Global Austerity Research Articles

Geopsychiatry: Climate change, migration, and mental health

Geopsychiatry, a newly emerging discipline within psychiatry, examines the influence of geopolitical determinants on mental health and mental illness. Geopolitical determinants include conflict and wars, global austerity, climate change, public health crises (such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)), and migration. This study focuses on the two significant areas of climate change and migration. Climate change can affect mental health directly or indirectly in a variety of ways, including chronic (global warming) and acute (heat waves and environmental disasters) events. Certain groups of migrants, including migrating children, older migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, are particularly vulnerable to developing psychiatric disorders. The convergence of climate change and migration is significantly complicating the already highly difficult situation for mental health services worldwide, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where access to care is limited. Despite this, the majority of studies examining mental health impacts of these events originate from high-income countries, and there is still a lack of effective preventive and treatment strategies. In 2023, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) set up a Special Interest Group on Geopsychiatry with a clear and explicit aim to summarize current evidence and propose strategies to tackle geopolitical challenges on mental health. The Special Interest Group aims to support regional and local groups across all psychiatric disciplines and stakeholders dedicated to building local consensus, prioritizing research, crafting policies, and collating and sharing good clinical practices. With such significant effort, we can expand our understanding and collaboration on geopsychiatry and make changes to the care of people with geopolitical and mental health challenges around the globe.

The Essential Work of Crip Resistance: Demanding Dignity in Spain's Pandemic Austerity

This article considers crip resistance to the politics of austerity with which Spain's government has reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly a decade after the 15-M anti-austerity movement and its occupations. Given the intensification of austerity politics and their effects on people with disabilities, I examine three instances of crip resistance and their virtual, local, and global settings. Beyond McRuer's expansive view of crip resistance as comprised of tactics that center disability against global austerity, my analysis establishes its groundwork in the current demands by Spanish disability advocacy groups and on Javier Romañach's modelo de diversidad funcional, the prevalent model of disability among Spanish disability activists that centers the concept of dignity. Throughout this analysis, I demonstrate how crip tactics that emerge in a crisis can help make sense of a continuing emergency as they challenge the existing conditions of cultural austerity and contribute to the concept of dignity as an organizing principle.

Global Austerity Alert: Looming Budget Cuts in 2021-25 and Alternative Pathways

This paper warns of an emerging post-pandemic fiscal austerity shock—one that is far more premature and severe than the one that followed the global financial crisis—and presents alternative options to ensure that populations do not yet again have to suffer from austerity cuts. It does so by: (i) examining IMF government expenditure projections until 2025; (ii) summarizing the most common austerity measures to be avoided given their negative social impacts; (iii) presenting financing alternatives and (iv) calling on governments to urgently create fiscal space to finance an equitable socio-economic recovery and progress toward human rights and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“Hybrid” medical leadership emergency medicine training for international medical graduates

