Advanced Capitalist Economies Research Articles

The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies

The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies

Eco-imperial Tensions: Decarbonization Strategies in Times of Geopolitical Upheaval

The neoliberal world order has given way to a geopolitical disorder, shaped by the climate crisis and increasing rivalries between dominant powers. This poses a challenge to the social sciences. Neither theories searching for the problem-solving potentials of ‘global governance’ nor critical notions of imperialism seem to be equipped to fully grasp the rapidly changing circumstances. Instead, we suggest to understand the recent upheavals as eco-imperial tensions. They result from the contradictions of what we have called the imperial mode of living, that is, resource- and emissions-intensive patterns of production and consumption, which produce enormous socioecological costs and externalize them in space and time. With the rise of China and other countries of the Global South, the imperial mode of living is generalized globally and threatened in its precondition, namely the unlimited access to nature and labor power on a world scale. This is intensified by the competition for the raw materials needed for decarbonizing the advanced capitalist economies.

Singapore’s Temasek Model and State Asset Management in China

Since the late 1970s, Singapore has been an important policy reference for China. Some Chinese policymakers viewed Temasek, its government holding company, as a model for state asset management. They studied Singapore’s approach, but ultimately chose a different institutional design when establishing the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) in 2003. China’s engagement with Temasek subsequently concentrated on corporate governance, specifically boards of directors in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Yet despite the Temasek model’s appeal, its influence in China was limited by the far greater size and indebtedness of the state sector; the weaker role of firm performance in asset and capital allocation; SOEs’ numerous social and welfare functions; lack of willingness to augment firm autonomy; and divergent interpretations of the Temasek model and its reference value. “Policy collage” by Chinese policymakers explains the existence of formal similarities between China and advanced capitalist economies without fundamental convergence in function.

Explaining Rural Conservatism: Political Consequences of Technological Change in the Great Plains

Rural areas are conservative electoral strongholds in the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. But this was not always the case. What explains the rise of rural conservatism? This paper argues that technological change transformed not only agriculture but rural political preferences during the twentieth century. It studies a natural experiment: the post-World War II introduction of new irrigation technologies, which enabled farmers to irrigate otherwise arid land in the Great Plains using groundwater. Difference-in-differences analyses exploiting the shock’s differential impact on counties overlying the Ogallala Aquifer—a pattern validated with remote-sensing data—show that technological change contributed significantly to the region’s long-term conservative electoral transformation. Additional analyses, including comparison of individual policy preferences inside/outside the Ogallala Aquifer boundary, suggest that this was due to the rise of capital-intensive agriculture and the growing power of agribusiness. The findings demonstrate how new technologies made new politics in rural America.

Putting wage growth back on the table: Labour incorporation, political exchange, and wage-boosting policies in advanced peripheral economies

Growth model scholarship posits that wage-led growth has become increasingly difficult to achieve in advanced capitalist economies since the demise of Fordism. The constraints to the pursuit of policies compatible with wage-led growth strategies could be expected to be particularly stringent in peripheral economies, which often rely on price-sensitive exports, suppression of domestic demand, and labour disempowerment to compete in global markets. Yet, empirical experience shows that even advanced peripheral economies that adopted export-led growth strategies have successfully implemented policies intended to raise wages and expand social transfers. How to explain the emergence of such wage-boosting policies in the context of advanced peripheral, export-oriented economies? Drawing on the cases of Israel, Poland, and Spain since the Great Recession, we identify one common mechanism accounting for this unexpected outcome: the contingent political incorporation of organized labour through a cross-class political exchange in the coalition supporting a country’s growth strategy. We identify two scope conditions that enable the implementation of such policies in unlikely contexts. Domestic political instability, coupled with a contingent relaxation of prior economic constraints, leads governing parties of both left and right orientation to activate political exchange with unions, resulting in the implementation of diverse policies boosting household income. These policies also increase the role of domestic consumption as a key growth driver. Nonetheless, the depth and durability of such changes remain conditioned. The findings develop our understanding of the role of, and structural limits to, organized labour’s agency to promote wage growth in advanced peripheral economies.

