Neoliberal Experiment Research Articles

The crisis in South America: neoliberalism, neodevelopmentalism and beyond. Insights from Argentina and Brazil

This article reconstructs the contemporary experience of the crisis in South America as part of the continuing crisis of the peripheral neoliberal state, focusing on the cases of Argentina and Brazil. Comprehensively exploring the implications of the demise of ‘neodevelopmentalism’ as a progressive politics and a specific relation of forces in the Southern Cone of Latin America, it tackles the recent backlash and ‘turbo-charged’ neoliberal experiments carried out in both countries, delivering a novel understanding of the situated nature of the ‘age of crisis’ and an insight into the prospects and challenges for a transformative praxis worldwide.

Making the world open again. The US State Department's thwarted first steps towards global neoliberalization during the Great Depression and World War II

Given that neoliberal rationality implies the economic opening of state spaces in a borderless global market, this article proposes a critical reassessment of the origins of actually existing neoliberalism, with the twofold aim of addressing the empirical shortcomings of the conventional narrative and specifying the conditions of the emergence of neoliberalization. The present authors demonstrate how the US Department of State implemented a foreign economic policy between 1933 and 1947 which constituted one of the first neoliberal experiments of the twentieth century, engendering the hotbed of transatlantic neoliberalization which unfolded, albeit incompletely, in the following decades. This revisitation of the origins of neoliberalization has, in turn, enabled a theoretical reframing of the neoliberal spatiality, intersecting multiple stream framework analysis and the neo-institutionalist approach, in order to highlight the complexity of the factors responsible for the emergence of political neoliberalism in the context of the global crisis of the 1930s and 1940s.

Advertising Pinochet: The Cold War Limits to a Neoliberal Crusade

In July of 1974, the J. Walter Thompson advertising company signed a contract with the Chilean junta to improve the international image of the dictatorship. Around two months later the agreement was made public, first in the United States and then around the world. Over the next few days, European and American JWT managers began to complain about the agreement. By the end of September, 1974, it was clear that the collaboration would have to be severed, which finally happened in October. In this paper, I show that both the efforts made to sign the contract and its sudden cancellation testify to the early makings of neoliberalism and its contingency. Pinochet’s Chile was an early neoliberal experiment; therefore this paper sheds new light on reconstructing the rising of neoliberalism within a Cold War framework. Most of the new historiography on neoliberalism focuses on ideas and public policy. I build on this recent historiography but change the scope. Here, I tell the story of a contract that provides a glimpse into this fundamental turn in the history of capitalism from the point of view of a multinational company facing the limits imposed by the negative reputation of the junta.

(Un)Limited choice: analysing the strategic choices of first-in-generation students in neoliberal higher education

In highly marketised higher education systems, massification has afforded greater access, particularly for first-in-generation students. Generally, this expansion has been fuelled by neoliberal ideologies that valorise the notion of choice and promise of social mobility. In this study, using interviews with 25 first-generation students, the issue of choice is critically examined in one of the earliest arenas of neoliberal experimentation: the Chilean higher education system. The study found that these first-in-generation students encountered complex and multi-levelled challenges in making higher education choices. Such choices were firmly anchored in differing levels of aspiration, and were strongly mediated by both family and school social capital. As a result, we propose an addition to traditional conceptions of choice: students (and their families) who act as strategic choosers. This outcome challenges the notion that first-in-generation students encounter unitary trajectories or equitable choices in encountering higher education.

Cybertarianism further exposed: Chile, Colombia, Mexico and the COVID-19 conjuncture

Chile, Colombia and Mexico have long been at the heart of neo-liberal experimentation and cybertarian fantasy. The former has denuded their ability to meet the needs of the citizenry in general, the latter to provide a democratic media. The contemporary pandemic has put these deregulated, privatized economies under particular strain – market solutions to social problems have proven dramatically, drastically, predictably inefficient. In the sphere of education, the isolation of school pupils and workers, mandated in the interest of public health, has driven a return to public broadcasting. Combined with mass public agitation and media-reform movements, that provides hope for a new landscape.

Sociological Comprehension of the Preset-Day Ukrainian Society Modernization

Introduction. Despite its widespread usage, the concept of “modernization” is not clearly defined. Concretization of its meaning depends on the researcher’s worldview position. Problem Statement. The introduction of neoliberal economic principles did not lead to the improvement of society and the growth of human well-being. It transformed Ukraine into a raw-material appendage of global capitalism and the poorest country in Europe. Purpose. To analyze public opinion on the modernization of Ukrainian society and identify the prospects for science and innovative development in Ukraine. Materials and Methods. Analysis of statistical information and scientific publications on the problems of modernization, data of the sociological monitoring of social changes in Ukrainian society and two expert surveys (scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and specialists on innovative development). Results. The author has proved that the transformation of Ukrainian society is not, in essence, a modernization. It is a neoliberal experiment under the guise of modernism, which rejected Ukraine from the cohort of the most industrially and scientifically developed countries to the periphery of the modern world, led to impoverishment and total despair of the majority of citizens. The author substantiates that it is impossible to modernize Ukraine and turn to innovative development within the existing neoliberal model and the oligarchic power rooting. As a result of financial genocide and the lack of state support, science in Ukraine is deprived of the opportunity to effectively perform its public functions, in particular, to be one of the decisive agents of modernization of society in the interests of all citizens. Conclusions. The specific political and ideological interests of a global capital stand behind the theory of modernization as an ideological and theoretical construct of modernity. The theory and practice of neoliberal modernization imposed on Ukraine as the main mean of reaching the path of successful socio-economic development have not lived up to the expectations and led to a chronic crisis state of the society. It requires finding another alternative model of development.

