How do states assess technological self-sufficiency in a globalizing world? To sustain long-term growth and limit foreign dependency, rising powers pursue domestic sources of technological innovation. In recent decades, however, the hybridization of innovation - marked by increased cross-border financial flows and expanded mobility of high-skilled workers - has fostered hybrid firms that challenge emerging economies' ability to assess 'independent' innovation. Borrowing Robert Reich's notation, the grounds for debate over 'who is us' have fundamentally shifted. This article posits that, compared to their predecessors, rising powers today adopt more malleable boundaries for the corporate actors included within indigenous innovation because their technology ecosystems are more reliant on transnational technical communities and foreign direct investment. Case studies of how policymakers evaluated independent innovation in China, India, and Japan provide empirical support for the theory. These comparisons, across time and between states, illustrate how structural changes in the global economy have made it more difficult for rising powers to draw lines between 'domestic' and 'foreign' companies, resulting in unsettled assessments of independent innovation. This article contributes to academic and policy debates about the consequences of economic dependence, the efficacy of high-profile industrial policies, and how developing states manage the challenges of globalization.
Since the 1980s, the United States has unilaterally pressured many developing countries to open their markets to American exports. Despite such pressure coinciding with trade liberalization around the world, prior research largely concludes that US pressure was ineffective. This paper challenges this conventional wisdom by mitigating selection bias in previous studies, which focused on late-stage forms of pressure such as Section 301 investigations and sanctions. In contrast, this paper estimates the effect of US pressure starting at an earlier stage: inclusion in the US' National Trade Estimate (NTE) Report. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design with data on 157 developing countries from 1980 through 2020, we find that US pressure significantly increased imports from the US, with targeted countries increasing imports by 26.6% more than non-targeted countries after five years. We also find evidence that US pressure is especially effective on countries with high levels of trade dependence on the US. We supplement these quantitative results with qualitative evidence from US efforts to open cigarette markets abroad, demonstrating the effectiveness of US pressure associated with the NTE. The research provides important insights for understanding the exploitation of power asymmetries to enact policy change, an increasingly prominent feature of the contemporary global political economy.
Amid growing concern about the geopolitical reordering of the global economy, this paper examines the structural entanglements between geopolitics and global financial networks. Against accounts that portray geopolitics as a recent and external disruption to financial globalization, it argues that geopolitical dynamics have long been embedded in the formation and operation of global finance. Taking inspiration from Giovanni Arrighi, the paper develops a conceptual framework grounded in a multi-scalar understanding of the state and informed by both financial geography and the geopolitical economy of finance. Empirically, it traces the development of China Concept Stocks, understood here as the overseas listings of Chinese companies in the US since the 1990s. The analysis identifies three distinct phases, each shaped by the changing geopolitical objectives and strategic actions of China and the US. By foregrounding state-centered geopolitics and global financial networks across the three phases, this paper offers a historically grounded account of the emergence, expansion, and recent crisis of China Concept Stocks. In doing so, it situates these developments within the US financial expansion and its unfolding crisis, a period that marks the concluding phase of the current systemic cycle of accumulation which Arrighi referred to as the Long Twentieth Century.
Labor rights abuses remain a critical challenge globally. Preferential trade agreements with labor clauses (PTALCs) have emerged as a governance tool to address this by embedding labor standards in trade liberalization. While prior research has focused on whether PTALCs improve conditions in signatory countries, this study examines their systemic effects on non-signatory countries. Drawing on the private regulation literature, it argues that PTALCs can trigger a 'displacement effect': By reshaping competitive incentives, these agreements raise the opportunity cost of maintaining high labor standards in excluded countries. Two channels drive this shift: Trade liberalization raises the relative cost of non-signatory exports, while labor clauses signal commitment that non-signatories cannot easily replicate. Using spatial econometrics on a panel of 109 developing countries (1985-2012), the paper finds that PTALCs with the United States are associated with a significant deterioration of labor practices in non-signatory countries. PTALCs with the EU, Canada, EFTA, Australia, and New Zealand do not produce a comparable effect, consistent with the expectation that displacement is strongest when PTALCs combine a large market with stringent provisions. These findings demonstrate that governance tools designed to improve standards can interact with competitive dynamics in ways that harm workers beyond their intended reach.