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to outline the “Hybrid” “International” Emergency Medicine (HIEM) programme, which is an ethical pathway for the recruitment, employment and training of Emergency Medicine doctors; with a rotation through the NHS on a two-year medical training initiative with a Tier 5 visa, “earn, learn and return” programme. The HIEM programme offers an advantage to the Tier 2 visa by combining training, education and employment resulting in new learning to help improve the health system in Nepal and provide continued cultural support, clinical and leadership development experience in the UK NHS. Finally, this programme also provides a Return on Investment to the NHS.Design/methodology/approachA shortage of doctors in the UK, combined with a need to develop Emergency Medicine doctors in Nepal, led to a UK Emergency Medicine Physician (PS) to facilitate collaboration between UK/Nepal partners. A mapping exercise of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine curriculum with the competencies for the health system and quality improvement leaders and partners with patients produced a “HIEM programme”. The HIEM programme aims to develop first-class doctors to study in Emergency Departments in the UK NHS while also building trainee capability to improve the health system in Nepal with a research thesis.FindingsThe HIEM programme has 12 doctors on its programme across years one and two, with the first six doctors working in the UK NHS and progressing well. There are reports of high levels of satisfaction with the trainees in their transition from Nepal to the UK and the hospital is due to save £720,000 (after costs) over two years. Each trainee will earn £79,200 over two years which is enough to pay back the £16,000 cost for the course fees. Nepal as a country will benefit from the HIEM programme as each trainee will submit a health system improvement Thesis.Research limitations/implicationsThe HIEM programme is in its infancy as it is two years through a four-year programme. Further evaluation data are required to assess the full impact of this programme. In addition, the HIEM programme has only focussed on the development of one medical speciality which is Emergency Medicine. Further research is required to evaluate the impact of this model across other medical and surgical specialties.Practical implicationsThe HIEM programme has exciting potential to support International Medical Graduates undertake a planned programme of development while they study in the UK with a Tier 5 visa. IMGs require continuous support while in the UK and are required to demonstrate continued learning through continuous professional development (CPD). The HIEM programme offers an opportunity for this CPD learning to be structured, meaningful and progressive to enable new learning. There is also specific support to develop academic and research skills to undertake a thesis in an area that requires health system improvement in Nepal.Originality/valueThis is the first time an integrated clinical, leadership, quality improvement and patient partnership model curriculum has been developed. The integrated nature of the curriculum saves precious time, money and resources. The integrated nature of this “hybrid” curriculum supports the development of an evidence-based approach to generating attitudes of collaboration, partnership and facilitation and team building in medical leadership with patient engagement. This “hybrid” model gives hope for the increased added value of the programme at a time of global austerity and challenges in healthcare.

Ontario Pension Policy Making and the Politics of CPP Reform, 1963–2016

AbstractAfter years of pension policy drift in a broader context of global austerity, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was enhanced for the first time in 2016 to expand benefits for Canadian workers. This article examines Ontario's central role in these reforms. The deteriorating condition of workplace plans, coupled with rising retirement income insecurity across the province's labour force, generated new sources of negative feedback at the provincial level, fuelling Ontario's campaign for CPP reform beginning in the late 2000s. The political limits of policy drift and layering at the provincial level is considered in relationship to policy making at the national level. As shown, a new period of pension politics emerged in Canada after 2009, in which the historical legacy of CPP's joint governance structure led to a dynamic of “collusive benchmarking,” shaped in large part by political efforts of the Ontario government, leading to CPP enhancement.

Wishful thinking? Towards a more realistic role for universities in regional innovation policy

ABSTRACTThe past 30 years has seen an escalating interest in the potential role of universities in contributing to their regional economies, reflected in the increasing trend for regional innovation strategies to ascribe a central role for universities, particularly in peripheral, institutionally thin places. The global economic crisis and subsequent austerity measures implemented in many developed economies have put further pressure on universities from national and regional policymakers to become more explicitly involved in contributing to their local economies in order to justify their public funding. This paper will draw on the academic literature to consider how justified this focus is by questioning whether universities are willing or even able to play the roles expected of them in contributing to regional innovation. It will critique an approach to policymaking that often views universities as homogenous actors in the regional innovation system and places an over reliance on imitating success stories from other places without sufficient consideration of the specificities of local conditions. It will argue for a more realistic and nuanced approach to involving universities in regional innovation policy, concluding with key insights for both universities and policymakers.

