Download Free Pawned States Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Pawned States and write the review.

How foreign lending weakens emerging nations In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external public finance offered emerging nations endless opportunities to overcome barriers to growth, but it also enabled rulers to bypass critical stages in institution building and political development. Pawned States reveals how easy access to foreign lending at early stages of state building has led to chronic fiscal instability and weakened state capacity in the developing world. Drawing on a wealth of original data to document the rise of cheap overseas credit between 1816 and 1913, Didac Queralt shows how countries in the global periphery obtained these loans by agreeing to “extreme conditionality,” which empowered international investors to take control of local revenue sources in cases of default, and how foreclosure eroded a country’s tax base and caused lasting fiscal disequilibrium. Queralt goes on to combine quantitative analysis of tax performance between 1816 and 2005 with qualitative historical analysis in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, illustrating how overreliance on external capital by local leaders distorts their incentives to expand tax capacity, articulate power-sharing institutions, and strengthen bureaucratic apparatus. Panoramic in scope, Pawned States sheds needed light on how early and easy access to external finance pushes developing nations into trajectories characterized by fragile fiscal institutions and autocratic politics.
How foreign lending weakens emerging nations In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external public finance offered emerging nations endless opportunities to overcome barriers to growth, but it also enabled rulers to bypass critical stages in institution building and political development. Pawned States reveals how easy access to foreign lending at early stages of state building has led to chronic fiscal instability and weakened state capacity in the developing world. Drawing on a wealth of original data to document the rise of cheap overseas credit between 1816 and 1913, Didac Queralt shows how countries in the global periphery obtained these loans by agreeing to “extreme conditionality,” which empowered international investors to take control of local revenue sources in cases of default, and how foreclosure eroded a country’s tax base and caused lasting fiscal disequilibrium. Queralt goes on to combine quantitative analysis of tax performance between 1816 and 2005 with qualitative historical analysis in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, illustrating how overreliance on external capital by local leaders distorts their incentives to expand tax capacity, articulate power-sharing institutions, and strengthen bureaucratic apparatus. Panoramic in scope, Pawned States sheds needed light on how early and easy access to external finance pushes developing nations into trajectories characterized by fragile fiscal institutions and autocratic politics.
This Handbook presents chapters that explore the causes and consequences of politics within economic history using social-scientific theory and methods.The first section summarizes the state of the field and provides an overview of the data and techniques typically used by HPE scholars. Subsequent chapters survey major HPE research areas in political economy, political science, and economics, as well as the long-run economic, political, and social consequences of historical political economy
Escaping a life of marginalization and misery, Kitty Doe joins the most powerful family in the country, a choice that requires her to assume the identity of the Prime Minister's niece and stop a rebellion that ended her predecessor's life.
Across the developing world, governments still lack the fiscal capacity to fund critical public goods, alleviate poverty, and invest in economic development. Yet, we know little about how to effectively build strong states in these settings. This book develops and tests a new theory to explain why fiscal capacity in African states is low. Drawing on work in psychology and behavioral economics, this book argues that taxation leads citizens to demand more from leaders as they seek to recover lost income from taxation. It then argues that governments' willingness to tax will depend on the extent to which they can satisfy citizens' demands while maintaining rent extraction. Rent-seeking leaders of low-capacity states will strategically underinvest in fiscal capacity in order to avoid the higher demands they face under taxation. Contrary to many existing theories, Martin shows that this can actually lead to lower taxation in democracies compared to autocracies, as citizen accountability demands pose a bigger threat to rulers. The book uses multiple empirical approaches to test the theory. Laboratory experiments in Uganda and Ghana, combined with Afrobarometer data, demonstrate that taxation increases citizens' demands on leaders. Global cross-national panel data show that democracy can actually lead to lower taxation in low-capacity states. When taxation is sustainable, however, it is associated with better governance. Case studies in Uganda, based on the author's own fieldwork and original survey data, provide additional support for the theory. These findings provide new framework for understanding the challenges to building state capacity, especially fiscal capacity, in modern developing countries.