Taliban's return to power in August of 2021 caused everyone to ask why the two decades of institution building in Afghanistan failed. This book investigates the root causes of failed reforms in an important area of reform: trade and credit institutions. It explains why the efforts to reform and regulate the economic institutions in Afghanistan failed and what we can learn from their failure. It draws on more than eighty interviews with Afghan merchants, business leaders, money dealers, and government officials in five major provinces of Afghanistan to identify the barriers to access to credit and to understand the performance of formal institutions (banks) and their informal counterparts. This book finds that Afghan merchants were often unable to benefit from the offerings of formal institutions for three reasons: a highly volatile business climate, uncertain contract enforcement, and an unsupportive property rights system. Several informal institutions have emerged that alleviate some of the credit constraints on Afghan merchants. These informal institutions include risk-sharing trade credit operations, money dealers’ short-term working capital loans, Gerawee, and Sar qufli. Although these informal institutions have helped Afghan merchants survive, they are unable to support economic growth. This book argues that countries like Afghanistan should solve their institutional dilemma by adopting an approach which the author calls "Grounded Institutional Reform." Using this approach, a country would formalize existing informal institutions, a development that would vastly increase their effectiveness. While this book focuses on credit and trade in Afghanistan, the analysis of "formalizing the informal" can easily be extended to solve other types of economic problems in similarly situated countries. This book should be of great interest to scholars, policymakers, and development workers in the field of law, finance, and development.

Seventeen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2020 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity.

'In this very nice volume reputed academics and central bankers discuss recent regulatory reforms in financial governance from a political economy perspective. Therefore it is invaluable for both policymakers and scholars interested in financial governance and market regulation.' - Sylvester C.W. Eijffinger, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Centre for Economic Policy Research, UK and CESifo Research Network, Munich, Germany This book focuses on recent financial market reforms, and their implications for social, economic and political exclusion. In particular it considers the hitherto under-researched question of whose interests govern the design of regulatory mechanisms and who influences the decision-making process. This process is set out as contested terrain, in which there are winners and losers, and in which there are inevitably circles of exclusion. The authors, comprising financial authority experts and academic specialists, expand the concept of exclusion beyond its typical social dimension to incorporate all actors, be they individuals or institutions not permitted to contribute to financial market regulation as a public good. As they point out, this may take the form of political, economic or indeed cultural exclusion. The book examines the conflicts that arise between various interests and how these are managed within the process of regulation.

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.

This paper analyzes the effect of an IMF Staff-Monitored Program for Chad to enhance economic development. Weak institutional capacity and governance concerns have limited economic development and donor support in Chad. It is highlighted that the reduction in the nonoil primary deficit envisaged in the 2013 budget appears appropriate, but expenditures linked to the regional security situation and lower than anticipated oil revenues imply large financing needs. There are significant economic and political risks to program implementation,; the regional security situation remains volatile, and the economy is highly dependent on volatile oil revenue.

In this sprawling and ambitious book John Braithwaite successfully manages to link the contemporary dynamics of macro political economy to the dynamics of citizen engagement and organisational activism at the micro intestacies of governance practices. This is no mean feat and the logic works. . . Stephen Bell, The Australian Journal of Public Administration Everyone who is puzzled by modern regulocracy should read this book. Short and incisive, it represents the culmination of over twenty years work on the subject. It offers us a perceptive and wide-ranging perspective on the global development of regulatory capitalism and an important analysis of points of leverage for democrats and reformers. Christopher Hood, All Souls College, Oxford, UK It takes a great mind to produce a book that is indispensable for beginners and experts, theorists and policymakers alike. With characteristic clarity, admirable brevity, and his inimitable mix of description and prescription, John Braithwaite explains how corporations and states regulate each other in the complex global system dubbed regulatory capitalism. For Braithwaite aficionados, Regulatory Capitalism brings into focus the big picture created from years of meticulous research. For Braithwaite novices, it is a reading guide that cannot fail to inspire them to learn more. Carol A. Heimer, Northwestern University, US Reading Regulatory Capitalism is like opening your eyes. John Braithwaite brings together law, politics, and economics to give us a map and a vocabulary for the world we actually see all around us. He weaves together elements of over a decade of scholarship on the nature of the state, regulation, industrial organization, and intellectual property in an elegant, readable, and indispensable volume. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University, US Encyclopedic in scope, chock full of provocative even jarring claims, Regulatory Capitalism shows John Braithwaite at his transcendental best. Ian Ayres, Yale Law School, Yale University, US Contemporary societies have more vibrant markets than past ones. Yet they are more heavily populated by private and public regulators. This book explores the features of such a regulatory capitalism, its tendencies to be cyclically crisis-ridden, ritualistic and governed through networks. New ways of thinking about resultant policy challenges are developed. At the heart of this latest work by John Braithwaite lies the insight by David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana that the welfare state was succeeded in the 1970s by regulatory capitalism. The book argues that this has produced stronger markets, public regulation, private regulation and hybrid private/public regulation as well as new challenges such as a more cyclical quality to crises of market and governance failure, regulatory ritualism and markets in vice. However, regulatory capitalism also creates opportunities for better design of markets in virtue such as markets in continuous improvement, privatized enforcement of regulation, open source business models, regulatory pyramids with networked escalation and meta-governance of justice. Regulatory Capitalism will be warmly welcomed by regulatory scholars in political science, sociology, history, economics, business schools and law schools as well as regulatory bureaucrats, policy thinkers in government and law and society scholars.