Book Review: Varieties of Alternative Economic Systems – Practical Utopias for an Age of Global Crisis and Austerity by Richard Westra, Robert Albritton and Seongjin Jeong (eds)

Book Review: Varieties of Alternative Economic Systems – Practical Utopias for an Age of Global Crisis and Austerity by Richard Westra, Robert Albritton and Seongjin Jeong (eds)

Health inequities in the age of austerity: The need for social protection policies

This commentary assesses the impacts of the global austerity drive on health inequities in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. In doing so, it first locates the origins of austerity within the 40 year history of neoliberal economic orthodoxy. It then describes the global diffusion of austerity since 2008, and its key policy tenets. It next describes the already visible impacts of austerity-driven welfare reform on trends in health equity, and documents how austerity has exacerbated health inequities in countries with weak social protection policies. We finally identify the components of an alternative policy response to the financial crisis than that of austerity, with specific reference to the need for shifts in national and global taxation policies and public social protection policies and spending. We conclude with a call for a reorientation of public policy towards making human health an overarching global policy goal, and how this aligns with the multilaterally agreed upon Sustainable Development Goals.

The Rise and Fall of Global Austerity

The Rise and Fall of Global Austerity

Global Austerity and Local Democracy: The Case of Participatory Budgeting in Guelph, ON.

This paper examines the role of participatory budgeting in policy-making at the municipal level, through a case study of the longest experiment with participatory budgeting in Canada, the Neighbourhood Support Coalition (NSC) in Guelph, ON. While existing scholarship tends to view participatory budgeting largely as oppositional to neoliberalism, I argue that participatory budgeting in Guelph is better understood as an adaptation of community groups to a neoliberal political context, rather than a direct challenge to neoliberal policies. When participatory budgeting began to be perceived as contravening neoliberal rationalities of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and marketization, the grassroots democratic elements of the practice were ultimately sacrificed in favour of a process that fit better with these logics. This work builds on previous research on participatory budgeting in Guelph by both bringing participatory budgeting in explicit dialogue with neoliberalism, and temporally extending the narrative of Guelph’s experience with participatory budgeting beyond 2009.

Supported housing in global austerity: Local providers fears for the future in Gloucestershire, England

Shelter is a key component of an individual’s well-being and as a consequence is an area of policy development that cuts across national policies including welfare, health and social. Supported housing is a sub-set of the wider category of social housing, offering support services intended to help people with a range of challenges live as independently as possible. This paper is based on case study research in an English county that has a diverse range of rural and urban contexts. The analysis draws on evidence gathered mainly from interviews with decision-makers representing the largest supported housing providers in the region across a range of specialisms and needs provision. The research demonstrates that supported housing professionals have a range of concerns for the future of supported housing provision. Respondents reported that reforms to welfare payments and funding of housing support is creating great concern for the organisations and the fracturing of services meant it was increasingly difficult to offer comprehensive coverage in the county. However, the housing professionals also discussed a range of innovative and entrepreneurial responses to these uncertainties. This paper concludes that on the one hand there is a real and pressing threat of increased residualisation within the sector and within services for these most vulnerable groups reduced in both their scope and coverage. While on the other hand, those organisations able to operate more flexibly, and who were communicating effectively with local authorities, felt they had the best chance to respond to uncertainty in the policy landscape.

Toward social movement activist research

In this article, we grapple with possibilities and dilemmas of activist scholarship in the struggle for education justice and political power. As activists and scholars, our social movement praxis seeks to produce knowledge that shifts the dominant neoliberal policy discourse, exposes racism inherent in neoliberal education policies, and supports education justice struggles. Although our work is centered in Chicago, a focus of contestation over neoliberal education policy and the right to the city, we believe this work is relevant to other US and international contexts facing similar reforms. We discuss the value of multiple forms of activist scholarship, describe the Chicago context and the principles that guide our social movement praxis, and raise dilemmas we wrestle with. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of activist research in this historical moment of global capitalist crisis, austerity politics, racist and anti-immigrant attacks in conjuncture with social movements reaching for new humane, democratic, and egalitarian social alternatives.

