While it would seem that China's huge surpluses amid sustained growth eliminate any comparative relevance to Latin America, the paper argues that analogous vulnerabilities exist. Capital account volatility and China's relatively subordinate position within the massive rerouting of international production networks via China, point to this. In fact, overly optimistic appraisals of China's strength underestimate many
of its persisting structural vulnerabilities as a contemporary developing country and distract attention away from important lessons for other developing countries.

The global financial and economic crisis has cast serious doubts about the paradigm of market deregulation that dominated the last three decades. Although many developing countries, especially in Asia, became cautious following the Asian financial crisis, international financial institutions continued to advise developing countries to deregulate, albeit at a slower pace. However, this paper argues for re-regulating the financial sector with a view to preventing system-wide failures and fulfilling development needs. It highlights the importance of segregating different parts of the financial sector as well as controls over both deposit and lending rates, and the role of government-owned banks, especially for agriculture and SMEs.

Many of the financial regulatory proposals now being considered by developed countries might not be feasible given the legally binding commitments these countries have made under GATS with respect to financial services liberalisation. Such WTO rules may therefore get ignored or GATS may require to be renegotiated, for the necessary financial sector reforms to take place.

This paper addresses how Keynesian narratives are being used to reconstitute an orthodox policy paradigm in the face of the current economic crisis. These processes of paradigm maintenance need to be urgently addressed if the current crisis is to be leveraged for
a return to a more progressive, inclusive and developmental policy paradigm in both the North and the South. Failing this, current orthodoxies risk being reconstituted or even reinforced, and we could find ourselves soon entering a new round of development debacles similar to those of early 1980s.

It is very difficult to know the impact of the MDGs on poverty reduction. On one hand, poverty measurements are ambigous and on the other hand, the mechanisms by which MDGs affect poverty reduction are not clear. This article argues that the MDGs should be replaced by a re-politicisation of the mainstream development agenda, together with a genuine revival of emphasis on universalistic modes of social policy as viable means
of dealing simultaneously with poverty and inequality.

Recently, a number of authoritative voices have called for a return to the New Deal Glass-Steagall legislation as the most appropriate response to the clear failure
of the 1999 Financial Modernization Act to provide stability of the financial system. However, a clear understanding of the 1933 Banking Act, and subsequent regulatory interpretation and legislation suggest that this would be difficult, if not impossible. A new Glass-Steagall Act would have to be substantially different from the original, and some of the internal structural contradictions that led to its demise remedied.

High risk, opaque, and complex financial products have been among the key causes of the current economic crisis. Not only have these products helped cause the crisis but they have also made it extremely difficult to resolve. In response, a number of analysts have proposed a requirement that financial products be approved by a government regulatory authority before they can be marketed. In this paper the authors outline how a financial products regulatory authority would work.

For some time now, Mr. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of
the Federal Reserve Board, has been arguing that the substantial increase in the U.S. current account deficit, the swing from moderate deficits to large surpluses in ''emerging-market countries'', and the significant decline in long-term real interest rates, since 1996,
are the fall-out of a world ''savings glut''. Some, especially authors from the IMF stable, have gone further to explicitly link this ''savings glut'' to the world financial crisis. The present paper is devoted to a
close examination of this ''savings glut'' theory.

The most relevant financial innovations have been the result of active policies pursued by public authorities, which have intrinsic to them, a specific financial design based on the freedom to create and absorb financial risks. The excesses that are considered as the main culprits of the current crisis are therefore a part of the physiology and not of the pathology of the wanted financial morphology. As a consequence, no regulatory reform can be effective without radical changes in the system design. A general outline of an alternative approach to regulation is presented.

The breakdown of the Bretton Woods' agreements and the oil shocks of the Seventies, the paper argues, changed the management of financial firms. Flexible exchange rates created new opportunities for financial operations while inflation and the decision of the authorities to attribute high priority to it accelerated financial innovation. These phenomena led to a progressive growth of the turnover of the financial sector, which strengthened its weight in the economy and may have favoured the introduction of legislation reducing the ability of the authorities to prevent the
rise of systemic risk.

The paper argues that the foreign savings-led strategy followed by Eastern European economies created in 2000s almost a decade long carry trade of easy credit. That, among other things, transformed the domestic financial sector into largely foreign-owned universal banks with weak linkages with the domestic productive sector. While the credit and consumption boom helped gloss over deeper structural problems then, now these economies need to step up their efforts in industrial and innovation policies for paving their way out of the crisis.

The current global financial crisis raises important questions for scholars of international political economy. Among the most important of these is
how it is influencing various dimensions of financial governance vis-à-vis developing and transitional economies. The paper examines three related questions. How is the crisis affecting the governance and policies of the IMF; the prospects of regional alternatives to the Fund; and the policy space
available to developing and transitional countries?

This paper argues that supply-side factors rather than the financing requirements of developing countries, explain the recent revival and surge in capital flows into developing countries. Financial liberalization and the globalization of finance have also resulted in changes
in the financial structure. This in turn has implications for the accumulation of risk in markets where agents tend to herd. Associated with this increasing risk are changes in the business practices and motivations of financial firms that reduce the role of finance in ensuring broad-based economic growth.

Rejecting the current approach to financial regulation based on a laissez faire regime on risk production and allocation, the authors advocate that regulation must contain and monitor systemic risks through a top-down approach, while the resulting morphology must be consistent with market discipline imposing bankruptcies. Apart from rules for risk containment with a sharp distinction between leveraged financial institutions, non-leveraged financial institutions and non-financial firms, the proposed new framework also covers rules for derivatives, markets, transparency, crisis resolution, multinational financial institutions as well as supervisors' powers and accountability.

In this paper the author argues that as recorded history has shown, any republican government could end up as an oligarchy. In addition to giving a detailed exposition of the various strands in the analysis of oligarchy, the author contends that the Indian experience will add new chapters to the emerging corpus of work on oligarchic democracy.

The paper argues that long periods of economic progress in the core countries lead to increasingly abstract and irrelevant economic theories ('terrible simplifications'). This leads to turning points towards more relevant economic theories. The author also outlines the key variables that need to be re-introduced into economic theory in order to furnish poor countries with the type of productive structures that makes it possible to eliminate poverty.