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The objective of the thesis is to study, through a critical constructivist analysis, the conception and practice of security by humanitarian international aid agencies (IAAs), with particular reference to their relation with private military and security companies (PMSCs). The research provides a qualitative analysis of humanitarian security, which is defined as the practice of safely accessing vulnerable populations for humanitarian purposes. Its methodology relies on semi-structured interviews, including in Afghanistan and Haiti; participant observation; and a literature review. The thesis‘ critical constructivist approach implies studying the co-constitution of aid organizations‘ identity and interests. It argues that IAAs‘ identity and approaches to security are mutually shaped. It does so by first highlighting dominant discourses framing aid agencies‘ identity and processes by which particular views are reproduced. It then identifies the dominant representations in security management and reveals how they relate to IAAs‘ identity. The thesis defines three ideal–types of IAAs (Deontological, Solidarist and Utilitarian) and of PMSCs (Guarding, Unarmed, and Weaponised). This typology allows a dissecting of IAAs‘ different conceptions and practices of security, and the conditions under which each type of IAA employs PMSCs. The research reveals that an aid agency‘s identity forms the basis of its approach to security. Identity and security, are however, not stable but dynamic and in a constant process of interaction with each other. The thesis then offers a study of these dynamic processes, with a focus on agents. The thesis delves into the implications of the research for the concept of security and reveals how humanitarian security embodies IAAs‘ distinctive baggage. It suggests that IAAs require a more comprehensive understanding of how their identity and practices affect their security. The thesis‘ original contribution is two-fold: it represents the first critical constructivist study of humanitarian security practices and is the first research to study humanitarian organizations as referent objects of security.

This study compares business culture in seventeenth and eighteenth century China and England through an examination of the ideals of the businessman. It focuses on these ideals as presented in business advice literature, the core of which are business handbooks giving advice on how businessmen were expected to behave. These handbooks have not previously been used comparatively. This study looks at three aspects of the ideal of the businessman - attitudes to the market, wealth and social relations. Business culture is an important factor in global history for explaining economic performance and the Great Divergence. In England, the rise of a bourgeoisie with commercial values and increasing status of commerce is seen as a spur to economic development. On the other hand, in China, the ideal of the Confucian merchant has been argued to be a possible hindrance. By comparing the business cultures of China and England through an analysis of business advice literature we find similarities which dispel many stereotypes, and differences, which point out factors important in the Great Divergence. Through this this study aims to shed new light on cultural debates in global economic history. This study argues that there are highly surprising similarities between the ideals of the businessmen of China and England, including thrift, charity and attitudes to the market. However, it also argues that through this comparison two key differences in attitudes are crystalized which might have been important in looking at the Great Divergence. In England the ideal of honesty was made malleable and subsumed to commerce. In China a familial emphasis was present in the ideal of the Chinese businessman to a much greater degree than for the English businessman.

This thesis provides three works which each contribute to understanding of the promising yet struggling market for rainfall index insurance in India. The first chapter contains an analysis of the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for rainfall insurance by poor farmers in Gujarat, India. It develops a theoretical model to predict individual WTP and contrasts it with emprical estimates of WTP using the Becker-DeGroot-Marshalk (BDM) mechanism. We find that BDM works well as a predictor of WTP, but that our model significantly overestimates WTP. The second chapter seeks to provide a possible explanation for demand being lower than theoretical predictions by looking at the dynamics of insurance demand. Using a panel dataset of insurance purchasers in India, it shows that people who receive an insurance payout are 9-22% more likely to purchase insurance the following year. The results are consistent with a dynamic model of insurance demand featuring loss aversion, in which receiving an insurance payout shifts the reference point such that people become more risk averse the following season. I provide evidence against other possible explanations, such as increased trust and learning about insurance, and direct effects of bad weather. The final chapter explores the possibility that combining rainfall insurance with savings may result in a more attractive financial product than insurance on its own. We conduct a laboratory experiment with Indian farmers that uses the BDM mechanism to assess the valuation of various insurance/savings combinations, which we title WISAs (Weather Insured Savings Accounts). We find that, contrary to theoretical predictions, most people prefer both pure savings and pure insurance to any combination of the two. This paper hopefully provides valuable contibutions to solving the puzzle of how to shield poor farmers from uncertain rainfall.

This thesis contains three independent chapters that are aimed towards contributing to our understanding of three questions in the literature on poverty, occupational choice and social networks. The first chapter asks whether labor contracts in a rural economy play a significant role in insuring workers against risks and if the outside options of workers determine the extent to which their labor contracts are interlinked with their insurance arrangements. As such, it provides evidence on a well-established idea in the study of rural labor markets - that of labor-tying - by showing that it is an important channel through which the poor workers smooth their income and that an exogenous improvement in their outside options induces them to exit labor-tying and switch to alternative channels of informal insurance. The second chapter provides evidence on whether transfer of capital and skills enable the poor to permanently exit poverty by entering into higher return occupations. It shows that such a transfer not only transforms the occupational choices of the targeted poor, but has significant general equilibrium effects on the local markets, and corresponding spillover effects on non- targeted households. The third chapter provides evidence on the question \do formal transfers crowd out informal transfers", exploiting the randomized roll-out of a large scale asset transfer and training program to test for its effects on the informal transfer arrangements of the poor. It shows that the informal transfers to the poor are crowded out by the program, but this effect is highly heterogenous depending on the location of the sender and the vulnerability of the targeted poor.