Under what conditions will consumers support domestic industries targeted by economic sanctions? A growing literature examines how sanctions may generate nationalist boycotts in which consumers punish companies from sanctioning states, yet much less is known about the opposite behavior: 'buycotts', where consumers express goodwill toward sanctioned industries. Extending research on how market actors may condition sanction impacts, we conceptualize consumer buycotts as a mediating variable in the sanctioning process. Synthesizing insights from the IPE literature on boycotts and marketing science research on domestic buycotts, we specify empirical expectations about dynamics that may shape buycott participation and probe their plausibility through comparative case studies of responses to sanctions imposed by China on Australia, Taiwan, and Japan. We find buycotts may meaningfully mediate sanction impacts, especially when products are promoted by political leaders, publicly consumed, and have high demand elasticity. We also identify structural differences between buycotts and boycotts, including the visibility of nonparticipation, the costs of participation, and the dependence on supply-side infrastructure. We use our findings to begin inductively theorizing buycotts as a distinct form of political consumerism and a defensive instrument of economic statecraft, with implications for policy debates about countering economic coercion.
Research on women and trade policy presents mixed findings: Public opinion studies consistently found women more protectionist than men; yet, legislative research found women sometimes support higher tariffs and sometimes support liberalization. We argue these inconsistencies reflect how trade is framed. When trade is presented as a foreign policy and development tool benefiting women in developing countries, women are more likely to support liberalization. Women's support for trade depends on perceptions of who benefits, and is conditioned by individual risk tolerance. We test this argument using two empirical strategies. First, we use a survey experiment with US respondents to demonstrate that women increase their support for trade when it is framed as benefiting women in developing countries. This positive association is stronger among risk-tolerant female respondents. Second, we examine the policy implications of the argument and our individual-level findings. Using tariff data from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and instrumental-variable approaches to address endogeneity, we find that more women in legislatures in developed countries is associated with lower tariffs. These results help reconcile contradictory results in the literature and underscore the importance of recognizing trade as a multidimensional domestic and foreign policy tool.
Internet memes are increasingly recognized as part of political discourse, yet there is no consensus on how to study them. Much existing scholarship has focused on impact - debating whether memes function as resistance for marginalized groups or as vehicles for disinformation that reify the status quo. This paper shifts the question from what memes do to what memes know, re-conceptualizing them as sites of distributed, non-elite knowledge production and dissemination. Using a set of macroeconomic memes as a case, the paper demonstrates that memes provide access to lay reasoning about political and economic conditions - access that eludes approaches centered on elite ideas or on meso- and micro-level practices, creating a bridge between constructivist ideas and everyday IPE. The paper also introduces a methodology, based in Natural Language Processing, for studying memes as an archive of lay knowledge. This approach is more systematic than search-based approaches and offers a new template for integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis of large text corpora.
In this paper we propose the notion of wartime care economy in order to make visible the way Ukrainians, and Ukrainian women in particular, ensure social reproduction, that is the everyday survival and flourishing of people as well as the reproduction of society. Existing accounts of war economies often focus on the way states restructure their economies to enable war and on illicit activities used either to sustain the fighting or to survive. The wide range of social reproduction activities - everyday, non-illicit activities often predominantly carried out by women or feminized subjects and unpaid or underpaid - thus is made invisible. We suggest that an understanding of war economies is incomplete unless it takes into account the often non-monetized value created in wartime care economies. Drawing on first-person narratives from Ukraine, literature of Ukrainian feminists and other secondary and grey literature, we examine the way intensified demands for care are being met in five spheres: households, neighborly and family support networks, volunteering, humanitarian organizing, and the state's social services sector. We highlight the different kinds of labor performed in these spheres and the way they relate to each other.
Global environmental governance has long been predicated on a normative compromise, commonly referred to as 'liberal environmentalism', which posits that addressing global environmental challenges requires the promotion and maintenance of a liberal economic order. Today, however, the global economy is fragmenting across its material, ideational, and institutional dimensions due to renewed geopolitical rivalry and the resurgence of state capitalism. This commentary explores what the fraying of the liberal basis of the world economy means for global environmental governance. Across global climate, food, and plastics governance, we identify a disjuncture: Institutions produced by the compromise of liberal environmentalism are increasingly out of step with a post-liberal global economy being reconfigured along statist and geopolitical lines. We reflect on the implications of this disjuncture for the future of global environmental governance and for social forces committed to environmental equity and justice.
