Lecturer in International Development.
My work with Carolina Alves on Heterodox Economics is now translated to Spanish and published in the Colombian journal Ensayos de Economía. Download the full Spanish article or read the working paper in English. Thanks to Orlando Nikolai Santos Alvarado for the translation.
I wrote a blog post with Surbhi Kesar for the Institute for New Economic Thinking on the Economics discipline’s lack of capacity to understand racial inequalities, based on survey data.
I wrote an article on how COVID-19 exposes weaknesses in the dominant Economics narrative, and how heterodox economics offer important alternatives, with Carolina Alves for the Review of Agrarian Studies. Here’s the abstract:
In this article, we argue that societies’ unpreparedness and inadequate responses to the Covid-19 pandemic expose weaknesses in the foundations of the dominant economic paradigm. We document how economics came to disembed itself from broader societal analysis and how this has influenced public policy in problematic ways, leading to privileging of efficiency over resilience. We then go a step further to consider the role of economic evidence in public policy more generally. Furthermore, we demonstrate how heterodox economics can enrich our understandings of our economies’ weaknesses and of how to build a more resilient and just economy. We conclude that we need an explanation of the crisis that is capable of seeing the economy as more than just markets and as embedded in society; one that is capable of linking the causes and consequences of the pandemic to our systems of production and distribution.
Read the full paper.
A diverse reading list on pandemics compiled with Devika Dutt, Surbhi Kesar and Farwa Sial.
Along with D-Econ, I’ll be hosing a workshop at Exploring Economics’ Summer Academy August 10-16th 2020 on Critical Development Economics/Decolonizing Economics. Register for the workshop here.
On February 27th 2020, the “Women in Science” project invited me to talk about diversifying and decolonising economics. This was a part of the Great Speaker Series campaign in Portugal in partnership with the British-born co-working space Second Home Lisbon. In the podcast, I outline how D-Econ came to be, how I came to be interested in heterodox economics, and why and how the missions of diversifying and decolonising economics are so essential. Listen to the podcast here.
I wrote a post for openDemocracy laying out how a dependency theory research programme can help us understand the global impacts of COVID-19. Check it out.
I recently published “Beyond the Stereotype: Restating the Relevance of the Dependency Research Programme” in Development and Change. Here is the abstract:
This article evaluates the relevance of dependency theory for understanding contemporary development challenges, especially in the light of changes in the global economy over the past 50 years. In order to do so, the article rectifies previous misunderstandings of the scholarship and offers a new definition of dependency theory as a research programme, rather than a singular theory. Four core tenets of this research programme are identified: a global historical approach; theorizing of the polarizing tendencies of global capitalism; a focus on structures of production; and a focus on the specific constraints faced by peripheral economies. While each of these elements can be found in many contemporary theories, what makes dependency theory unique — and a particularly strong research programme — is the combination of these elements. The article demonstrates how this approach provides a deep and broad understanding that is necessary to appreciate the persistence of uneven development with reference to two case studies, namely successful industrialization in South Korea, and how the fragmentation of global value chains has impacted industrialization in Indonesia. Finally, the article argues that approaching these kinds of cases through a dependency research programme can contribute to a fruitful renewal of development studies.
In April, I was interviewed for two episodes of the brilliant Danish Economics podcast Boblen. One episode was on microfinance and the other on trade.
I recently wrote a review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology for Nature. Read the full review.
