Tussle for space: The politics of mock‐compliance with global financial standards in developing countries

Florence Dafe and Rebecca Elisabeth Husebye Engebretsen

Regulation & Governance, 2023, vol. 17, issue 2, 328-345

Abstract: As efforts to harmonize policies globally intensify, developing countries increasingly face pressures to adopt international standards. Yet, we know little about the circumstances under which developing countries manage to circumvent such pressures, or about their strategies to maintain policy space. We explore under which conditions developing countries are willing and able to sustain mock‐compliance, a situation where countries comply on paper but not in practice. Using country comparisons of Angola's, Nigeria's, Tanzania's, and Vietnam's engagement with the Basel banking standards, we show how three factors combine to produce sustained mock‐compliance: high costs of outright non‐compliance due to outward‐orientated banking sectors; high political costs of substantive compliance; and state control over profitable markets. Our article contributes to theory‐building in the literature on compliance and structural power as well as to broader debates about developing countries' policy autonomy in their engagement with global financial norms.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12427

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:reggov:v:17:y:2023:i:2:p:328-345

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Regulation & Governance from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().