Dance of the Trillions: Developing Countries and Global Finance

‘Dance of the Trillions: Developing Countries and Global Finance’, published by Brookings Press in the summer of 2018, is a historical narrative that traces the evolution of ‘emerging markets’ as an organising concept in international financial markets. It is also a discussion about how wise it is for developing countries to open themselves fully to unrestricted capital flows, and how countries have sought to protect themselves from the volatility of those flows in the wake of the ‘crisis decades’ of the 1980s and 1990s. It is the first book to look across the entire modern period, since the early 1970s, in which developing countries have had access to international finance. Underlying the story is an analysis of how the relationship between developing countries and global finance appears to be moving from one governed by the ‘Washington Consensus’ to one more likely to be shaped by Beijing.