Assistant Professor Didac Queralt won the 2023 MacMillan Center Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for best first book by a Yale ladder faculty member for Pawned States: State Building in the Era of International Finance (link is external).
Abstract:
In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external public finance offered emerging nations endless opportunities to overcome barriers to growth, but it also enabled rulers to bypass critical stages in institution building and political development. Pawned States reveals how easy access to foreign lending at early stages of state building has led to chronic fiscal instability and weakened state capacity in the developing world.