Developing Economics

In Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, the peasant appears twice dead. First in life, as property; then in death, as inventory lingering in the bureaucratic ledgers of the empire. Pavel Chichikov, Gogol’s wandering con man, traverses provincial Russia purchasing the names of deceased serfs still counted in the census so he can accumulate fictive wealth from human […]

In September 2025, Adam Tooze sent a shock wave through Development studies circles (in the West) with an essay entitled “The End of Development”. He declared the evident truth that “the West’s aid model was always a mirage” and that “the UN Sustainable Development Goals now look less like a new dawn than the final […]

Industrial policy, once a taboo in mainstream economics, is being mainstreamed by the very institutions that spent four decades stigmatising it. In March 2026, the World Bank published Industrial Policy for Development: Approaches in the 21st Century, co-authored by Ana Margarida Fernandes and Tristan Reed. The IMF, has done a similar volte face, first in […]

What actually constitutes the key agenda for workers in Indonesia beyond celebrating May Day as a symbol of struggle? Wages in Indonesia are never truly “negotiated”; they are determined, stabilized, and at the same time separated from the political power that should be able to challenge them. Since the authoritarian New Order regime, the state […]

Somewhere in the state of Maharashtra, a cotton farmer took his own life after years of compounding debt and crop failure. Across India, this tragedy is not rare. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 11,290 farmer and farm-labourer suicides in 2022—roughly one death every hour—with debt consistently identified as a leading cause (Down to Earth, […]

By Farwa Sial and C.P. Chandrasekhar  Private credit markets are showing real signs of stress, with multiple major funds restricting withdrawals as investors struggle to exit illiquid holdings. The fears of investors in these funds, which explain the withdrawals, is driven by the success of AI, which, while driven by enormous capital spending financed in part […]

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO’s) 2025 summit in Tianjin produced a series of outcomes that, although modest in appearance, are strategically significant. The most prominent developments were the agreement in principle to establish an SCO Development Bank, seeded with approximately ¥2 billion in grants and a further ¥10–14 billion in concessional loans from China. The summit [&#8…

Why do so many people who claim to “see the whole system” remain blind to power? This question struck me while listening to a recent episode of Planet Critical. The guest was Joseph Tainter, best known for The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter is celebrated as a pioneer of collapse studies and systems thinking. Yet […]

In the past two decades, global health governance has undergone a quiet revolution, shaped less by sovereign states and more by the growing influence of private capital. The World Health Organisation (WHO), once envisioned as the democratic engine of international public health, has increasingly come to rely on large-scale philanthropic foundations. This shift toward what […]

In June, 1,200 scholars and activists from around the world gathered in Norway for a historic convergence of two movements: degrowth and ecological economics. During the closing plenary session, I listened to three speakers, two of whom—Kate Raworth and Max Ajl—represented radically different approaches to our current crises. Though Raworth and Ajl engaged in respectful […]