Risk and the Rupee in Pakistan's New Economy Financial Inclusion and Monetary Change in a Frontier Market

"In a world of open markets and global trade, current development thinking seeks stability and prosperity for the world's poor by expanding access to financial products. By bringing credit and savings facilities to those who have historically enjoyed little access to formal finance, the 'financial inclusion' agenda promises to spark bottom-up growth at the same time as it offers a safety net. Yet by tooling-up households with access to finance in order to secure financial and economic stability amidst the instabilities of open markets, the financial inclusion agenda overlooks how new risks that are generated by the globalisation of money and markets ultimately undermine money and the financial inclusion agenda itself. Cast against fundamental change in the monetary environment that has accompanied the globalisation of markets, this book examines the rapid liberalisation of money and markets in Pakistan, itself a pioneer in the promotion of financial inclusion and a 'frontier economy' for global investment. It argues that liberalisation has generated substantive problems not only for the central bank as guardian of national currency, but for ordinary households in everyday transactions. By exposing jarring contradictions between free markets and financial inclusion, the book contributes to important emerging debates about how poor people engage money and finance, setting this micro-scale analysis in a comprehensive framework that scales right up to the heights of global finance. This construction generates a set of meaningful links between the abstraction of 'globalisation' and the experience of everyday economic engagement in the periphery that challenges money theory and the development sector's embrace of financial inclusion alike, by posing substantive and empirically-grounded monetary contestation that demonstrates a burden of risk imposed on ordinary people that is only exacerbated by financial inclusion"--