“The cuts, they trimmed the people” – School children, precarity and European citizenship

Recently, the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (2012) have funded programmes designed to advance European citizenship and citizen competences through education. This paper reports on the findings from one project, Creative Connections, designed to encourage the “voices” of young people in exploring European identities.Children (aged 9–16) in 25 schools in six European Union (EU) countries (UK, Finland, Spain, Czech Republic, Portugal and Ireland) developed artworks that explored perceptions of European citizenship. Their art was posted on a secure website and they discussed images with peers using automatic online translated blogs. The project facilitated representations of identity/belonging using a range of media. However, some artworks suggested that children were alienated from “Europe”, particularly EU responses to global austerity. This paper uses the theory of precarity to examine the ways in which the children expressed their concerns.Some artworks suggest that recent economic and political decisions have had the effect of challenging a sense of shared European citizenship; they resist a positive sense of identification with Europe and demonstrate fear for their future based on their current lives. This indicates that the EU’s educational goals to promote citizenship competences may require revision to account for the challenges of contemporary societies.

Curb Cuts: Crip Displacements and El Edificio de Enfrente

Theorists of neoliberalism have placed dispossession and displacement at the centre of their analyses of the workings of contemporary global capitalism. Disability, however, has not figured centrally into these analyses. This essay attends to what might be comprehended as the crip echoes generated by dispossession, displacement, and a global austerity politics. Centring on British-Mexican relations during a moment of austerity in the UK and gentrification in Mexico City, the essay identifies both the voices of disability that are recognized by and made useful for neoliberalism as well as those shut down or displaced by this dominant economic and cultural system. The spatial politics of austerity in the UK have generated a range of punishing, anti-disabled policies such as the so-called ‘Bedroom Tax.’ The essay critiques such policies (and spatial politics) by particularly focusing on two events from 2013: a British embassy good will event exporting British access to Mexico City and an installation of photographs by Livia Radwanski. Radwanski's photos of the redevelopment of a Mexico City neighbourhood (and the displacement of poor people living in the neighbourhood) are examined in order to attend to the ways in which disability might productively haunt an age of austerity, dispossession, and displacement.

Middle manager role and contribution towards the competitive intelligence process: A case of Irish subsidiaries

Background: Calls have been made especially during a period of global competition and economic austerity for research that focuses on how competitive intelligence (CI) is actually generated within organisations.Objectives: The aim of this study was to understand the views and experiences of middle managers with regard to their role and contribution towards the CI process within Irish subsidiaries of the Multinational Corporation (MNC).Method: The study adopts a qualitative approach using the semi-structured interview technique to generate narratives and themes around how CI is generated using a sample of 15 middle managers drawn from five participating Irish subsidiaries.Results: Based on the analysis of the narratives of the middle managers, three main themes emerged as findings. Firstly, the process of gathering CI was facilitated by the reliance on internal and external tools. Secondly, information gathered from the use of such tools was then communicated by middle managers to top managers to inform the making of strategic decisions. Thus, (and thirdly), middle managers were found to occupy an important role not only through the execution of their management duties but by extending this influence towards the generation of information deemed to affect the competitive position of not just the subsidiary but also the parent company.Conclusion: The study concludes by focusing on the implications and recommendations based on the three themes drawn from the empirical data.

Is Personalization the Right Plan at the Wrong Time? Re‐thinking Cash‐for‐Care in an Age of Austerity

AbstractAs personalization has dominated the policy agenda for reform in social care, its roll‐out as a mainstream option has coincided with global programmes of austerity which have targeted services for disabled people. Was this simply bad timing or was its implementation always part of the agenda for reform? Whilst the principle of cash‐for‐care schemes drew strongly on promoting the independence and autonomy of disabled people, early incarnations of direct payments policy in the UK were initially at least in part rolled out in light of potential cost savings to social care budgets. This article explores these and other issues in light of evaluations of the Scottish government's self‐directed support (SDS) test sites (2009–11) and implementation of subsequent legislation enforcing models of SDS in Scotland from April 2014. Discussion draws on the authors’ recent book (Pearson et al. 2014) to reflect on what the evidence can tell us about radically transforming social care at a time of global austerity.

