In and against Development: The World Bank behind the Looking Glass: 314 (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 314) - Hardcover

Fine, Ben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9004723501 ISBN 13: 9789004723504

Publisher: Brill, 2025

Synopsis

Long self-proclaimed as “Knowledge Bank”, the World Bank is as active as criticised in its endeavours across scholarship, ideology and policy in practice, serving US interests in the age of globalisation, neoliberalism and financialisation. This Volume focuses on the Bank’s scholarship, meticulously criticising it and assessing alternatives. Its analytical framing draws upon economics imperialism in general, and its evolution through three phases. Corresponding phases of new, newer and newest development economics are identified, with the World Bank taking a leading role in each, with implications for the expanding scope of development economics and its contestations with development studies.

About this title

About the Author

Ben Fine, Ph.D. (1974), London School of Economics, is Emeritus Professor of Economics at SOAS University of and Visiting Professor at Wits School of Governance, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. His most recent books include Material Cultures of Financialisation, co-edited with Kate Bayliss and Mary Robertson (Routledge, 2018); Race, Class and the Post-Apartheid Democratic State, co-edited with John Reynolds and Robert van Niekerk (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2019); and A Guide to the Systems of Provision Approach: Who Gets What, How and Why, with Kate Bayliss (Palgrave, 2021). His Marx’s ‘Capital’ (Pluto, 2016) is now in its sixth edition (with co-author Alfredo Saad-Filho). He was founding Chair of the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (iippe.org) until June 2023.

Edition details

• Publisher: Brill
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004723501
• ISBN 13: 9789004723504
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 376