A Critical History Of Poverty Finance Colonial Roots And Neoliberal Failures 1st Edition Nick Bernards by Nick Bernards 9780745344836, 9780745344829, 9780745344867, 0745344836, 0745344828, 0745344860 instant download after payment.

Finance, mobile and digital technologies - or 'fintech' - are being heralded in the world of development by the likes of the IMF and World Bank as a silver bullet in the fight against poverty. But should we believe the hype?
A Critical History of Poverty Finance demonstrates how newfangled 'digital financial inclusion' efforts suffer from the same essential flaws as earlier iterations of neoliberal 'financial inclusion'. Relying on artificially created markets that simply aren't there among the world's most disadvantaged economic actors, they also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and uneven development, many of which date back to the colonial era.
Bernards offers an astute analysis of the current fintech fad, contextualised through a detailed colonial history of development finance, that ultimately reveals the neoliberal vision of poverty alleviation for the pipe dream it is.
A World Bank official interviewed by the Financial Times in early 2019 rhapsodised the virtues of emerging financial technology (fintech): It reduces costs, it’s much more efficient, it can be scaled up… It does come with risks as well because, you know, you really don’t want to hurt those that are most vulnerable, so we have to be careful. But I think it is really remarkable. (Politi 2019) Media outlets including the Guardian and The Economist have run glowing reports about the promise of fintech (e.g. Gould 2015; Noonan 2019). These have included breathless accounts of financial ‘innovations’ ranging from psychometric credit scoring methods (The Economist 2016) to MobiLife, a South African life insurer offering a (truly dystopian) product called ‘FoodSurance’ – which pays out in weekly grocery vouchers sent to beneficiaries’ mobile phones if a family breadwinner dies (Noonan 2019) – to index-based livestock insurance schemes using satellite imagery to assess the extent of drought (The Economist 2014).