IFIs undertake financing when their environmental and social quality criteria are met

The main content of this article is to describe “climate finance” and “green finance” in detail, as implemented by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and their pertinent environmental and social project quality criteria. The approach of this article is to perceive and understand environment-related activities of international financial institutions (IFIs) as part of a societal learning process, and consequently to describe their “environmental and social project quality criteria” as an expression of such ongoing societal learning processes. What can our readership, related to global finance, profit from such a comparison? Against the expectation of many, IFIs already implemented efficient rules for redirecting global funds to climate and environmental projects — and have thus performed a successful “act of societal learning”. The “environmental and social project quality criteria” have played a crucial role in convincing economic and administrative actors (i. e., learners in our context) to behave in a climatecompatible manner. Thus, the lesson can be drawn from the domain of “societal learning” to the domain of “individual learning” that clear and transparent criteria sets are decisive for a rule-based societal transformation. This article shows that a criteriabased selection process provides the best results for long-term societal interest; in this case climate protection.

Toward a Realism of the World-System: John Lanchester’s Capital and the Global City

This essay explores how John Lanchester’s Capital adapts classical realism to represent the contemporary global city; it pays particular attention to how London’s position in the world-system disrupts Lukácsian totality. Because the novel attends to the complexity and extensiveness of the world-system, it depicts the city not as a representative totality but as embedded in the global circuits of capital, shaped by the influences of inward migration and global finance. In this the novel has affinities with many fictions of the global periphery, for instance portraying the city as at once socially fragmented and structurally connected. Furthermore, the novel departs from classical realism in its closure; though the 2008 financial crisis is omitted from the novel, it overshadows the entire plot, and its absence emphasizes the lack of finality in the story of this phase of capitalism itself. In demonstrating the temporal and spatial unknowability of contemporary capital, Lanchester’s novel both affirms the capacity of realism to trace deep systemic connections and reveals the fragility of its construction of a social totality, positing a realism attendant to its own perspectival limits within the world-system.

Debunking the system: The rigging of the geofinancial power network

This article demonstrates how key Marxist theories and concepts have influenced my thinking and theoretical framework on financialization. Several key contributions from Marxist theory (the accumulation of capital and class struggle; the law of value and capitalist money; uneven development and imperialism; and financialization and global finance capitalism) provide the theoretical framework for what I call the geofinancial power network, a transnational sociotechnical system. The network is then historically and geographically situated in within the context U.S. post-World War II international hegemony and its military-industrial-complex that gave life to the ideas of ‘systems theory’ and sociotechnical systems, and its efforts to control transnational finance and the mechanisms of power (institutions, technologies etc.) that enabled global finance capitalism to emerge as a system of power. This theoretical framework has been useful for helping me understanding not only how financialization enables capitalism to reproduce itself unevenly across space, but also how it subsequently reorganizes economic spaces institutionally and technically into a hierarchical global system and single division of labor.

Longing for Haute Finance in the 21st Century? A Neo-Polanyian Approach to the Theory of Money in the Digital Age

This article examines the Libra project, which was announced by Facebook in 2019 as an important turning point in the development of digital currency since Bitcoin. Libra is a kind of stablecoin, and it has been identified as a global stablecoin owing to its wide-ranging impact on the dimension of global finance. Because the Libra project aims to offer a globally accessible low-cost payment system for all users, we analyse it in the research area of global finance with a qualitative approach to the history of economic theories of money and finance. In this area, Karl Polanyi’s thoughts on money and finance and the interpretation by Saiag, which he called a neo-Polanyian approach, deserve attention. Taking this approach, we understand that unofficial functions of haute finance played a significant role in sustaining the international and interdependent financial system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this context, although it also saved colonized and dependent regions from falling into financial crises, it was not socially helpful for them. If Libra wants to be the haute finance of our age in the real sense of serving to bring about financial inclusion, such a point should be considered. However, for the moment, existing international monetary institutions are only keen to take regulatory measures against the risk of dirty transactions. There is a substantial lacuna of publicness in the discussion, and this needs to be filled in in the near future.

Profitability without Investment

Sustained investment in productive capabilities and fixed-capital formation is a key driver of inclusive and sustainable structural transformation. Both historically and compared to other middle-income countries, South Africa has performed poorly in terms of sustaining domestic-productive investments. This failing has coexisted with the development of a stock market with the second-highest level of capitalization over gross domestic product (GDP) in the world, and high levels of profitability across several economic sectors. This chapter provides new evidence on the specific ways in which financialization of non-financial corporations in South Africa has resulted in low investment performances, focusing on two large, publicly listed corporations operating across different economic sectors between 2000 and 2019. The analysis shows that, despite sector heterogeneities: (1) corporations have increasingly financed operations, capital expenditure, and distributions to shareholders with debt; (2) the US dollar-denominated share of this debt has grown rapidly, exposing corporations to increased exchange and interest rate risk; and (3) distributions to shareholders, driven by dividends rather than share repurchases, have risen markedly. These financialization dynamics are attributed to the distribution of power in the domestic political economy and the subordinate nature of South Africa’s integration with global finance. Driving financialization, these two mutually reinforcing factors have undermined the translation of profits into domestic investment, reducing its capacity to drive structural transformation.

LA BANQUE ISLAMIQUE ; NATURE SPECIFIQUE ET EVOLUTION / THE ISLAMIC BANK; SPECIFIC NATURE AND EVOLUTION

La finance islamique est désormais une composante essentielle de la finance mondiale. Elle connait une croissance vertigineuse dans plusieurs pays musulmans à l’instar des pays de Golfe et de l’Asie Sud – Est. Elle a fait preuve d’innovation et a pu s’implanter dans plusieurs pays où elle cohabite avec la finance conventionnelle La finance participative, en se basant sur les percepts islamiques, peut présenter des opportunités qu’elle offrirait par sa contribution au financement des secteurs prioritaires. La finance islamique est une finance éthique qui s’inspire sur des valeurs morales et des enseignements de la Charia. Elle repose essentiellement sur l’interdiction des taux d’intérêt dans les opérations d’endettement (plus connu sous le nom de « riba »), et sur le principe de partage des pertes et des profits ; ce qui constitue les éléments distinctifs à l’égard de la finance conventionnelle. Islamic finance is now an essential component of the global finance. It is experiencing dizzying growth in several Muslim countries such as the Gulf countries and Southeast Asia. It has demonstrated innovation and has been able to establish itself in several countries where it coexists with conventional finance Crowdfunding, based on Islamic precepts, can present opportunities that it would offer through its contribution to funding priority sectors. Islamic finance is ethical finance that draws on moral values and the teachings of Sharia. It is essentially based on the prohibition of interest rates in debt transactions (better known as "riba"), and on the principle of profit and loss sharing; which constitutes the distinguishing elements with regard to conventional finance. JEL: G21, G29 <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0798/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>