Resistance vs Cooperation: Political Economy of International Financial Control

Abstract

The discussion so far suggests that IFC represented an era of recovery and restoration of the credibility for the economies of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Serbia and Greece as evidenced by recovery of cost of borrowing, bond spreads and access to international markets. Moreover, I examined the turning points in the history of sovereign risk of each country and highlighted the role of political, monetary, institutional and other factors in explaining the historical trends. However, so far I have not dealt with the mechanisms through which IFC led to a decline in the sovereign risk nor have I attempted to explain the differences in the degree of recovery and success among the cases. This chapter provides a comparative picture of the political and fiscal institutions of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Greece and Serbia before 1914 and puts forward a framework to interpret the different ways that IFC functioned in each case.