Subordination and Development: Emerging Market Economies of Asia and Latin America

About the Book

This book provides an analysis of the impact of subordination in the major EMEs. Distinct from 'dependence' under official aid till 1970s, subordination prevailed over developing nations withliberalization of capital-flows by the 1990s when markets used as agents for overseas capital for extracting surpluses. Domestic economic policies changed under autarkic neo-liberal norms with stagnation in the real economy. Critiques, of the neo-liberal premises follow in the book with suggested heterodox alternatives. The book also dwells on the economic dynamics of thestructural changes which led finance attain its dominance for those economies with deleterious consequences for the real economy.

About the Author :
Sunanda Sen is a former professor of economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is also a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute, Bard College, USA and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her publications include a number of books of which the last two, Dominant Finance and Stagnant Economies (Oxford University Press, 2014) and The Changing Face of Imperialism: From Colonialism to Contemporary Capitalism (co-edited with Cristina Marcuzzo; Routledge, 2018), received the prestigious Japan Society Political Economy (JSPE)–Routledge Prize of 2021.

Review :
The global interdependence of economies through international markets is historically associated with the exploitation of differences and the generation of asymmetries. Sunanda Sen’s book highlights the role of expanding markets in triggering cumulative processes of subordination of certain economies (or groups of economies) relative to others. The book is an ambitious exploration of the multi-faceted character of subordination as it unfolds through the various layers of economic interdependence from international division of labour to global financial flows.

Sunanda Sen’s exploration proposes asymmetry as a fundamental benchmark for interpreting the long-run dynamics of market relationships in the world economy. Her book is an invaluable contribution to understanding the relationship between market globalization and structural dynamics, and to assessing the complex trajectories along which patterns of subordination are currently challenged and transformed. Subordination and Development is an outstanding study of our current phase of capitalist development, brilliantly characterized as a modern blend of financialization and neo-imperialism. Using a highly informative analytical economic framework, rigorously and insightfully based on Keynes’s and post-Keynesian contributions, the book shows how the global South is caught in a web of unequal financial and trade relationships with Northern countries and their multinational corporations, to the detriment of workers and communities. Subordination and Development is truly enlightening and compelling because Sunanda Sen applies her analytical framework in detailed and highly informative case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, India and China. These studies show the financialized subordination in practice and their highly negative impacts on these southern countries.

I highly recommend this book to teachers, students and all those interested in understanding the underlying dynamics of finance and unequal development in today’s world. Sunanda Sen successfully interweaves Gramscian concepts of hegemony and subordination with Marxian ideas of fictitious capital to analyse the nexus between corporates, finance, the state, and global regulatory and finance institutions, as they coalesce into an embryonic global elite. This domination by ‘new capital’ involves the detachment of finance from the real economy, with money chasing its own tail for artificial profits, an emerging scenario that has severe negative implications for sustainability, stability and for generating inclusive economic growth with progressive features in the global South. Combining perspectives drawn from heterodox theoretical traditions with applied statistical analysis, this pioneering, innovative and erudite exploration illuminates key contemporary economic policy issues dominating national and international discourse. A very valuable contribution that will surely catalyse much creative investigation; strongly recommended for researchers, policy makers, teachers and advanced students in the wide-ranging fields of finance and development.