Financial subordination and uneven financialization in 21st century Africa

Abstract

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.

Governing Fintech and Fintech as Governance: The Regulatory Sandbox, Riskwashing, and Disruptive Social Classification

“…Obviously, fintech-financialization penetration to society meets with a number of obstacles which limit the effect of the apparatus as we described here (Bernards 2019), and it is also a globally highly uneven process (Kvangraven et al 2021). However, given the magnitude of this potential impact, it would be crucial to open the regulatory process to stimuli that force conscientious awareness and incorporation of factors that we outlined here.…”

Colonial Financial Infrastructures and Kenya’s Uneven Fintech Boom

“…Kvangraven et al. 2021; Newman 2020). The forms of social and spatial unevenness baked into the “imperial remains” (per Kimari and Ernstson 2020) of Kenya’s financial infrastructures are unlikely to change without a more radical restructuring of existing systems of property relations and exploitation and the state forms through which they are sustained.…”

“…Indeed, the uneven development of fintech, and the longer history traced here suggests that financial development in itself is likely to reinforce existing patterns of uneven development (cf. Kvangraven et al 2021;Newman 2020). The forms of social and spatial unevenness baked into the "imperial remains" (per Kimari and Ernstson 2020) of Kenya's financial infrastructures are unlikely to change without a more radical restructuring of existing systems of property relations and exploitation and the state forms through which they are sustained.…”

The new ‘bond-age’, climate crisis and the case for climate reparations: Unpicking old/new colonialities of finance for development within the SDGs

“…As the result of banking and financial crises across developing countries since the 1980s, they suggest that the channels of financial liberalization, and now financialization ii , have instead undermined development through macro-economic stability and incapacity to direct needed resources and credit to developmental purposes (Arestis, 2016;Alves and Toporowski, 2019). In Sub-saharan African and Latin American countries, some literature have reported limited causal relationship between liberalization, increased capital movements and broad productive development due to lack of long-term investment and financing of domestic firms (Crespi, Tacsir and Vargas, 2016;Njikam, 2017;Kvangraven, Koddenbrock and Sylla, 2020).…”

“…Hence, enduring systemic vulnerabilities weaken the resource and fiscal outlay and capacity of both households and the state. In addition, the intentional and uneven integration of developing countries in the global financial system have resulted in increasing debt and financial speculation in developing countries that contribute to perennial vulnerabilities (UNCTAD, 2018; Kvangraven, Koddenbrock and Sylla, 2020;K. K. Perry, 2020c).…”