Financialisation: Economic and Social Impacts

Abstract

Malcolm Sawyer is a distinguished figure in heterodox macroeconomics, specialising in financial economics and monetary economics. From 2011 to 2016, he was the principal investigator of a major international research project on Financialisation, Economy, Society, and Sustainable Development, which was funded by the European Union. This was a collaboration between 14 major universities: ‘A multi-disciplinary, pluralistic project which aims to forge alliances across the social sciences, so as to understand how finance can better serve economic, social and environmental needs’. His book, Financialisation: Economic and Social Impacts, which draws heavily on this research, ‘documents the growing scale and importance of financial institutions and markets, how the financial sector has evolved and changed since the 1970s, and which forces have generated that growth’ (p. 3). There are many definitions of financialisation to choose from, and he adopts that of Epstein (2005): ‘financialization means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors, and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies’.