A Quest for the Presence of Financialization in the Global South The Case of India

Abstract: The globalized world is witnessing increasing dominance of the financialization of the economy and society. A rapidly changing association among finance capitalists, individuals, the economy, geography, and society, with financialization at the center of these relationships, has been observed recently. However, existing research on this subject is primarily concentrated on advanced capitalist economies of the Global North. As global finance is penetrating the Global South as well, there is a necessity to understand the features, nuances, and theoretical debates surrounding financialization in the context of countries from the Global South. A comprehensive review of the literature reveals that studies on financialization exhibit unsettled and inconclusive debates in relation to the genesis, characteristics, causes, and consequences of the phenomenon. In the case of India, it is particularly difficult to establish strong evidence on the financialization of the Indian economy since the macro-evidence of financialization is not robust in comparison to evidence from the developed capitalist economies in the Global North. However, some recent microstudies have cited traces of financialization in microfinance, manufacturing firms, and digital banking in India. This micro-evidence, despite being a sector-specific phenomenon, is crucial to the larger debate on financialization. This article argues that in cases of blurred features of financialization, macro-findings may not be completely reliable or even relevant. A better approach is to collate both macroand micro-data and contextualize the findings in specific contemporary socioeconomic structures.

International financial subordination in the age of asset manager capitalism

The rise of asset managers as key nodes of financial intermediation has been one of the most fundamental changes in the global economy over recent years. An emerging literature on asset manager capitalism (AMC) discusses these changes and its implications, though largely in the context of corporate governance in advanced capitalist economies. This paper expands the remit of the AMC literature to spaces outside the global capitalist core, and assesses its implications, based on quantitative data on asset manager allocations and flows, and qualitative data from semi-structured interviews. We find that despite the growth of asset managers’ investments into emerging markets, their presence remains limited and that the threat of exit remains present but increasingly tied with global conditions and the composition of benchmark indices. We also find that asset managers’ investments are increasingly focussing on bonds, and are heavily concentrated in a few companies and sectors, revealing a marginal rather than broad-based presence. Finally, we find very limited evidence that asset managers use their voice to influence corporate governance and macroeconomic policy. Overall, asset managers do not seem to fundamentally reshape the characteristics of financial subordination of emerging markets, and the characteristics of AMCs remain, for now, specific to advanced economies.

THE ROLE OF PRIVATE SECTOR INVESTMENT IN THE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT OF NAJAF GOVERNORATE

The contemporary world is witnessing critical economic developments on multiple levels. International productive integration began as a result of the scientific and technological revolution. There is a growing role of some international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Economic blocs such as the European Union, ASEAN, and NAFTA exist. These developments constitute tributaries that favor globalization, representing the general picture of the current global economy, which is led by advanced capitalist economies.

The education and income voting divides in Canada and their consequences for redistributive politics

Profound changes in the nature of class cleavages in advanced capitalist economies have been documented in recent years. Some have posited that the increasingly educated nature of left electorates has weakened impulses for redistribution. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class voting has largely been neglected in Canada, as it has traditionally been viewed as being comparatively weak in the face of strong linguistic, regional, and religious identities. Using the entire series of the Canadian Election Study (1965–2019) we examine the education and income political divides in Canada. We find strong support for a divergence between the effect that income and education have on party voting, as people with high incomes continue to vote for the right, while people with higher levels of education have shifted significantly to the left. However, we also find a strengthening income cleavage, whereby lower-income individuals are increasingly supporting the social democratic New Democratic Party, with redistribution a key driver. The findings reveal that Canada, despite a strengthening class cleavage, largely fits the mould of a multi-elite party system. However, it does so in a distinct fashion from the party systems previously examined in the cleavage literature.

Reassessing the econometric measurement of inequality and poverty: toward a cost-of-living approach

The econometric measurement of inequality and poverty in advanced capitalist economies has been preoccupied with aggregate measures of relative deprivation, namely, the Gini Index and a relative poverty rate, both of which are based on economic distances from the population median. Using the case of Hong Kong, this article demonstrates the limitations of relative measures: the Gini Index masks social mobility and the relative poverty line understates actual poverty. This article argues instead for a cost-of-living approach to measure poverty, where the poverty line is defined as the cost of essential goods and services. A cost-of-living approach produces a poverty line of HK$28,815 and attendant poverty rate of 44.47% in 2020, nearly double the poverty line of HK$13,450 and poverty rate of 23.6% according to the conventional relative measure of the poverty line set to 50% of median household income—capturing a shortfall of 551,400 poor households that have been overlooked by relative measures.

Representation and Displacement: Labor Disembedding and Contested Neoliberalism in France

This article analyzes changing patterns of worker protest and mobilization in France, with particular emphasis on the post-1970s era of neoliberalism. It argues that processes of state-led disembedding of labor have underpinned major changes in the leadership, content, and class bases of worker contestation. Drawing on more than forty original interviews as well as extensive secondary sources, it highlights a long-term shift in the dynamics of labor's political engagement, in which unions' role has been increasingly displaced by broad-based, anti-systemic social movements. Protests have called into question the legitimacy of French capitalism and the state, revealing the dysfunctions of political representation with troubling implications for the stability of French democracy and the governability of advanced capitalist economies.

