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What can Hirschman tell us about the digital economy and development?
This is a short blog piece on the ict4dblog discussing whether Hirschman’s conceptualisation of economic growth are relevant for digital development
While there is a growing appetite for digital rules, what we don’t have yet are clear frameworks by which these different policy ideas can cohere into overarching (and successful) digital development strategies.
In this post, I consider whether Albert Hirschman’s models of unbalanced growth might provide a useful framework to guide policy strategies.
Read full blog post
Short Article: On Global Platforms and Local Capitalisms
This article in Bot populi, discusses a summary of my recent paper which examines the concept of “variety” and how it links into platform expansion
Analysis of the global expansion of digital platforms has led to growing debate. Often under the heading of platform capitalism, the focus has been on how platforms are rapidly advancing across sectors, centralizing power within Big Tech and leading to new forms of value capture and labor precarity across the globe.
In these debates, the attention has mainly been on the ‘platform’ element of platform capitalism and the mechanisms by which platforms are operating. But more can be said about the “capitalism” side. We know that platforms are typically capitalist enterprises but how are platforms altering how capitalism is developing, and its future directions?
Full article available here
Policy Brief on digital policy for latecomers
I have published a Policy Brief (with Shamel Azmeh) for UNIDO on “Aligning digital and industrial policy to foster future industrialization“. Based on our previous papers, this discusses the importance of digital policy as part of industiral policy. It particularly focusses on emerging policy around data. The policy brief is available here and a shorter summary available on the UNIDO Industrial Analytics Platform
New special issue and publication – Globalization in Reverse
I was recently involved in putting together a special issue of Cambridge Jounal of Regions Economy and Society (CJRES) alongside Huiwen Gong, Robert Hassink, Martin Hess and Harry Garretsen
The SI is titled “Globalization in Reverse: Reconfiguring the Geographies of Value Chains and Production Networks” and looks to examine through its contributions some of the recent deabtes around the reconfigurations of globalization.
This special issue on ‘Globalisation in Reversal? Reconfiguring the Geographies of Value Chains and Production Networks’ aims at showcasing recent work that seeks to contribute to and advance on the debates on economic globalisation and the reconfiguration of global value chains and production networks. Standing at a crossroad, where ongoing slowbalisation coincides with new forces such as the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, heightened geopolitical tensions, the emergence of several revolutionary technologies, and the increasing urgency of addressing environmental challenges, many important questions still remain unsolved regarding the nature and impact of these changes.
The special issue also includes an extended editorial from the editors that discusses some of the shifts occurring, based on the papers in the issue
Blog post: Global transfers: M-Pesa and intellectual property rights
To accompany a short paper I presented at IFIP 9.4 online conference, I have written a blog post “Global transfers: M-Pesa and intellectual property rights” that discusses recent research on M-Pesa and its IPR
In July 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom announced a significant event – the intellectual property rights (IPR) for the mobile money service M-Pesa was finally “moving back into African control”. For this, it paid a sum of £7m to its UK-based parent company Vodafone.
The announcement didn’t receive much commentary at the time, but it raises a number of critical questions – Who controls the IPR of M-Pesa? Wasn’t M-Pesa created in Kenya, so why did Safaricom need to buy the IPR?
See blog post on Manchester CDD blog
New publication: The rise of the data economy and policy strategies for digital development
Recently Shamel Azmeh, Ahmad Abd Rabuh and myself published a paper “The rise of the data economy and policy strategies for digital development” as part of Digital Pathways at Oxford Paper Series. It examines the notion of “data value chains” and how we might use them to understand global regulation and policy making around data
This paper uses the concept of data value chain to analyse the data economy and to examine the different policies states are following in different stages of the data value chain. We examine how these policies could translate into different pathways to achieve digital development by focusing on different stages within the data value chain.
We identify four pathways to digital development: a) active data localisation, b) strategic data sharing, c) opportunities in low income data processes, and d) building sectoral specific application linked to data, and illustrate how different countries and economies could follow different policy pathways.