Short Abstract

This panel examines competing prisms shaping African finance: domestic revenue mobilisation (tax, development banks, pension funds) and global financial integration. We invite papers that interrogate how these dynamics intersect, with emerging tensions between state autonomy and external dependence.

Long Abstract

African states sit at the point where two competing prisms of finance refract onto domestic political economies. On one side, amid cuts to international aid, governments face renewed pressure to strengthen domestic revenue mobilisation: expanding tax bases, strengthening national banks and mobilising pension funds as instruments of developmental finance. Scholarship has long argued that structural transformation would only occur if African governments mobilised domestic finance effectively, warning that 1990s financial reforms have bent regulations towards short-term and market-conforming logics (Mkandawire 1999). On the other side, African economies have become deeply enmeshed in global financial circuits. Most African commercial banking sectors have been liberalised with mixed results, while capital and exchange controls have been reduced. Portfolio flows, remittances, Eurobond issuance, resort to cryptocurrencies and integration with global offshore sectors has refracted external pressures into domestic policy space, often distorting the priorities domestic resource mobilisation strategies aim to serve.

This panel asks how these two prisms – inward-facing domestic resource mobilisation and outward-facing financial integration – interact, compete and sometimes reinforce one another. The case of pension funds is one example, combining the logic of mobilising resources domestically for long-term strategic investment while also being embedded in global financial markets. The panel invites papers grounded in fieldwork that examine the political economy of domestic resource mobilisation amid financial integration through case studies or comparative analysis. It welcomes papers that foreground who benefits from financial sector strategies, and the extent to which Africa’s financial landscape signals developmentalist ambition or entrenched external dependence.

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