Framing the Purchase of Human Goods: Cosmetic Surgery Consumption in Capitalist South Korea

Sociological and cultural research on market participation has been preoccupied with creative markets and traditional labor markets, overlooking alternate types of markets, particularly those of human goods which have proliferated in Asia. This article analyzes South Korea's cosmetic surgery market to examine how and why consumers participate in markets of human goods on the microlevel vis‐à‐vis macrolevel social structures in an advanced capitalist economy. This article theorizes two cognitive frames (normative conformity and competitive edge) that rationalize and motivate surgical modifications as an alternative vehicle for financial and marital stability in response to macrolevel economic challenges from the nation's developmental trajectory and cultural anxieties from its Confucian traditions about marriage.

Capitalism in Academia and the Theory of Academic Capitalism: Political Economy of Higher Education in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Abstract The theory of academic capitalism (ac) is a prominent attempt to grasp the multifaceted organizational and functional transformations of universities and higher education (he) in contemporary times. However, this has rarely provided an in-depth examination of the meaning of capitalism in the context of he and has largely ignored the Global South. Focusing on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, this paper begins by examining the political economy of this country’s little-studied he system. It explores its entanglements with the broader Jordanian political economy by focusing on for-profit private universities and the implications of capitalist (foreign) ownership for their functioning and governance. The article draws, in part, on novel interview data gathered by the author in Jordan from 2015–17 to elaborate Jordanian he elite’s understanding of this system. The Jordanian case is juxtaposed with ac to appraise the applicability of the theory to contexts distinct from advanced capitalist economies.

Crafting Work Happiness: Balancing Client Agency & Empowerment With Critical Social Awareness

Job crafting is a method taught by career developers and coaches to workers to help them achieve greater happiness in their jobs. Given its agentic, bottom-up approach, job crafting has become closely aligned with positive psychology. While offering empowerment benefits, job crafting has limitations. Given its almost exclusive focus on individual freedom and control, there is little attention paid to the social context, including structural operations of power within an advanced capitalist economy. Three social science critiques of positive psychology and job crafting are examined, with reference to contemporary career development theory. Practical suggestions are made for how career developers might address these social science critiques to best meet diverse client needs. This involves upholding a commitment to client agency and empowerment, whilst developing and maintaining a critical social awareness. Implications for research on job crafting are also discussed.

الاستثمار في الشركات الراعية

Since the contemporary world is witnessing important economic developments, and on more than one level, the international productive integration was launched on the impact of the scientific and technological revolution. There is the rising role of some international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. There are also economic blocs such as the European Union, ASEAN and NAFTA....and all of these developments constitute tributaries in favor of globalization, which represents the general picture expressing the current global economy, which is led by the advanced capitalist economies. The growing role played by multinational companies in the context of economic globalization, and in particular their role in the movement of investments at the global level, and the transfer of capital from one country to another, with a kind of overlap less like in the past, is not hidden, so that some developed countries have become leaders in importing and exporting investments at the same time.

Regulating Improvement: Industrial Water Pollution, White Settler Authority, and Capitalist Reproduction in the St. Clair–Detroit River Corridor, 1945–1972

This article explores the postwar racialization of socionatural metabolisms as Michigan consolidated its capacities to regulate water pollution in the St. Clair–Detroit River corridor. These unceded waters flow through the traditional territories of the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Mississauga, and Wyandot nations, as well as the heavily industrialized, urbanized, and racially segregated geographies of southeast Michigan. Drawing on archival records, I examine discursive constructions of White settler and Indigenous water metabolisms that coarticulated with Michigan’s growing concern that unchecked water pollution posed a metabolic barrier to industrial manufacturing. I situate these representations against the state’s emerging objective to reconcile two interconnected forms of waste: (1) the material degradation of water attributed to Michigan’s advanced capitalist economy, and (2) the wasted economic potential long used to denigrate Indigenous societies that “failed” to extract capitalist value from nature. This case study demonstrates how Michigan’s discursive approach to managing a potential crisis of capitalist reproduction also reconfigured the logic of improvement as the racial and economic basis for settler colonial authority over nature. “Improving” nature was not only about facilitating access to nature for capitalist production, but reproducing—indefinitely—the ecological conditions on which capitalist production relied. This article builds on two lines of inquiry in critical geographic scholarship exploring mutually constitutive relationships between race and socionatural metabolisms, and between settler colonialism and environmental degradation, to interrogate the postwar discourses flowing through water management in southeast Michigan, a region where water remains at the center of multiple racialized dispossessions and their ongoing contestation.