The growing use of domestic pension funds in shaping investments in national economies is a visible feature of the contemporary global economy. In North America, Europe, and East Asia, pension funds played a vital role in funding nationally strategic investments and structural transformation strategies. There are reasons to doubt whether pension funds can play a similar role in African countries because of the relatively small size of formal sectors in those countries. Yet, some African countries have employed pension funds in innovative ways. Synthesizing literatures on state capitalism, the Wall Street Consensus, and pension fund capitalism, this paper examines the Rwanda Social Security Board (RSSB) to reveal the potential, as well as the limits, of state financial activism in the twenty first century. Rwanda has been among Africa's fastest growing countries over the last two decades, and the RSSB has been the central institution funding the pursuit of its services-first strategy. Employing pension funds under contemporary globalization is accompanied by challenges associated with future demographic changes, the youth under-employment of contemporary low-wage services-based growth, and precarious domestic elite politics and state-business relations. The paper is based on fieldwork in Rwanda since 2011, analysis of RSSB annual reports, and investment data.
This article revisits economic nationalism through the lens of postcolonial political thought, examining its role not simply as a developmental strategy but as a liberatory project grounded in anti-colonial struggle. Focusing on the Indonesian case, it foregrounds the contributions of three foundational thinkers, Sukarno, Tan Malaka, and Hatta, whose political-economic visions articulated distinct yet interconnected understandings of economic nationalism. Sukarno positioned economic nationalism within a global anti-imperialist movement centered on solidarity among the oppressed and the transformation of racialized hierarchies. Tan Malaka framed economic sovereignty as inseparable from revolutionary struggle, advancing ekonomi berjuang (struggling economy) as a means of achieving national control over production and resources. Hatta promoted ekonomi kerakyatan (people's economy) as a model of domestic reconstruction grounded in cooperative development and cultural practices of mutual aid. Situating these thinkers alongside cognate post- and anti-colonial traditions in International Political Economy (IPE), particularly W.E.B. Du Bois' analysis of the global color line and Samir Amin's concept of delinking, the article shows how Indonesian thought articulated themes that resonate strongly with contemporary decolonial IPE. It further demonstrates how these intellectual traditions continue to inform contemporary policies, including nickel downstreaming and the promotion of the Islamic economy.
Ambitious goals to limit global heating cannot be achieved without significant efforts to cut fossil fuel production. Yet, comparative analysis of the international political economy dynamics that explain why and how different states adopt such supply-side policies is lacking. Drawing on original interview-based research in four countries that have unilaterally adopted supply-side climate policies and led international initiatives to limit the production of oil and gas (Costa Rica, Colombia, Denmark, and the UK), we identify key lessons that can be derived from the experience of these countries regarding the drivers of these policies and the specific forms they take, before reflecting on what lessons can be drawn for efforts to phase-out fossil fuels elsewhere. We argue that understanding this new frontier in climate governance requires an international political economy approach that links shared material drivers of supply-side climate policy to national institutional responses shaped by countries' positions in the global political economy, incumbent power structures, and state capacity to manage conflicts among capital, labor, and civil society within and beyond their borders.
International Political Economy (IPE) as a discipline increasingly acknowledges the significance of racial oppression and inequalities. Yet, these are often seen as separate from, or coinciding with, financial hierarchies and power structures. There is some understanding that race may shape how finance works, but this does not factor into what IPE scholars called the structural power of finance. By contrast, we suggest that hierarchies of race and finance may be more intimate, integral, and co-constitutive than this position suggested. We call this conceptual hypothesis 'raced finance'. Raced finance encourages us to ask: How, exactly, is finance 'raced', and why is this the case? With what consequences for our understandings of race, finance, and capitalism? After offering a conceptual definition, we map out historical and contemporary arguments on raced finance in IPE and beyond, across three thematic categories: (1) race, empire, and primitive accumulation via financial means; (2) raced global monetary orders; (3) financial risks and racialized anxieties. We then further develop our raced finance analytic as a frame for the special issue and future IPE research. We submit that raced finance can be productively grasped in terms of three constitutive tensions: inclusion/exclusion, totalization/differentiation, and stabilization/destabilization. The combination of these three dialectical tensions is what makes raced finance such a potent force. We conclude by offering reflections on teaching race and finance in IPE. Giving due attention to race in the IPE of finance may require rethinking pedagogical priorities, shifting empirical angles, adopting new geographical foci, mobilizing new theories, and reconstructing periodizations.
Climate finance is considered essential to the Global South's green energy transition, yet little is known about how financial capitalism shapes access to it or the factors determining domestic receptivity. While effectively describing the constraints on Global South development, the financial subordination literature says little about how policy space evolves temporally, green energy climate finance, or the domestic factors that impact climate finance receptivity. To address these gaps, this study combines theory on resource nationalism, the political economy of the green transition and climate finance, with evidence from global liquidity and commodity markets, using process tracing and secondary data analysis to explore the case of resource-nationalist, fossil- and commodity-dependent Bolivia. The paper finds that climate finance flows to Bolivia are contingent on both internal and external factors, including how domestic politics shapes institutions and state receptivity, and how complex interactions between commodity markets and liquidity conditions create variations in policy space. This makes important contributions to a literature that has yet to address issues around climate finance for the green energy transition or changing dynamics in Global South policy space, thereby improving understanding of how Global South states can pursue energy transitions and the role that climate finance might play.
