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Kicking away the financial ladder? German development banking under economic globalisation

Naqvi, Natalya ORCID: 0000-0003-0821-070X, Henow, Anne and Chang, Ha-Joon (2018) Kicking away the financial ladder? German development banking under economic globalisation. Review of International Political Economy, 25 (5). 672 - 698. ISSN 0969-2290

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Identification Number: 10.1080/09692290.2018.1480515

Abstract

While extensive literature exists on how economic globalisation has limited developing countries’ policy space for industrial policy, the literature on how it has affected advanced economies remains scant. We utilise original archival material to analyse the activities of the German public development bank, the Kreditantstalt fur Wiederaufbau (KfW), in order to shed light on an important, but neglected aspect of German industrial policy. We analyse how the KfW responded to multiple challenges after the rise of economic globalisation, including a funding crisis, international agreements to limit export subsidies and Europeanisation. We argue that KfW successfully managed to navigate these challenges in order to retain, and even increase, its ability to conduct selective industrial policy in the post- 1980s era. This was possible because of Germany’s hard currency and low sovereign credit risk, large market size, which was augmented by membership in the European Union, and Germany’s position as regional hegemon within Europe. More broadly, this shows how, conditional on domestic politics, advanced economies are able to shape and exploit the rules of the international economic system to increase state intervention in the allocation of credit, for industrial policy purposes, even as developing countries are given the opposite policy recommendations.

Item Type: Article
Official URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rrip20/current
Additional Information: © 2018 Informa UK
Divisions: International Relations
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
H Social Sciences > HG Finance
Date Deposited: 11 Jun 2018 13:40
Last Modified: 17 Nov 2024 00:21
Funders: German Federal Foreign Office
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/88291

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