Contents: Acknowledgements. Contributors. I. Themes and trends: developing nations in the age of finance: 1. Global financial integration-I: The overlooked historical context of the current period/Amiya Kumar Bagchi. 2. Global financial integration-II: Exclusion, vulnerability and systemic fragility/Gary A. Dymski. 3. Central Bank 'autonomy' in the age of finance: The implications for developing countries/Jayati Ghosh. 4. The illusionism of finance/Prabhat Patnaik. II. Histories of the periphery and of the centre: 5. The facts and fictions of financial architecture: Evidence from the late nineteenth century/Marc Flandreau and Clemens Jobst. 6. The imperial impact on the globalization of Indian finance prior to the First World War: the role of the British colonial exchange banks/John McGuire. 7. Finance and production in the United States, 1928-2001: an empirical note/Porus Olpadwala and Yuri Mansury. 8. Shareholder value maximization, stock market and new technology: Should the US corporate model be the universal standard?/Ajit Singh, Jack Glen, Ann Zammit, Rafael De-Hoyos, Alaka Singh and Bruce Weisse. 9. The globalization of financial exploitation/Gary A. Dymski. III. Insights into the Indian financial structure and experience: 10. Credit risk and bank fragility in the new financial environment/C.P. Chandrasekhar. 11. Stock market development and financing of the corporate sector in India: some recent evidence/Parthapratim Pal. 12. Liberalization of capital inflows and the real exchange rate in India: a VAR analysis/Indrani Chakraborty. IV. Comparisons and lessons: 13. Financial liberalization in Eastern Europe: fortunate fetters or financial underdevelopment?/Adam Hersh and Christian E. Weller. 14. The emerging hubs in central-Eastern Europe, trade blocs and financial cooperation/Giuseppe Tattara. 15. China in the bull shop: dealing with finance after WTO/Sunanda Sen. 16. Finance: lessons for India/Amiya Kumar Bagchi. Index.
"The essays gathered in this book address two broad questions. What are the legacies of the imperial age and the colonial epoch, in the capitalist economy of the present day? And what challenges do global financial dynamics pose for developing countries, and for lower- and middle-income households?
Increasing cross-border economic flows have attracted ever more attention. Ironically, cross-border financial relations are centuries old: they date to the birth of the modern nation-state, and, indeed, emerged under the dual shadows cast by imperialism and colonialism. Under colonialism, the financial flows were asymmetric, almost always flowing from the periphery to the core. This historical fact has a continuity in the world economy's financial core -- the US, Western Europe, Japan and newly emerging urban East Asia, and a few selected regions elsewhere. There, globalization has, in the past quarter-century, provided ever more investment and credit options for firms and consumers with access to what Marx would have called 'world money'.
But any balance-sheet of the contemporary impacts of cross-border financial flows for nations outside this global core--that is, formerly, colonialized and imperially dominated areas--would look quite different. Certainly, there are global 'financial citizens' in these countries, who have benefited from freer global financial flows. But, overall, these nations' macroeconomics have been compromised by contractionary policies forced on them due to recurrent cross border financial crises; further, many micro-economic tragedies have unfolded in the wake of these macroshocks.
The chapters in this book investigate three interlocking domains: the terrain of ideology about how global financial markets are supposed to work, across nations and across agents; the terrain of institutions and market structures; and the terrain of macro-economic and regulatory policy. Special attention is paid to the situation of India. This book demonstrates that, because asymmetric power rooted in imperialism and exploitation underlies the current era, exclusion and fragility are persistent features of the world in which we live." (jacket)