Experimental financial inclusion as refugee management: shelter insecurities at the bottom of the pyramid in Kenya

Kenya was amongst the first countries in the world to undergo structural adjustment programmes in 1980 leading to welfare retrenchment and the lack of social safety nets for many of its urban poor. This article shows how refugee hosting in Kenya has coincided with ongoing statewide neoliberalisation. With lack of state-led welfare support, and diminished global aid for a nearly three-decade long encampment in Dadaab and Kakuma, refugees have no choice but to turn to the private sector for shelter aid through microcredit loans especially in major urban centres. This article shows how neoliberal policies dovetail with refugee governance in Kenya by examining the deployment of financial inclusion strategies on multiple scales. Drawing upon fieldwork in 2018, I argue that refugee assistance intersects with the needs of private capital where refugees, due to their social marginality, are prone to experimentation in terms of financial inclusion. Housing microfinance, an ineffective guarantor of long-term refugee shelter, and new technologies of financial inclusion exemplify neoliberal experimentation and illustrate how these strategies fail to ensure the long-term survival of refugees.

Introducing business regions in Denmark: The ‘businessification’ of strategic spatial planning?

This paper explores the driving forces behind the promotion of new soft spaces of territorial governance in Denmark at the scale of city regions, the so-called business regions. We interpret the emergence of business regions as outcomes of the most recent round of reterritorialisation in Denmark, producing new spaces for promoting neoliberal policy agendas of competitiveness, job creation and economic growth. We argue that the business regions should not only be understood as products of neoliberalisation, but also as spaces of neoliberal experimentation, contributing to the normalisation of policy agendas of job creation and business development as taken-for-granted planning objectives. We conclude that the new business regions emerging at the scale of city regions constitute new political spaces for reworking the Danish planning culture in the context of neoliberalism. We suggest that this development can be conceptualised as a ‘businessification’ of strategic spatial planning.

Democratic Socialism in Chile and Peru: Revisiting the “Chicago Boys” as the Origin of Neoliberalism

AbstractIn the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government paid the economics department at the University of Chicago, known for its advocacy of free markets and monetarism, to train Chilean graduate students. These students became known as the “Chicago Boys,” who implemented the first and most famous neoliberal experiment in Chile after 1973. Peruvian, Mexican, and other Latin American economics students followed a similar path and advocated a turn to neoliberal policies in their own countries. The Chicago Boys narrative has become an origin story for global neoliberalism. However, the focus on this narrative has obscured other transnational networks whose ideas possess certain superficial, but misleading, similarities with neoliberalism. I examine Chilean and Peruvian engagements with Yugoslavia's unique form of socialism, its worker self-management socialism, which was part of a worldwide discussion of anti-authoritarian socialism. I first introduce the Yugoslav socialist model that inspired those in Chile and Peru. I then examine socialist discussions in Chile and Peru that called for decentralized, democratic socialism and looked to Yugoslavia for advice. I conclude by examining the 1990s postponement of socialism in the name of a very narrow democracy and realization of neoliberalism. The Chicago Boys story assumes the easy global victory of neoliberalism and erases what was at stake in the 1988–1994 period: radically democratic socialism on a global scale.

Public education and student movements: the Chilean rebellion under a neoliberal experiment

Chile is recognized in the educational policy field as one of the first laboratories of neoliberal initiatives. These policies, initiated under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, did not change with the new democratic governments after 1990. This characteristic led international organizations to promote the Chilean policies in different contexts in Latin America and beyond. In 2006, a high school student movement occupied public and private schools, demystifying the outcomes of these policies. A new wave of demonstrations took place in 2011, with a college student leadership that paralyzed a significant amount of universities and schools throughout the country. After both waves of mobilizations, the political system opened the process of policy-making that considered the demands of social movements. In this article, we explore the dynamics between educational policies and social student movements in Chile, and the possibilities of change in favor of public education.

