Economic Coordination as Freedom of Association

Although international economic coordination was one of the major questions arising in international economics after World War I, when the British hegemonic stability broke down, it mainly attracted the interest of economists from the 1960s onwards, as economic interdependence revealed itself to be a significant phenomenon, with an expansion of research during a period that began in the mid-1970s and ended in the late 1980s. During those fifteen years, a major theoretical effort yielded a significant body of literature which may be analyzed as an outcome, independently of its practical application. In fact, international economic policy coordination remained a speculative matter which, it seems, did not adequately support or persuade policy-makers to implement concrete economic coordination among countries. Far from explaining why this happened, a detailed investigation of the assumptions and logical aspects on which theories were grounded may provide insights into their practical workability.

The G20 has emerged as a key informal forum of global economic governance after the economic crisis of 2008. The paper argues that the rule of law aspect of the G20 economic policy coordination is a limited one. It is mainly due to the fact that the economic policy coordination, such as macroeconomic, monetary or financial services, focuses primarily at the target of public good rather than at the rule of law. Emergence of a tax evasion coordination at G20 level creates a specific case of economic policy coordination. It targets multilateral coordination of taxation – a policy which is subject to national sovereignty. The paper analyses the rule of law impact of the tax policy guidance of G20 for the G20 members and others, through the channels of existing international organisations and beyond.

While the institutional dimension of inter-parliamentary cooperation has been the subject of intense research, much less is known about the involvement of partisan actors, and more specifically of members of opposition parties. This article aims to bridge this gap by looking at the composition of parliamentary delegations to the meetings of the inter-parliamentary conference on stability, economic coordination and governance in the EU (so-called ‘Article 13 Conference’, established by Art. 13 of the Fiscal Compact in 2012). It focuses on the involvement and attitude of opposition parties, in order to verify whether they take part to inter-parliamentary cooperation and with which approach.

<p>This article aims to verify whether, and to what extent, the Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance (IPC SECG) has become an accountability enhancing arena through which domestic legislatures can better scrutinize the process of the European Semester. While there is a broad scholarship on the difficult institutionalization of the IPC SECG and controversies related to its operation, little has been said about its actual performance as an accountability enhancing platform, especially in the context of domestic interactions between parliaments and executives in the area of economic governance. Despite it being operational for several years, the scholarship lacks focus on the national parliaments’ perspective with regard to this Conference’s effectiveness. Against this background, drawing from comparative data obtained from questionnaires and interviews, this article addresses the above-mentioned aspects from an actor-oriented approach and delves deeper into parliamentary perceptions of the SECG Conference. Findings indicate that attendance at the SECG Conference by MPs has neither significantly affected their domestic parliamentary activity in the area of economic governance and budgetary policy, nor improved the existing domestic legislative-executive relationship in this context. The Conference’s procedural weaknesses are only one part of the problem, another being the marginalized domestic position of parliaments in the European Semester procedure.</p>

The provision of Article 13 TSCG to create an Interparliamentary Conference was the starting point for long discussions after which national parliaments and the European Parliament eventually reached a compromise. This article pursues a two-fold objective: It first examines the different phases of interparliamentary negotiations from 2012 to 2015. On the basis of a distinction between three competing models for interparliamentary cooperation, the article shows that the two models of EP-led scrutiny and creating a collective parliamentary counterweight did not prevail: Parliaments agreed that the new Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance (SECG) would follow the ‘standard’ interparliamentary conference (COSAC model). In terms of national parliaments’ actual participation, the lowest common denominator compromise has not changed the numbers of participating MPs: Attendance records are stable over time, the size of national delegations continues to vary and participating MPs are still twice as likely to be members of Budget or Finance committees than to be members of European affairs committees.

This article explores the variation of vocational education and training systems in European countries. From a survey of experts in 15 European countries, we develop a typology along two dimensions: employer involvement and public commitment. In a second step, we explain the variety of skill formation systems, highlighting the importance of partisan power and economic coordination. The causal argument is applied in three illustrative case studies of Germany, Sweden and the UK. In particular, we argue that a high degree of economic coordination increases the relevance of training relative to academic education. However, differences within the cluster of coordinated market economies are related to different legacies of partisan power in the post-war decades.

This article does an empirical analysis on Chinapsilas economic coordination and deflator coordination during 1953-1978 and 1979-2005. Firstly, we have introduced the concepts of the coordination theory and coordination coefficient. Secondly, we have defined the models of economic coordination coefficient and deflator coordination coefficient for seven main industries and the urban consumer price index and the overall retail price index. Finally, the empirical analysis has found that in averagely when the growth rate of GDP was greater than 7% and less than 11.28% during 1953-1978 or when the growth rate of GDP was greater than 7% and less than 10.61% during 1979-2005, not only did the Chinapsilas aggregate economy can possess a continuously and moderately higher level of growth rate, but also the Chinapsilas aggregate economy could possess a lower level of deflator. Our research suggests that for maintaining Chinapsilas aggregate economy to keep on developing continually and moderately at a higher level of growth rate and a lower level of deflator, the growth rate of GDP should be greater than 7% and less than 10.61%.

