial crash. He then offers well-thought out legal measures to regulate these factors in a way that can prevent the worst from happening and more adequately protect the interests of vulnerable parties and victims. In the course of the discussion he covers such topics as the following: the roles of the Bretton Woods institutions in the globalisation process global capital flows debtor nation policies the effects of the Brady restructurings of the 80s and 90s fixed versus floating exchange rates the social costs of IMF policies debt-for-development exchanges and the national balance sheet problem. Professor Buckley’s far-reaching recommendations include details of tax, regulatory, banking, and bankruptcy regimes to be instituted at a global level.

This timely book offers the first critical examination of World Bank policy reforms and initiatives during the past decade. The World Bank is viewed as one of the most powerful international organizations of our time. The authors critically analyze the influence of the institution’s policy and engagement during the past decade in a variety of issue areas, including human rights, domestic reform, and the environment. The World Bank and Governance delves into the bowels of the World Bank, exploring its organizational structure, professional culture and bureaucratic procedures, illustrating how these shape its engagement with an increasingly complex, diverse and challenging operational environment. The book includes chapters on two under-researched divisions of the World Bank: the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. Several illuminating country studies are also included, analyzing the World Bank's activities in Argentina, Bolivia, Lebanon, Hungary and Vietnam. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, development, politics and economics.

This book employs critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis to explore what Cape Verdeans have to say about women's lives in the era of twenty-first century globalization. The authors investigate the economic and personal difficulties they face such as poverty, managing single mother-headed households, and violence.

In recent years, Africa has undergone the longest period of sustained economic growth in the continent’s history, drawing the attention of the international media and academics alike. This book analyses the Africa Rising narrative from multidisciplinary perspectives, offering a critical assessment of the explanations given for the poor economic growth and development performance in Africa prior to the millennium and the dramatic shift towards the new Africa. Bringing in perspectives from African intellectuals and scholars, many of whom have previously been overlooked in this debate, the book examines the construction of Africa’s economic growth and development portraits over the years. It looks at two institutions that play a vital role in African development, providing a detailed explanation of how the World Bank and the IMF have interpreted and dealt with the African challenges and experiences. The insightful analysis reveals that if Africa is rising, only 20-30 per cent of Africans are aboard the rising ship, and the main challenge facing the continent today is to bring on board the majority of Africans who have been excluded from growth. This book makes the complex, and sometimes confusing debates on Africa’s economic growth experience more accessible to a wide range of readers interested in the Africa story. It is essential reading for students and researchers in African Studies, and will be of great interest to scholars in Development Studies, Political Economy, and Development Economics.

Africa’s international relations have often been defined and oriented by the dominant international and geopolitical agendas of the day. In the aftermath of colonialism the Cold War became a dominant paradigm that defined the nature of the continent’s relationship with the rest of the world. The contemporary forces of globalization are now exerting an undue influence and impact upon Africa’s international relations. Increasingly, the African continent is emerging as a vocal, and in some respects an influential, actor in international relations. There is a paucity of analysis and research on this emerging trend. This timely book proposes to fill this analytical gap by engaging with a wide range of issues, with chapters written by experts on a variety of themes. The emerging political prominence of the African continent on the world stage is predicated on an evolving internal process of continental integration. In particular, there are normative and policy efforts to revive the spirit of Pan-Africanism: the 21st century is witnessing the evolution of Pan-Africanism, notably through the constitution and establishment of the African Union (AU). Given the fact that there is a dearth of analysis on this phenomemon, this volume will also interrogate the notion of Pan-Africanism through various lenses – notably peace and security, development, the environment and trade. The volume will also engage with the emerging role of the AU as an international actor, e.g. with regard to its role in the reform of the United Nations Security Council, climate change, the International Criminal Court (ICC), the treaty establishing Africa as a nuclear-free zone, Internally Displaced Persons, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), international trade, the environment, public health issues, security, and development issues. This book will assess how the AU’s role as an international actor is complicated by the difficulty of promoting consensus among African states and then maintaining that consensus in the face of often divergent national interests. This book will in part assess the role of the AU in articulating collective and joint policies and in making interventions in international decision and policy-making circles. The Handbook will also assess the role of African social movements and their relationship with global actors. The role of African citizens in ameliorating their own conditions is often underplayed in the international relations discourse, and this volume will seek to redress this oversight. Throughout the book the various chapters will also assess the role that these citizen linkages have contributed towards continental integration and in confronting the challenges of globalization.