This article examines the expansion of the soybean complex in South America and the role of Chinese firms in expanding their presence in different sectors of the oilseed complex. The growth in trade relations between the two parties has been built on the export of primary commodities from South America and the import of Chinese manufactures—a trade pattern that reproduces core‐periphery dynamics identified by dependency theory scholars. Of particular importance in this bilateral trade is soybean, a crop that has been consolidated as the main export for several South American countries, fuelled by growing demand from China. This article explores China's role in the global political economy as a key agri‐business player and the implications for new relations of dependency by studying the strategies deployed by Chinese firms to increase their influence in the governance of the soybean nexus.

In low-income and middle-income countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial implications for women's wellbeing. Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the gendered aspect of pandemics; however, addressing the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic comprehensively and effectively requires a planetary health perspective that embraces systems thinking to inequalities. This Viewpoint is based on collective reflections from research done by the authors on COVID-19 responses by international and regional organisations, and national governments, in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa between June, 2020, and June, 2021. A range of international and regional actors have made important policy recommendations to address the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's health and wellbeing since the start of the pandemic. However, national-level policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been partial and inconsistent with regards to gender in both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, largely failing to recognise the multiple drivers of gendered health inequalities. This Viewpoint proposes that addressing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in low-income and middle-income countries should adopt a systems thinking approach and be informed by the question of who is affected as opposed to who is infected. In adopting the systems thinking approach, responses will be more able to recognise and address the direct gendered effects of the pandemic and those that emerge indirectly through a combination of long-standing structural inequalities and gendered responses to the pandemic.

The recent global commodity boom created new opportunities and challenges for countries that are net agricultural producers. Natural resources literature has explored how the sudden appearance of extraordinary revenues in resource rich countries impacts upon growth, political institutions, and conflicts. However, there has been less attention paid to how already existing arrangements can shape distributional conflicts that emerge as a response. This article analyses the design and implementation of fiscal policy during the soy boom in Argentina and Brazil. It is argued that domestic institutions play a key role in mediating the capacity of the state regarding the design and implementation of tax structures related to natural resources.

Financial Services Act. New archival evidence suggests that this policy represented a strategy to facilitate the Big Bang's globalization of Britain's financial sector through the creation of an unbiased, reterritorialized legal framework for the City of London. Yet political accountability for this regulatory system was rescaled to an obscure, quasi-governmental scale, so as to absorb any political backlash from future financial crises and insulate government legitimacy. This article thus contends that neoliberal state restructuring can be understood as the coalescence