Brian Thompson is a Senior Nutrition Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO is an intergovernmental organization, it has 191 Member Nations, two associate members and one member organization, the European Union. As a knowledge organization, FAO creates and shares critical information about food, agriculture and natural resources in the form of global public goods. FAO plays a connector role, through identifying and working with different partners with established expertise, and facilitating a dialogue between those who have the knowledge and those who need it. By turning knowledge into action, FAO links the field to national, regional and global initiatives in a mutually reinforcing cycle. Its mandate is to raise levels of nutrition and standards of living. What is the size of the malnutrition problem and what regions are most affected? There are persistently high levels of undernutrition. Nearly 870 million people in the world go to bed hungry (1 in 8 people) according to the recently released report of The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (SOFI) and 2 billion have some form of micronutrient malnutrition – this constitutes a crime against humanity and is a responsibility for all of us. Prevalence of undernourishment in developing countries has declined over the past two decades, from 23 to 15 percent. In terms of total numbers in 1990– 92, around 980 million individuals were estimated to be undernourished. The number dropped to 901 million in 1999– 2001, to 885 million in 2006–06 and to 852 million in 2007–09. The financial crisis, economic downturn, persistent food price volatility, drought and other repercussions of climate change since 2006–08 may have prevented any further significant improvements in the number of people who are undernourished in developing countries since then. Africa has by far the highest prevalence, at around 23 percent in 2010–12 but though it is down from what it was in 1990–92 (27 percent) the numbers have risen from 175 million to 239 million with nearly 20 million added in the past four years. In subSaharan Africa, the modest progress achieved in recent years up to 2007 was reversed, with hunger rising 2 percent per year since then. In Asia, both prevalence and numbers dropped over the same period from 24 percent (739 million) to 14 percent (563 million). Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) boasts the lowest rate of undernourishment (8 percent) among developing country regions but the rate of progress has slowed recently. Countries considered as leastdeveloped countries and lowincome economies have the highest prevalence rates of all around 30 percent but down from the 40 percent levels of twenty years ago.

Interview ラン・ラン

(2003). Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 130-130.

Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century

Book Review: The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist ReasonThe Theory of Communicative Action Vol. Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason By: HabermasJurgen Translated by: McCarthyThomasBoston: Beacon Press. 1987. 457 pp. $37.50.

Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it. In this volume, Agier explores the concept of humanitarian government, the political apparatus set up during emergency situations that takes responsibility for the life and death of individuals no longer protected adequately by a state. For as Agier shows, a refugee camp is far more than a place of shelters and emergency food aid. They are places in which someone decides who gets plastic sheeting and who does not, who receives food rations and for how long, what social programs should be put into place and who should be in charge of them, and what barriers need to be constructed (barbed wired, armed guards, cinderblock walls) to ostensibly protect those inside but also to protect the local population from incursions of these displaced ‘‘undesirables.’’ Further, these ‘‘camps’’ are hardly temporary shelters; many have existed for decades, taking on the appearance of towns and cities with entrepreneurs setting up small businesses and political elites emerging from the post-flight chaos. And yet, the camp is a hybrid social form, taking the shape of something entirely new from what existed before in the lives of its inhabitants, and as Agier convincingly argues, it exists in a state of exception, outside the bounds of the political and social life that humanitarian law and human rights ostensibly guarantee. Agier uses his ethnologist’s eye for culture to analyze observations he made during fieldwork in refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea between 2000-2007, accessing the camps through Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; in English, Doctors Without Borders). His affiliation with MSF gave him a level of flexibility and independence (particularly from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) that allowed him sufficient time in the camps to not only observe humanitarian government at work but also the response of the refugees under its purview. He combines his observations with detailed histories of different migrations, explaining the historical and geographic paths that led different groups of refugees to the camps that he studied. Agier demonstrates the discursive power that humanitarian organizations have over defining and categorizing the displaced individuals in the camps; defining a person’s status as a refugee leads to acceptance into the camp and the security that brings, but the denial of such status leads to rejection and often deportation back to life-threatening circumstances. Once determined as a refugee, a person’s suffering and vulnerability come to define their place in the camp and the world, with moral hierarchies created around different definitions of vulnerability with different access to resources provided by the humanitarian organization. This process, Agier argues, de-socializes refugees; they lose their individual personhood and either become ahistorical, pitiable masses that the charitable-at-heart seek to keep alive, or potential threats to order and the safety of the non-displaced that must be managed or

Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance

How does cooperation emerge in a condition of international anarchy? Michael Tomz sheds new light on this fundamental question through a study of international debt across three centuries. Tomz develops a reputational theory of cooperation between sovereign governments and foreign investors. He explains how governments acquire reputations in the eyes of investors, and argues that concerns about reputation sustain international lending and repayment. Tomz's theory generates novel predictions about the dynamics of cooperation: how investors treat first-time borrowers, how access to credit evolves as debtors become more seasoned, and how countries ascend and descend the reputational ladder by acting contrary to investors' expectations. Tomz systematically tests his theory and the leading alternatives across three centuries of financial history. His remarkable data, gathered from archives in nine countries, cover all sovereign borrowers. He deftly combines statistical methods, case studies, and content analysis to scrutinize theories from as many angles as possible. Tomz finds strong support for his reputational theory while challenging prevailing views about sovereign debt. His pathbreaking study shows that, across the centuries, reputations have guided lending and repayment in consistent ways. Moreover, Tomz uncovers surprisingly little evidence of punitive enforcement strategies. Creditors have not compelled borrowers to repay by threatening military retaliation, imposing trade sanctions, or colluding to deprive defaulters of future loans. He concludes by highlighting the implications of his reputational logic for areas beyond sovereign debt, further advancing our understanding of the puzzle of cooperation under anarchy.

The Puzzle of Cooperation in International Debt, from Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries

China's financial system is rapidly evolving. Both the emergence of shadow banking since 2009 and the growth of fintech since 2013 as forms of ‘non-bank credit intermediation’ have catalysed market...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13563467.2018.1562437

Not Just Another Shadow Bank: Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism and the ‘Developmental’ Promise of Digital Financial Innovation

In this article, we investigate the dynamics of contestation and adaptation that are unfolding within global financial markets as China seeks to internationalize its currency, the renminbi (RMB) or yuan. We develop a conceptual framework that stresses the potential malleability of the global monetary system. Economic actors and international institutions are not static but dynamic and respond to events. Accordingly, we highlight two underexplored features of RMB internationalization: first, the variegated and politicized nature of capital account and currency management controls that China is implementing; and second, the manner in which these unique currency management systems are interacting with the ideational and institutional underpinnings of how transnational financial markets are generated and stabilized. Our analytical framework is then applied to examine the interface of China's onshore/offshore RMB markets. We argue that China is adopting a unique mode of monetary governance that reflect...

A novel pathway to power? Contestation and adaptation in China's internationalization of the RMB

Global financial standard-setting has been the exclusive domain of advanced economies for decades. Following the 2008–09 crisis, China and other emerging markets and developing economies obtained f...

From shadow banking to digital financial inclusion: China’s rise and the politics of epistemic contestation within the financial stability board

Digital credit scoring is driving a number of significant transformations in Chinese economy and society, catalyzing financial liberalization, deepening financial inclusion, and shifting economic power beyond the previously state-controlled commercial banking system. Yet the significance of financial technology is informed in turn by locally specific traditions of governance and regulation. This article critically interrogates the rise of Chinese fintech, reconceptualizing it as a process of financialization that is embedded in a Chinese systems- oriented authoritarian governance tradition. On the basis of documentary sources, Chinese- language secondary literature, and fieldwork conducted from 2016-18, it argues that in addition to disrupting existing practices of financial intermediation, the emergence of novel digital credit scoring technologies is enabling new forms of algorithmic governance to be exercised over the process of financialization, which in turn represents an important component in the construction of China’s neo-statist authoritarian capitalism. These findings have broader implications for how we understand the importance of new financial technologies in an era of big data, contributing to contemporary debates in international political economy, economic sociology, and Chinese studies.

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Financializing authoritarian capitalism: Chinese fintech and the institutional foundations of algorithmic governance

China's financially repressed economy remains characterized by a distinctly resilient political structure (the Chinese Communist Party, CCP) that penetrates both increasingly rational ‘private’ (market) and ‘public’ (state) organizations. How are we to understand the financial system's role in this persistently illiberal yet marketizing political economy? This paper develops a theory of China's financial reform as the management of socio-economic uncertainty by the CCP. Since the early 1990s, the financial system has formed a locus of the CCP's capacity both to manage and to propagate socio-economic uncertainty through the path of reform. The unique path of financial reform in China should thus not be viewed solely in terms of ‘partial’ or ‘failed’ free-market reform, but rather as the product of a more concerted vision of how the financial system enabled a mode of economic growth that combined the drive for accumulation of capital with the distinctive legacies of China's post-1989 socio-political...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03085147.2016.1143724

Julian Gruin

Papers

Not Just Another Shadow Bank: Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism and the ‘Developmental’ Promise of Digital Financial Innovation

A novel pathway to power? Contestation and adaptation in China's internationalization of the RMB

From shadow banking to digital financial inclusion: China’s rise and the politics of epistemic contestation within the financial stability board

Financializing authoritarian capitalism: Chinese fintech and the institutional foundations of algorithmic governance

The social order of Chinese capitalism: socio-economic uncertainty, communist party rule and economic development, 1990–2000