The Role of Central Banks in Global Austerity

The literature on austerity, by scholars and policymakers alike, has largely downplayed the important role of central banks in designing and implementing global austerity both before and since the 2008 financial crisis. This article considers how and why the world’s leading central banks display an inherent bias toward austerity. As central banks have become increasingly influenced and even captured by large private banks and financial institutions, they have pursued policy agendas that favor those same private interests. The structure of the U.S. Federal Reserve suggests a central bank that has been captured by design and is rife with inherent conflicts of interest in its governance, regulatory, and monetary policy functions. These conflicts are often overlooked because of the myth of central bank independence, which has rested on truncated empirical studies and flawed readings of economic history. Yet, the myth has legitimized the Federal Reserve’s policy agenda—particularly beginning in the 1980s when Alan Greenspan became chair of the Federal Reserve—when deregulation, liberalization, and privatization came to serve the private interests of Wall Street banks while creating a boom-and-bust bubble economy. The austerity bias of central banks was also revealed in both the academic work and monetary policy approach of Ben Bernanke, who succeeded Greenspan as Federal Reserve chairman just ahead of the 2008 financial collapse. Not only was the Federal Reserve’s response to crisis a reflection of the domination of Wall Street interests, it also revealed a complete misreading of the lessons from the Great Depression by Bernanke and other mainstream economists. The result has been a flawed “trickle-down” response to the financial crisis, as the Federal Reserve and other leading central banks have provided massive subsidies to financial institutions and markets while relegating other sectors of the economy and society to the pains of austerity. A more balanced economic approach will require reform of central bank governance to include representatives of a wider range of social interests in monetary policymaking.

Urban fiscal austerity, infrastructure provision and the struggle for regional transit in 'Motor City'

Studies suggest that urban fiscal crises trigger the institutional separation of strategic services from general purpose municipal functions. Traditional reformists have highlighted the economic benefits of regional approaches. Global austerity has created fiscal problems for central cities and suburbs alike, transforming the motives for regional solutions. This paper examines how the City of Detroit engineered a new regional arrangement with the surrounding suburbs to raise debt for the delivery of mass transit infrastructure. It represents a dual 'spatial fix' in the form of (i) a 'state territorial fix' providing fiscally stressed municipalities access to municipal bond markets and (ii) a 'speculative spatial fix' that benefits the Detroit growth coalition by linking regional mass transit to the prospect of land-use intensification. © The Author 2014.

Challenges in funding new developments in oncology

Pharmaceutical developments in oncology are moving at a considerable pace. This article provides an international perspective from both the USA and UK on the challenges payers are facing with regards to funding new oncology treatments. The article investigates current approaches to appraising oncology treatments in the USA and UK against a background of global austerity. Rising pharmaceutical prices and increased costs of oncological drugs are not sustainable in the mid/long-term. This article highlights the dual role of the media that can not only put pressure on payers to fund new treatments, but also on the pharmaceutical companies to offer discounts and enter pricing arrangements. High-cost innovations in other therapy areas such as rare diseases means that there is less space available to fund new oncology treatments; and therefore, payers have to play the role of managing the rising expectations of both patients and the pharmaceutical companies.

THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS. GENDER, ‘YOUTH’, AND THE DELHI GANG RAPE CASE OF 2012

Following the Delhi gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandhey in New Delhi and the unprecedented levels of protest that followed, high numbers of young people in the subcontinent and specifically urban India were blamed for sexual violence, while also heralded as a progressive vanguard.1 In this piece, I discuss the paradoxical discourses that surround the Delhi gang rape and the unprecedented levels of protest that followed in relation to global austerity and anxieties concerning youth. While ‘idle young men’ are blamed for sexual violence and ‘young’ women are subject to paternalistic protectionism, I suggest that gendered violence in urban India must be thought of in relation to a wider moment of global recession and austerity. I use the Delhi gang rape case and discursive constructions of ‘youth’ as both deviant and politically progressive to discuss the gendered effects that increased forms of global precarity supports.