Risk and the Rupee in Pakistan's New Economy
Financial Inclusion and Monetary Change in a Frontier Market

Explores how economic liberalisation impacts the everyday economic life of ordinary people and why it undermines the development agenda.

Antonia Settle (Author)

9781108489935, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 October 2020

260 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.1 cm, 0.47 kg

In a world of open markets and global trade, development thinking seeks stability and prosperity for the world's poor by expanding access to financial products. This book challenges the development sector's embrace of 'financial inclusion' by exploring how the new risks and instabilities that accompany the pivot towards the global economy undermining the functioning of money itself. Cast against fundamental change in the monetary environment accompanying the globalisation of markets, the book examines the rapid liberalisation of money and markets in Pakistan. It argues that liberalisation has generated substantive problems not only for the central bank as guardian of national currency, but for ordinary households. By pinpointing how globalisation generates new risks for households in the everyday economy, the book reveals jarring contradictions between free markets and financial inclusion whilst challenging money theory by positing substantive and empirically-grounded monetary contestation that demonstrates a burden of risk imposed on ordinary people, that is only exacerbated by financial inclusion.

List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The changing nature of money in a changing international monetary system
2. Money at the frontier
3. The transformation of monetary governance in Pakistan
4. Exploring monetary change amongst households
5. Fieldwork findings
6. Unstable money and risk mitigation in the new economy
7. Money in theory and money in Pakistan
8. Conclusion: central bank challenges – financial inclusion with frontier money
Appendix
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Development economics & emerging economies [KCM], Microeconomics [KCC], Economics [KC], Political structure & processes [JPH], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP]