This paper revisits the empirical relationship between political stability and inflation while explicitly accounting for the presence of the shadow economy. Using a large data set of 122 countries over the 1999 to 2007 period, we find that the well established negative correlation between political stability and inflation holds only if the size of the shadow economy remains modest; and it ceases to exist at higher levels of the size of the informal sector. This finding contributes to the existing literature on public finance that assigns special importance to political determinants of inflation. The results are robust against alternative specifications and satisfy the usual assumptions of a valid statistical inference.

The global community has spoken loud and clear: more resources must be mobilised to end extreme poverty and mitigate the effects of climate change. Blended finance-an approach to mix different forms of capital in support of development-is emerging as an important solution to help meet the 'billions to trillions' agenda. For development cooperation providers, the scaling up of this approach needs to be based on a good understanding of its potential in supporting developing countries meet the SDGs and Paris Agreement. This Policy Perspectives draws on recent OECD work, including the upcoming 2018 report Making Blended Finance Work for the SDGs, the draft OECD DAC Principles on Blended Finance and work under the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) on measuring the amounts mobilised by official development finance interventions. © SHUTTERSTOCK 01 Blended finance can help bridge the estimated USD 2.5 trillion per year annual investment gap for delivering the SDGs in developing countries.

No abstract

Decolonisation of the curriculum in higher education is a radical, transformative process of change that interrogates the enduring Eurocentric and racist narratives surrounding the production of academic ‘knowledge’. Our key argument is that it is essential for students of politics to understand the authorities and hierarchies exerted through quantitative data. In this article, we show that (1) quantitative methods and data literacy can be an explicit tool in the endeavour to challenge structures of oppression, and (2) there is a need to apply decolonial principles to the teaching of quantitative methods, prioritising the historical contextualisation and anti-racist critique of the ways in which statistics amplify existing micro and macro power relations. To explain how this can be done, we begin with a commentary on the ‘state of decolonisation’ in higher education, its relevance to the subdisciplines of politics, and its application to quantitative teaching in the United Kingdom. We then suggest some guiding principles for a decolonial approach to quantitative methods teaching and present substantive examples from political sociology, international political economy, and international development. These suggestions and examples show how a decolonial lens advances critical and emancipatory thinking in undergraduate students of politics when it is used with quantitative methods.

This edited collection explores the boundaries between political and financial geographies: it interrogates linkages between the changing spatialities and policies of the state, the evolution of a globalizing financial system, and the consequences of this for people and firms. Empirically, it focuses on the semi-periphery of the financial system to generate new perspectives on the entanglement between (geo)politics and finance: these complement and overlap with the core-centered analyses of what has come to be an Anglo-American geography of finance. Conceptually, it engages with insights from a variety of disciplines in order to explore the connections between geopolitical and geo-economic discourses, public finance and foreign policy, the practices and localization of financial institutions, and the evolution of strategies for globalizing firms. Such topics are becoming increasingly relevant, as evidenced in a speech by the UK Deputy Governor for Prudential Regulation in which the term 'geofinance' is presented as a dynamic to acknowledge the 'impact of geography on the shape of banks, insurers and financial regulation. .. With the revolution in regulation following the financial crisis coming to its end, and with changes to the geopolitical landscape looming large'. He observed that geofinance will be 'the defining challenge of the next few years' (Woods 2017). The chapters in this book explore trends, data, policies and geographies in Bulgaria, Brazil, Italy, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey and Vietnam. In addition, they offer crosscountry analyses for Central and Eastern Europe, and examine the evolutionary patterns of international financial institutions and other supranational financial players. All this has resulted in a complex web of relationships between governments and actors in finance which has, in turn, had an impact on firms as well as households (Figure I.1). Taken together, these are under-represented locations in the geography of finance: the focus on these underpins the originality of this