Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa

Description

Over forty years after the formal end of colonialism, suffocating ties to Western financial systems continue to prevent African countries from achieving any meaningful monetary sovereignty.

Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa traces the recent history of African monetary and financial dependencies, looking at the ways African nations are resisting colonial legacies. Using a comparative, multi-disciplinary approach, this book uncovers what went wrong after the Pan-African approaches that defined the early stages of independence, and how most African economies fell into the firm grip of the IMF, World Bank, and the EU’s strict neoliberal policies.

This collection is the first to offer a wide-ranging, comparative and historical look at how African societies have attempted to increase their policy influence and move beyond neoliberal orthodoxy and US-dollar dependency. Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa is essential reading for anyone interested in the African quest for self-determination in a turbulent world of recurring economic and financial crisis.

Foreword - Prabhat Patnaik

Introduction - By the editors

Part I: The contemporary global economic and monetary order

1. China’s Finance and Africa’s Economic and Monetary Sovereignty - Radhika Desai

Part II: Challenges to monetary sovereignty in the postcolonial periphery

2. Banking, Business, and Sovereignty in Sudan (1956–2019) - Harry Cross

3. Money, Finance, and Capital Accumulation in Zimbabwe - Francis Garikayi

4. Monetary Policy in Algeria (1999–2019): An economic and monetary history approach - Fatiha Talahite

Part III: Increasing sovereignty through monetary unions?

5. The West African CFA Franc Zone as a Double Monetary Union: Loss of economic competitiveness and anti-developmental path-dependencies - Carla Coburger

6. The CFA Franc Under Neoliberal Monetary Policy: A labour-focused approach - Hannah Cross

7. From Central Bank Independence to Government Dependence: Monetary colonialism in the Eurozone - Thomas Fazi

8. Geopolitics of Finance in Africa: Birth of financial centres, not monetary unions - Elizabeth Cobbett

Part IV: Alternatives

9. The Great Paradox: Liberalism Destroys the Market Economy: The pitfalls of the neoliberal recipe forAfrican economic and monetary sovereignty - Heiner Flassbeck

10. Food Sovereignty, the National Question, and Post-colonial Development in Africa - Max Ajl

11. Being Poor in the Current Monetary System: Implications of foreign exchange shortage for African economies and possible solutions - Anne Löscher

12. The German Push for Local Currency Bond Markets in African Countries: A pathway to economic sovereignty or increased economic dependency? - Frauke Banse