As China increasingly leads the world in green industries, the country is a critical case for the debate on climate change in political economy. While climate change is now less of a blind spot than previously, the debate is obstructed by an inadequate grasp of the complexities of China, stemming from the disciplinary isolation of 'China studies' and the political isolation of the country itself. In this commentary, we address this problem by presenting a structured approach to understanding the case of China. We distill insights from different literature to offer an account of the political economy of China's green transition, centering on three key insights. As umbrella terms that work as shorthands for summarizing the three literatures, we propose that China can be understood as: (1) 'green authoritarianism' - a political model that conceptualizes the political motives and processes underlying China's climate governance. (2) 'green state-steering' - central-local-private relations that combine top-down and bottom-up approaches to advance climate priorities. (3) 'green economic planning' - an approach to industrial policy, such as the 'Made In China 2025 Strategy', that guides and organizes climate governance over time. Our intention is that these insights can help connect the scholarship on China with the scholarship on the political economy of climate change by facilitating non-China specialists in both drawing from and relating their work to the country.
Echoing recent calls to problematize the centrality of race in the operations of finance, this article examines the role of migration control in expanding the frontiers of racial capitalism. While migration has long been a priority of European interventions in Africa, only recently has research unpacked the significance of these interventions in serving the material interests of actors in the Global North. Drawing on a Fanonian understanding of the interplay between (im)mobilities, race and capital, and theorizations of racial capitalism, this article further contributes to these debates by zooming into a key aspect of European responses to Tunisian 'irregular' migration, namely entrepreneurship projects that promote self-reliance. The analysis of interviews with actors involved in the funding and implementation of such projects and of various documents reveals the centrality of racialized structures of unequal mobilities in the operations of 'raced finance'. More specifically, this article illustrates the significance of entrepreneurship projects in creating racialized images of the adequate economic subject, and the critical role of spatial reconfigurations and unequal mobilities therein. This article thereby offers critical insights into how the production of racialized differences benefits finance, yet also how financial practices are beneficial for operationalizing racialized demands for less migration.
How do Chinese development finance institutions (DFIs) incorporate state priorities with market discipline in sovereign infrastructure lending across Africa? Existing scholarship has highlighted these institutions' dual mandate and often mapped the state-market tension onto concessional two-preferential-loan (TPL) and non-concessional lending windows. Building on emerging studies that challenge this dichotomy, this paper first conceptualizes three mechanisms in banks' decision-making - bureaucratic appraisal, financial review, and political endorsement. Second, the analysis systematically demonstrates that policy and market logics are braided across both lending windows. However, between these windows, what varies is (i) how state actors participate in decision-making and (ii) the qualitative content of market considerations. In TPLs, both bureaucratic appraisal and political endorsement dominate to align finance with policy objectives, while financial review focuses on repayment risk. In market-rate lending, financial review and profitability concerns take precedence, though policy signals persist through political endorsement rather than bureaucratic appraisal. The paper contributes by refining the analytical framework for the identification of priority constellations driving Chinese infrastructure lending in Africa. It furthers the understanding of blended state-market forces co-shaping Chinese DFIs' decision-making. The study draws process tracing of 93 infrastructure loans (2000-2023) across Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zambia, with 108 semi-structured interviews.
In 2025, Bolivia apparently ran out of money. The huge international reserves earnt by exporting natural gas during the prior commodities boom (2002-2013) had been spent - in a large part on hydrocarbon imports. This article grapples with this contradictory state of affairs and challenges both the dominant 'resource curse' and more critical 'extractivism' narratives about resource exporters like Bolivia by focusing on what resources become. Natural resources are priced, purchased, and sold in world money - in the twentieth-first century, United States (US) dollars. This forces countries to hoard US dollars, which are usually only obtainable through exporting natural resources, and to spend hard-earnt US dollars on imports. This both leaves resource exporters exposed to changes on the world market driven by events elsewhere in the world, and exposed to foreign exchange crises when they cannot access dollars. Through this lens, the predicament which Bolivia finds itself confronting today appears as a product of the Bolivian state's attempts to manage the transmutation of hydrocarbons into world money and back again. The simple fact that natural resource rents accumulate in world money is a vital yet often overlooked part of how inequality manifests on the world market.