Review of “Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia”

Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, authored by Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin, is a timely and ambitious book that examines increasing precarity in employment relations in three Asian economies. It is timely in the sense that it sheds light on the precarization of work, the central feature in the transformation of contemporary labor markets under neoliberal pressures. It is ambitious as it brings three economic powerhouses in Asia—Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia—into a comparative examination and in conversation with other advanced capitalist economies. The book traces how work has become increasingly uncertain, unstable, and insecure in three Asian economies in the last 20 years. To offer the comparative analysis, the authors provide the historical background of the developmental state, the shift in global capitalism, domestic institutional arrangements and social welfare regimes, and implications for inequality and poverty. In doing so, their overarching argument is centered on the changing balance of power among class actors. By looking into the political and economic dynamics behind the liberalization of employment and social protections, the book ultimately maintains that the shifting interests of global capitalism and the configurations of national institutions and class relations have shaped different degrees and forms of precarity in the three countries.

Decent gig work in Sub Sahara Africa?

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) economies are entrenched in traditional economic and employment structures driven by the informal sector. There is a small and regulated formal sector, built upon public sector employment. Unlike the discussion of gig work in advanced capitalist economies, the development of gig work in SSA is within an environment where employment standards and labour regulations are largely absent. The concern in developed countries is that gig work erodes the norm of regulated employment; in developing economies gig work is part of the norm of informal and unregulated employment. Gig work in SSA offers the potential for formalisation of production and work, new forms of agency, and supporting decent work. However, the challenge is how to realise this potential. The role of platforms in developing and transmitting decent work protocols into gig contracts is discussed as a potential means for supporting decent work in SSA.

Mister Chips goes to Brussels: On the Pros and Cons of a Semiconductor Policy in theEU

AbstractIs making semiconductors in Europe a good idea? With the introduction of the European Chips Act in early 2022, this is no longer an academic question. In this article we evaluate these plans in light of a wider—but remarkably one‐sided—debate on industrial policy in advanced capitalist economies. Instead of focusing on policymakers, as most students of industrial policy have done, we draw attention to two first‐order conditions that determine the chances of policy success: the existence of (proto‐)competitive incumbents, and the alignment of the policy objectives with the prevailing institutional framework. We rely on that framework to evaluate the successes and failures in European aerospace, German biotech, and French computers, before using these insights to evaluate the European Chips Act. Investing in manufacturing of mature chips is, in that light, not a good idea. We suggest, instead, that the EU should concentrate on market segments that leverage its high‐skill workplaces and world‐class research system, and in which Europe has either already developed a comparative advantage or will not find itself at an initial disadvantage.

Rethinking Varieties of Capitalism and growth theory in the ICT era*

Going beyond the Varieties of Capitalism comparative analysis, a theory of advanced capitalism is developed to explain what has been driving advanced capitalism through the massive creative destruction of the information and communication technologies (ICT) revolution of recent decades. Second, it is argued – reconfiguring Varieties of Capitalism – that the advanced capitalist economies should be seen not just in terms of comparative capitalisms, but as an advanced world innovation system of interacting advanced economies. Critically, the dominant position in that system is the (hegemonic but also fragile, problematic and handicapped) United States as the world driver of radical innovation: this reflects the key role of its top research universities, their diasporas and associated deregulated high-risk-taking venture capitalist and investment banking ecosystems; its decentralised and business-porous political and legal systems; and its dominance ab initio of digitalisation. Problematic has been the major reduction since the early 1990s in Federal R&D, itself a consequence of the anti-public-expenditure Republican gridlock in Congress, and in turn the result of the political, geographical and socioeconomic polarisation associated with technological creative destruction more dramatically in the US than elsewhere. Third, it addresses the paradox – in the contemporary technologically revolutionary age – of productivity growth falling below that of the Fordist era. It is argued that Schumpeterian growth expectations play a much larger role in R&D investment in the high-sunk-cost and high-risk US-centred ICT era than in the relative stability of Fordism and Chandlerian corporations; the author sets out a simple Keynesian–Kaldorian expectations-based multiple equilibrium productivity growth model, where major crashes shift economies down to lower growth equilibria. The conclusion raises six areas of future work which stem from the approaches outlined above.