Notes on Editors

Notes on Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Economic Policy
• Public Policy
• Economic History
• Monetary Policy
• Money Policy
• Modern
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• ECONOMICS
• Economie gestion
• África
• 21st century
• Modern history
• Monetary economics
• General officer
• Political economy
• Imperialism
• History of Africa
• Business
• Impérialisme (jeu vidéo)
• General
• Africa
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745344096
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa
Opens the canvas to reflect on the economic and monetary dependence of the entire continent, picking up the unfinished business of economic and financial decolonization, updating it empirically and conceptually right up to the present conjuncture of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has further exposed inequalities.
-Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth
A fresh and innovative view on Africa s entanglement in the world s financial and monetary system. Its point of departure - that Africa has long been a part of global finance - is absolutely necessary if we are to understand the future trajectory of Africa s political economy.
-Randall Germain, Professor of Political Science at Carleton University
A timely and highly recommended contribution to the literature with well researched case studies and deep historical, theoretical and policy insights into the issue.
-Howard Stein, Professor at the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Insightful and diverse, it is crucial reading for anyone wanting to understand and engage with the theoretical and political debates about sovereignty and subordination in Africa.
-Ingrid Kvangraven, Department of International Development, King s College, London
A powerful addition to a growing body of work aimed at enhancing our understanding of the ways in which, through the vector of finance, a transnational power regime controls the key levers of policy-making in Africa and undermines efforts at winning economic sovereignty. Readers will also find in the book, plenty of ideas for mobilizing alternatives for reversing the programmed reproduction of dependence and underdevelopment.
-Adebayo O. Olukoshi, Distinguished Professor, Wits School of Governance
Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa
Edited by Maha Ben Gadha, Fadhel Kaboub, Kai Koddenbrock, Ines Mahmoud, and Ndongo Samba Sylla
Foreword by Prabhat Patnaik
First published 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Maha Ben Gadha, Fadhel Kaboub, Kai Koddenbrock, Ines Mahmoud, and Ndongo Samba Sylla 2021
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License (the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license)
Open access to this publication is sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung with funds from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of the Federal Republic of Germany. The content of the publication is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the positions of RLS.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4408 9 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4407 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4411 9 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4409 6 EPUB
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Westchester Publishing Services
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Illustration designed by http://www.atelierglibett.com/
Contents
Foreword
Prabhat Patnaik
Introduction
By the editors
Part I: The contemporary global economic and monetary order
1 China s Finance and Africa s Economic and Monetary Sovereignty
Radhika Desai
Part II: Challenges to monetary sovereignty in the postcolonial periphery
2 Banking, Business, and Sovereignty in Sudan (1956-2019)
Harry Cross
3 Money, Finance, and Capital Accumulation in Zimbabwe
Francis Garikayi
4 Monetary Policy in Algeria (1999-2019): An economic and monetary history approach
Fatiha Talahite
Part III: Increasing sovereignty through monetary unions?
5 The West African CFA Franc Zone as a Double Monetary Union: Loss of economic competitiveness and anti-developmental path-dependencies
Carla Coburger
6 The CFA Franc Under Neoliberal Monetary Policy: A labour-focused approach
Hannah Cross
7 From Central Bank Independence to Government Dependence: Monetary colonialism in the Eurozone
Thomas Fazi
8 Geopolitics of Finance in Africa: Birth of financial centres, not monetary unions
Elizabeth Cobbett
Part IV: Alternatives
9 The Great Paradox: Liberalism Destroys the Market Economy: The pitfalls of the neoliberal recipe for African economic and monetary sovereignty
Heiner Flassbeck
10 Food Sovereignty, the National Question, and Post-colonial Development in Africa
Max Ajl
11 Being Poor in the Current Monetary System: Implications of foreign exchange shortage for African economies and possible solutions
Anne Löscher
12 The German Push for Local Currency Bond Markets in African Countries: A pathway to economic sovereignty or increased economic dependency?
Frauke Banse
Notes on Editors
Notes on Contributors
Index
Foreword
Prabhat Patnaik
For Africa, as elsewhere in the third world, the need to go beyond neoliberalism has become a matter not just of desirability, but of practical urgency. This is because the regime of neoliberal globalisation has reached a dead-end, owing to the working out of its own immanent tendencies. Three tendencies in particular are important here.
The first is a de-segmentation of the world economy. Historically, labour from the Global South was never allowed to move freely to the Global North, and still is not; indeed recent efforts to circumvent restrictions on such movement have had tragic consequences, like the European refugee crisis. Capital from the Global North, though formally free to move to the Global South, never did so, except to sectors like minerals and plantations that only complemented the colonial pattern of the international division of labour; the low Southern wages were never enough to attract Northern capital to locate production in the south to meet global demand. And products of capital from the south were prevented by entry-barriers of various kinds from accessing global markets from low-wage Southern locations.
The world economy got segmented as a result: wages in the North rose along with labour productivity, while wages in the South remained tied to a subsistence level because of the vast labour reserves there, generated through the destruction of local craft production under colonialism.
This segmentation has been broken for the first time by the current neoliberal globalisation. Capital from the North is now willing to locate production in the third world so as to take advantage of low wages there and to meet global demand. True, it goes only to some destinations, and not to the third world in general, but this is sufficient to keep Northern wages in check, as the workers there now have to compete with third world workers and hence suffer the baneful consequences of third world labour reserves.
The overall vector of real wages therefore does not rise to any significant extent, since it is pulled down by massive third world labour reserves. However, the vector of labour productivity rises across the world, which results in a rise in the share of surplus in output, both in individual countries and for the world as a whole. It is this that underlies the rise in income inequality in almost every country that Piketty and others have been highlighting, though they adduce reasons for it that are erroneous.
This rise in the share of that surplus also has the effect of causing an ex ante tendency towards overproduction in the world economy. As the propensity to consume is higher for wage earners (and, more generally, for the working people) than for surplus earners, a shift from wages to surplus lowers the time profile of consumption, and hence of aggregate demand, for any given time-profile of investment. This pulls down the time-profile of investment itself, compounding the problem further.
This tendency towards rising surplus might have come to an end if the relocation of activities from the North to the south substantially used up the third world labour reserves. But here we come to the second immanent tendency. With capital, including finance, being globalised, while the state remains a nation-state, state policy everywhere must conform to the demands of finance. If a country defies the demands of finance, finance will leave that country en masse causing a financial crisis. Therefore, governments willy-nilly pursue policies in keeping with the demands of finance. This entails their withdrawing support from the petty production sector, including peasant agriculture, and opening up this sector to encroachment by big capital. A crisis in petty production ensues and an exodus of petty producers, including peasants, to urban areas where they swell the labour reserves.
Thus the relocation of activities from advanced countries to the third world does not lead to any exhaustion of labour reserves in the latter. On the contrary, the migration of distressed petty producers to urban areas, together with a natural growth in population, enlarges the relative size of the labour reserves in the total workforce. The rising share of surplus within each country and in the world as a whole thus continues unabated, as does the ex ante tendency towards overproduction.
This ex ante tendency would not become ex post if the state increased aggregate demand through raising its own expenditures. But, for state expenditure to counteract ex ante overproduction, it must be financed either by a fiscal deficit or by taxing the rich. A tax on the working people, who spend most of their income on con