(2003). Political and Economic Coordination in Russia's Federal District Reform: A Study of Four Regions. Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 55, No. 4, pp. 507-520.

The urban ecological environment is the material basis and condition for human beings to engage in social and economic activities and the supporting system for the formation and sustainable development of cities. With the acceleration of urbanization and industrialization, urban living environments and economic development have become the focus of people’s attention. This leads to the necessity of studying how to improve the quality of the urban living environment and promote the harmonious coexistence of population, natural environment, and social economy. Traditional methods focus on multiple regression models to evaluate the urban environmental and economic harmony, but this method does not consider the weight of each index, resulting in poor accuracy of the evaluation results. This paper proposes a discrete mathematical model to design the evaluation index and evaluation system of urban environmental and economic coordination. It calculates the weight of each index; carrying capacity of the urban environment, the value of each environmental factor, and the comprehensive value of the environment is determined. The static evaluation and dynamic evaluation are used to evaluate the coordination of the urban environmental economy. The experimental results show that the designed evaluation method of urban environmental economic coordination has high accuracy and effectively improves the reliability and evaluation time.

We begin by remarking upon the pervasiveness of nonmarket institutional arrangements in capitalist economic systems. We then sketch out some typical generalized forms of collective order and economic coordination in industrial agglomerations—quasi-integration, voluntary associations, informal business cultures, and governmental institutions. With the aid of simple statistics we describe the growth of the high-technology industrial agglomerations (technopoles) of Southern California since the 1950s. The specific regulatory tasks and institutions engendered by this growth are reviewed in detail with special reference to transactional economies, innovation and technology transfer, labor supply, land development, and lobbying and local economic growth. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the problems and predicaments experienced by high-technology industry in Southern California and in the USA in the current (neoconservative) policy environment.

This article does an empirical analysis on China’s economic coordination and deflator coordination during 1953-1978 and 1979-2005. Firstly, we have introduced the concepts of the coordination theory and coordination coefficient. Secondly, we have defined the models of economic coordination coefficient and deflator coordination coefficient for seven main industries and the urban consumer price index and the overall retail price index. Finally, the empirical analysis has found that in averagely when the growth rate of gdp was greater than 7% and less than 11.28% during 1953-1978 or when the growth rate of gdp was greater than 7% and less than 10.61% during 1979-2005, not only did the China’s aggregate economy can possess a continuously and moderately higher level of growth rate, but also the China’s aggregate economy could possess a lower level of deflator. Our research suggests that for maintaining China’s aggregate economy to keep on developing continually and moderately at a higher level of growth rate and a lower level of deflator, the growth rate of gdp should be greater than 7% and less than 10.61%.

Comparative political economy (CPE) scholarship has drawn various insights from organization theory throughout its existence. Organization theory has made more progress than CPE to explicate the organizational processes behind institutional change. In this paper, we draw on theory of partial organization to describe, interpret, and explain change in the coordination of one Coordinated Market Economy: Finland. We show that Finnish corporatism has become gradually re-organized during the last three decades. We argue that the structural and membership dynamics of partial organization explain some key patterns as well as the shape and timing of institutional change in the face of a changing constellation of economic interests. We argue that theory of partial organization complements the interest-based and institutional explanations of change in economic coordination.

In the EU institutional architecture, parliamentary oversight of economic and fiscal policies is weakened by the existence of spheres of activity that tend to escape from the two ordinary channels of parliamentary representation. The consideration of existing gaps in the oversight circuit leads to investigate on the actual as well as the potential role of the Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance (SECG). A representation of the actual pros and cons of this Conference is drawn by means of the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. On this basis, strategies suited to turn this Conference into a body instrumental to strengthened and effective parliamentary oversight are highlighted, considering interparliamentary cooperation not as an autonomous channel for representation, but as an instrumental dimension that could help the European Parliament and national parliaments to tighten their oversight capacity, in their respective domains.

The purpose of our paper is to elaborate a coherent synthesis of the main achievements of the evolutionnary and institutionalist theories regarding institutional change and economic coordination. Adopting a “deep version” of institutionnalism and a wide acception of the concept of institution, we formulate five propositions of an “institutional economics of change” that would encompass both institutionalist and evolutionnary theories. Then we define the notion of “institutional hierarchy”, hence qualifying the various modes of influence of the institutions on economic behaviors. Finally, studying the evolution of institutions, we distinguish between three main regimes of evolution : “genesis”, “development” and “crisis”, and we discuss the conditions of the transition from one regime to another. In doing so, we aim at building a logically consistent theory of the complex interactions between institutional evolution and economic coordination.

This book is an integrated collection of a dozen of Peter Earl’s lively and thought-provoking essays, carefully edited and updated. Theoretical topics include the prediction of corporate behaviour, the economic foundations of marketing and shopping mall design, pricing strategy and its relationship with the existence of second-hand markets, and the microfoundations of macroeconomics. Case studies include cooperation in the car industry, managerialist reforms in New Zealand and the university sector, structural change in the advertising industry and the place of G.B. Richardson and G.L.S. Shackle in the literature of economics. Information, Opportunism and Economic Coordination will be of particular interest to historians of economic thought, business economists, behavioural economists and Post Keynesians.