This section of the website makes some of my recent and not so recent work available, in the hope that it may be worth reading. When I started out I worked on Latin America, and predominantly on Brazil - my first article was published in 1979, in the Brazilian journal Cadernos DCP, based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. This was a major focus of my work until the turn of the century ('The Resurgence of Populism in Latin America', 2000), and carried on intermittently thereafter. Meanwhile, in the late 1980s I started a series of critiques of non-Marxist political economy: 'Bringing the State Back In?' (1989), 'A Critical Assessment of the New Elite Paradigm' (1990), 'Statism, New Institutionalism and Marxism' (1990), and 'New Institutionalism: Predatory Rule, Institutional Persistence and Social Change' (1992).
This line of work accompanied and merged into a critique of political development theory: 'Dependency and the Politics of Development' (1988), 'Political Development Theory and the Dissemination of Democracy' (1994), 'Domestic and International Regimes for the Developing World: The Doctrine for Political Development' (1996), and Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World (1997). I drew on my own understanding of global political economy in those publications, which I saw as classical Marxist in inspiration. This became the principal focus of my next set of publications, and has broadly guided my work ever since: 'Interpreting ASEM: interregionalism and the new materialism' (1999), 'Making the Poor Work for Globalisation?' (2001), 'Making Poverty Work' (2001), 'Attacking the Poor' (2002), 'The Governance of Global Capitalism' (2003), and 'What the World Bank Means by Poverty Reduction and Why It Matters' (2004). This led to my first attempt to spell out 'The Politics of Global Competitiveness' (2006), in a Working Paper formatted to look like a World Bank publication. I am still exceedingly fond of it!
To my surprise, it took me another sixteen years to turn this into a book of modest proportions, The Politics of Global Competitiveness (OUP, 2022). It hasn't made much of a mark, but I do believe in it. In the intervening years, a number of articles and working papers delved further into the 21st century logic of global capitalist governance, and widened my focus from an almost exclusive concern with the World Bank to the Asian Development Bank, the UNDP and the OECD in particular: 'The Shape of Capitalism to Come' (2010), 'The G20, the Crisis, and the Rise of Global Developmental Liberalism' (2012), 'Risk, Social Protection, and the World Market' (2012), 'What International Organizations Do, and Why They Do It' (2015), 'World Market Regionalism at the Asian Development Bank' (2016), 'The UNDP, the World Bank, and Human Development through the World Market' (2017), 'Situating the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in the Context of Global Economic Governance' (2018), and 'The OECD and the World Market: Antecedents of Deep Marketisation' (2019).
From my perspective, 'social reproduction' is primarily concerned with the reproduction of a working class efficiently exploitable by capital, increasingly on a global scale. The World Bank certainly thinks so, as evidenced in its focus on risk and social protection, as does the UNDP. It was also my explicit focus in 'The World Development Report 2015: Programming the Poor' (2015). I made a case for Marx as a theorist of social reproduction in the imaginatively titled 'Marx on Social Reproduction' (2020). This is the background piece to my most recent work, strongly influenced by Martha Gimenez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays (2018): we are equal joint authors of 'The Permanent Global Crisis of Working Class Social Reproduction: Ten Propositions' (2025). I have since focused on generational reproduction (or the lack of it): 'The Political Economy of Post-Reproduction Society' (2025).
There is a lot more besides - some 90 or so other articles and working papers, a few of them preliminary or reprinted versions of things mentioned above but most of them not. And 99 review essays on this site, as of 1 January 2026.
This line of work accompanied and merged into a critique of political development theory: 'Dependency and the Politics of Development' (1988), 'Political Development Theory and the Dissemination of Democracy' (1994), 'Domestic and International Regimes for the Developing World: The Doctrine for Political Development' (1996), and Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World (1997). I drew on my own understanding of global political economy in those publications, which I saw as classical Marxist in inspiration. This became the principal focus of my next set of publications, and has broadly guided my work ever since: 'Interpreting ASEM: interregionalism and the new materialism' (1999), 'Making the Poor Work for Globalisation?' (2001), 'Making Poverty Work' (2001), 'Attacking the Poor' (2002), 'The Governance of Global Capitalism' (2003), and 'What the World Bank Means by Poverty Reduction and Why It Matters' (2004). This led to my first attempt to spell out 'The Politics of Global Competitiveness' (2006), in a Working Paper formatted to look like a World Bank publication. I am still exceedingly fond of it!
To my surprise, it took me another sixteen years to turn this into a book of modest proportions, The Politics of Global Competitiveness (OUP, 2022). It hasn't made much of a mark, but I do believe in it. In the intervening years, a number of articles and working papers delved further into the 21st century logic of global capitalist governance, and widened my focus from an almost exclusive concern with the World Bank to the Asian Development Bank, the UNDP and the OECD in particular: 'The Shape of Capitalism to Come' (2010), 'The G20, the Crisis, and the Rise of Global Developmental Liberalism' (2012), 'Risk, Social Protection, and the World Market' (2012), 'What International Organizations Do, and Why They Do It' (2015), 'World Market Regionalism at the Asian Development Bank' (2016), 'The UNDP, the World Bank, and Human Development through the World Market' (2017), 'Situating the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in the Context of Global Economic Governance' (2018), and 'The OECD and the World Market: Antecedents of Deep Marketisation' (2019).
From my perspective, 'social reproduction' is primarily concerned with the reproduction of a working class efficiently exploitable by capital, increasingly on a global scale. The World Bank certainly thinks so, as evidenced in its focus on risk and social protection, as does the UNDP. It was also my explicit focus in 'The World Development Report 2015: Programming the Poor' (2015). I made a case for Marx as a theorist of social reproduction in the imaginatively titled 'Marx on Social Reproduction' (2020). This is the background piece to my most recent work, strongly influenced by Martha Gimenez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays (2018): we are equal joint authors of 'The Permanent Global Crisis of Working Class Social Reproduction: Ten Propositions' (2025). I have since focused on generational reproduction (or the lack of it): 'The Political Economy of Post-Reproduction Society' (2025).
There is a lot more besides - some 90 or so other articles and working papers, a few of them preliminary or reprinted versions of things mentioned above but most of them not. And 99 review essays on this site, as of 1 January 2026.