CHINESE, BRAZILIAN, AND RUSSIAN INVESTMENT INTO THE EX-COLONIAL WORLD: THE POLITICS OF SOUTH-SOUTH INVESTMENT

Abstract

The major emphasis of this thesis is on the state to private sector relationships formed at a domestic level of each case study. The developmental trajectories of these relationships in China, Russia, and Brazil are examined through the beginning of the 2008 crisis to 2014. As argued below, these relationships are determinant in the ways in which local capital and state power transplants and reproduces in the ex-colonial world. To examine these relationships, this thesis offers a re-conceptualization of dialectics and the theory of uneven and combined development in a broader Marxist ontology of international capitalist political economy. In analyzing state-based methodologies of transnational firm movement, this thesis speaks to gaps in critical political economy concerning the contemporary characterization of Brazilian, Chinese, and Russian investment into the ex-colonial world. This course of argumentation is propelled by new discoveries within an analysis of secondary OECD and firm data. Macro investment data is used in conjunction with data gathered from financial and non-financial firms in Brazil and Russia. The allocation and movement of financial and productive resources is traced in this way. Legal policies and structural mechanisms of state agencies such as development banks and export credit agencies are explored. In analyzing these two factors in the relationships Brazil, Russia, and China have with the ex-colonial world the case is made that the underlying feature is one of neo-coloniality.