Gross domestic product has long been criticised as a poor indicator of economic growth. In this thesis I argue that any proposed alternative for GDP cannot effect change, because GDP is not an indicator. Instead GDP is our definition of the economy, which I argue by presenting the history of how we have measured the economy through national accounts. GDP, it turns out, is simply the most recent consensus definition of what the economy is. So this is the history of how we have defined, measured and redefined the economy since its invention in the 1620s. Using primary sources I argue that the supposedly mercantilist definition of the economy was never policy relevant in the 17th century. The 18th century saw an active empirical debate and the economy was defined by Davenant's civil service, Walpole's Treasury accounts, and eventually scholars, who displaced secular policy advisors in the 1770s. Adam Smith defined an economy that dominated Britain for a century, but he adopted Physiocratic ideas which were rejected by the French government‟s own economists. British government offices continued to do empirical work in the 19th century and produced the 'official' statistics used for policy making. Marshall and then Keynes would use these offices to redefine the economy. Keynes convinced Meade, Stone and HM Treasury to redefine the economy and his idea displaced the official American definition, despite loud protestations from Kuznets. So this is a history which tries to challenge our view of the economy, by showing how we have redefined it in the past and indicates how we could do it again.

The first part of this thesis examines the role of highly-leveraged institution in creating vulnerability in the financial system. By applying the framework of Kiyotaki and Moore (1997), Chapter 2 shows that when an asset price bubble bursts which cuts the value of land being used as collateral, the sudden fall in collateral value can create the possibility that firms’ net worth is entirely wiped out and the whole financial system collapse. This is due to the powerful feedback effects where forced selling further depresses prices, setting in motion a downward spiral of asset prices and loan recalls. We then show how wholesale financial collapse can be avoided by co-ordinated loan roll-overs in the form of a general financial freeze; and how the breathing space gained in this way can be used to arrange for loan write-downs or capital injections. In Chapter 3, the degree of corporate leverage is analysed more explicitly by introducing margin requirements into the model and two types of adverse shocks are examined numerically, an asset bubble bursting and a sudden rise in real interest rates. We find that when the economy is highly leveraged, a small shock to real interest rates can have powerful impacts on asset prices and cause widespread bankruptcy of the credit-constrained sector. To shed light on the recent debate on the role of prudential regulatory policies in mitigating the impact of a bubble bursting, we show that relaxing margin requirements can be used as a form of ‘regulatory forbearance’ for avoiding and/or reducing the knock-on effects. The second part of the thesis is a case study of Thailand. Chapter 4 provides a detailed account of Thailand economic developments from 1988 to 1998; it is argued that the nature of Thai financial crisis lied in the profound boom and burst in real estate sector which played a central role in creating tensions in the financial system and ultimately causing severe contraction of the economic activity. Chapter 5 explores some key issues relating to systemic bankruptcy of the corporate sector in aftermath of the Thai crisis.

Business cycles as a distinct type of economic behaviour originated in the severe instabilities experienced by European banking systems in the nineteenth century. A large number of divergent explanations of the phenomenon were proposed by contemporary economists; but by 1900 a consensus had emerged about how they were propagated, if not about causes. Business cycles were thought to be induced by disequilibrium relations among real and monetary variables. This quantity-theoretic view was formulated as self-sustaining sequences of phases of prosperity, recession and depression in 'general conditions' by Wesley Mitchell in 1913. Mitchell, with Arthur Burns, attempted to document these 'comovements' between the wars, but found that actual behaviour was complex and that all episodes were effectively unique. Their results were taken as 'proof of the comovement hypothesis by later economists, and most current research assumes such behaviour. Econometric research proposes an a priori decomposition into 'trend' and 'cycle' on the identifying assumption of separate data generating processes for each component, following the standard interpretation of Burns and Mitchell. Most empirical studies find that such decompositions either are rejected by the data or else fail to capture important empirical properties. Theoretical research assumes comovements to be the effects of random shocks propagated through moving average processes. This model is not in general supported empirically owing to the difficulties in identifying shocks from time-series data. The current literature mostly describes growth-rate rather than levels fluctuations, and models are increasingly being formulated explicitly in terms of growth. Evidence from undecomposed time series in levels suggests that the comovement hypothesis is not supported and further, that timing relations among economic variables are not stable.

The focus of this thesis is on the emerging markets. It assesses intra- and inter-market mean and volatility spillover, investigates the impact of the Mexican currency crisis on international portfolio diversification, and employ international asset pricing to test the integration of the emerging markets.

This thesis is concerned with understanding the changing dynamic in the relationship between the financial sector and the capitalist state. The thesis examines the changing form of this relationship in South Africa in the three decades that preceded the formation of the Government of National Unity in April 1994. Arguing that the political, ideological and economic forms expressed by the state are the surface appearances of deeper social processes arising from the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations, the thesis attempts to show how the contradictory tendencies of capital accumulation in South Africa increasingly took the form of a monetary crisis. In responding to the crisis after 1976, the apartheid state sought to depoliticise economic relations by restructuring the monetary basis of the state. The thesis analyses the proposals of the De Kock Commission appointed to inquire into the monetary system and monetary policy and shows how class struggle conditioned the attempt by the state to restructure the financial system. While the state pursued a legislative programme to restructure the financial system, deepening economic and political pressures, made it difficult to pursue such a programme in isolation from the pressures to restructure the relations of power and domination embodied in the apartheid state. The thesis traces the development of this contradiction during the course of the 1980's and its resolution in the formation of the Government of National Unity in 1994. The restructuring of the state in the 1990's and the emergence of a new popular government has made it possible to take the process of financial restructuring further. This is because the institutional restructuring of the 'post-apartheid' state has been confined within the liberal state form. The liberal state form allows the subordination of the state and civil society to the abstract rule of money and law. The thesis examines the implications for social relations of the continuity in the apartheid and post-apartheid forms of restructuring of the administrative, legal, fiscal, monetary and financial aparatuses.