The ‘new economy’ and social risk: banking on the poor?

By H. Weber. 2004

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rise of the ‘new economy’ in many of the advanced capitalist states since the 1970s has entailed a re-organization of global social and political relations generally. These changes become apparent in analyses that focus on trends and shifts in the global political economy. In the context of these adjustments, discourses of ‘poverty reduction’ have come to prominence, with a particular financially steered strategy emerging as a key approach to ‘poverty reduction’ on a global scale, namely microcredit. I argue that the microcredit approach to poverty reduction is strategically embedded in the global political economy. It has been appropriated primarily to facilitate the implementation of financial sector liberalization on a global scale. Additionally, the contexts in which these programmes are implemented also reflect the motive of achieving a form of social disciplining aimed at commanding compliance for neo-liberal restructuring more generally. I develop this argument through an analysis of the way in which microcredit is located in – and implemented through – the institutional policy framework of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the consequent implications this has for the realization of the wider objectives of these institutions in global politics. The argument elucidates the relationship between efforts to advance the imperatives of the ‘new economy’, the microcredit approach to poverty reduction, and the (re)-production of social risk.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/419c068d4deb71c0c636c4b9e9f067e559898965

How researchers see this paper

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. E. Mawdsley
2. H. Weber
3. A. Nicholls
4. Frances Westley

In Finance

1. E. Mawdsley
2. Frances Westley
3. M. Moore
4. H. Weber
5. A. Nicholls

In Urban Studies

1. E. Mawdsley
2. H. Weber
3. A. Nicholls

Citations in the corpus

• The Social Finance and Social Innovation Nexus 1 (2012, background): “In comparison, the scholarly literature on this subject is at a very early stage of development, with the exception of work on the sub-topic of micro-finance that is well researched (e.g. Weber 2004, Burgess and Pande 2005).”
• Politics of ‘Leaving No One Behind’: Contesting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda (2017, background): “…has been that microcredit schemes have been strategically aligned with structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) because they can be used to facilitate SAPs—and especially financial sector liberalisation—while simultaneously undermining resistance to neo-liberal development (cf. Weber, 2002, 2004).”
• Development geography II (2018, background): “As the sector has grown, so too have critical commentaries on the ways in which it reflects and enables wider sites and scales of financialization (Weber, 2004, 2014; Aitkin, 2013; Soederberg, 2013; Mader, 2014).”