The financialization debate has not paid enough attention to the African continent. The continent’s populations and governments have found creative ways of dealing with the capitalist world market and political power relations since decolonization in the late 1950s. However, several forms of structural dependence and subordination persist. We ask in this article how the global process of financialization has unfolded across the continent and what it means for relations of dependence. We understand financialization as the global expansion of financial practices, and, in particular, the financial sector, that followed the end of the Bretton Woods era. We consider to what extent it has occurred at all in the four case study countries of Mauritius, Nigeria, Zambia, and South Africa. The empirical analysis of aggregate country data shows that financialization is, at best, an uneven and patchy process on the continent, not a general structural shift in the way capital accumulation is organized. Rather, where financialization occurred, it appears to have diversified the relations of dependence that states, corporations, and populations have found themselves in.

One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from productive economic pursuits. In this paper, we explore these claims of ‘expansion’ and ‘divorce’ based on a longue durée analysis of the link between finance and production in Senegal and Ghana. As such, we de-centre the dominant approach to financialisation. Seen from the South, we argue that although there has been expansion of financial motives and practices the ‘divorce’ between the financial and the productive economy cannot be considered a new empirical phenomenon having occurred during the last decades and even less an epochal shift of the capitalist system. The tendency for finance to neglect the needs of the domestic productive sector has been the structural operation of finance in many parts of the Global South over the last 150 years. Therefore, one cannot put forward a theory of the evolution of finance under capitalism without taking these crucial historical insights into account.

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At the end of the twentieth century, Africa was described as ‘marginalised’. Nowadays, the continent is considered as ‘emerging’. The aim of this paper is to discuss the validity of this new perception of Africa's position in the global economy. By critically re-evaluating existing empirical data, the author will attempt to show that the emergence thesis is superficial and does not take into account the current nature of economic growth in Africa and the cost it implies in terms of net income payments to the rest of the world. The reality is that Africa remains one of the world's most open, dependent and exploited regions.

The "standard" unemployment rate is often criticized for omitting large numbers of people who are classified as employed or as not economically inactive, when in fact their situation amounts to unemployment. The author discusses the limitations of this standard definition for developing countries. After reviewing the methodological and statistical problems posed by the standard rate, he looks at the reality behind the words in contexts where the labour market is highly segmented. He shows that the standard unemployment rate underestimates excess labour supply and is a poor indicator of the Decent Work deficit, and considers its limitations in guiding economic policy.T he unemployment rate is widely used as an indicator of labour absorption problems, wasted human resources, labour market performance, success of economic policies, and even the risks of inflationary tensions. 1 Despite such broad appeal, however, it is a controversial and much criticized concept. Indeed, unemployment figures everywhere are hotly debated.This article considers the limitations of the "standard" -or "open" -unemployment rate in developing countries. It starts by reviewing the methodological and statistical problems associated with the standard rate, going on to look at the reality behind the words in contexts where the labour market is highly segmented. After showing how the standard unemployment rate underestimates excess labour supply and is a poor indicator of the Decent Work deficit, the discussion turns to its limitations in guiding economic policy. * Doctor of Economics, Head of Programmes and research in the West African Office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Dakar); email: ndongosylla@gmail.com.Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.