Deinstitutionalization of the State and Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Contribution to the Critique of the Neoinstitutionalist Analysis of Development

In recent years, a euphoric shift has taken place, typified by the narrative of “Africa rising,” which attempts to promote the idea of an economically emerging continent. In the Afro-optimist discourse, the idea is implicit that the neoliberal narrative has triumphed. However, critical voices argue that the discourse ignores the political environment under which African growth has been produced. This article critically reflects on the explanations of the neoinstitutionalist approach to development, the historical process of state formation and colonization in Africa. Following the proposal of postcolonial theory, sovereignty, tax, and violence are analyzed. Finally, the contradictory policies of the neoliberal experiment are demonstrated, which are leading to the deinstitutionalization of the State and to violence.JEL Classification: F54, F63, E02, N17

(Im)mobile and (Un)successful? A policy mobilities approach to New Orleans’s residential security taxing districts

Policy mobilities scholars critically analyze the processes of assemblage, mobilization, and mutation that shape policy circuits, but have been critiqued for an over-emphasis on successful and mobile cases. This paper adds to a growing effort to diversify the empirical scope of the field through an example that blurs the boundaries of mobility/immobility and success/failure. I examine residential security taxing districts, which are derived from the common business improvement district model but which in their specifics are unique to New Orleans. Security districts are quasi-public entities established within elite urban enclaves to collect taxes to fund neighborhood security patrols. First, I analyze the model’s rapid spread among the city’s neighborhoods, demonstrating the relevance of the policy mobilities framework in a case of intra-urban mobilization. Second, I explore why the model has not spread to other cities, particularly given New Orleans’s centrality as a site for neoliberal policy experimentation in the post-Katrina era. These post-disaster interventions applied preexisting policy prescriptions and were driven by outside experts, while the city’s own neoliberal experiments were ignored. Troubling the association of mobility and success, I conclude that this immobility should not be considered failure so much as anonymity.

Academic degree recognition in a global era: The case of the doctorate of education (EdD) in Israel

The current discussion around recognition of the doctorate of education (EdD) typically focuses on a national context, usually in relation to the PhD; however, relatively little is known about recognition of the EdD degree in countries that do not offer the qualification. As international cohorts and online delivery of doctoral education grows, it is valuable to understand the recognition of the EdD, particularly in countries that do not currently offer it, and in which policy and legislation may impede its recognition. Using Israel as a case, this study explores EdD recognition in a country that does not offer the degree and that has a particularly rigid recognition system, likely as a result of a neoliberal experiment with the deregulation of the higher education arena in the 1990s. My investigations indicate three spheres of recognition for the degree: the public, private and academic spheres. This article outlines these spheres and explores the implications of such a system.

Migrants on exhibition: The emergence of migrant worker museums in China as a neoliberal experiment on governance

ABSTRACTThis article develops a critical investigation of the recent emergence of migrant worker museums (MWMs) in Chinese cities. Though studies on migrant workers in urban China have examined in detail the state and popular discourses that construct migrants as uncivilized and inferior, limited attention has been dedicated to a more recent line of discursive formulation, which idealizes and romanticizes migrant workers as docile, hard-working subjects making laudable contribution to the development of postreform urban China. The MWMs are built in accord with such new discourses. With a detailed analysis of the MWMs in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, this article argues that MWMs depoliticize both the domains of labor and everyday life and render invisible exploitative labor relations by eulogizing migrant labor; advocating enterprising, self-reliant migrant subjects; and praising the generous care of the state. Hence, though the MWMs contribute to reversing the negative stereotypes of migrant workers, they can nonetheless be theorized as a neoliberal experiment on the governance of people and labor.

Old Malbec in New Bottles: The Return of Neoliberalism in Argentina

Argentina has long been plagued by cycles of economic mismanagement, including multiple failed neoliberal experiments. Before his election as president, Mauricio Macri promised resumed growth, an export boom, lower inflation, a smaller budget deficit, and less poverty. Since then, has the new neoliberalism outperformed the old?Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Scholar Outsiders in the Neoliberal University: Transgressive Academic Labour in the Whitestream

Over the past 15 years of tertiary sector reform, the nature of academic governance in New Zealand universities has radically changed. Globalization, neoliberal experimentation and managerialist practices have come to characterize a higher education system where the locus of authority is at an ever-widening distance from the majority of academics. This paper uses sociological analyses of organizational structure to explore how macro and micro-level interactions within the managerialist university shape ethnicized, classed and gendered institutional status systems. Drawing on interviews with 43 Māori and Pacific senior scholars in nine universities and Wānanga, we consider the role of scholar ‘outsiders’ from the point of view of minoritized/ethnicized academics and argue that while academic labour within the institutional margins can be profoundly alienating these sites are less readily accessed by institutional elites and therefore open up possibilities for organized scholarly resistance to the neoliberal status quo.

Capital accumulation, profit rates and cycles in China from 1952 to 2014: lessons from the evolution of Chinese industry

Based on the construction of our own new statistical series of stocks of productive physical capital and of enterprises’ fixed assets, and on a rigorously-defined scope of the industrial sector, we calculated various indicators of profit rates at the micro- and macroeconomic levels for China from 1952 to 2014. Such indicators of profit rates are extremely rare in the literature – while there exist numerous studies on the rates of return of capital within the neoclassical mainstream. The results obtained by these two methods (micro and macro) are quite original and can be summarized as follows: i) a tendency of the profit rate to fall is observed over the long period, for the two levels of analysis. ii) At the macro level, short-term fluctuations in the profit rates show a succession of (often incomplete) cycles whose amplitude decreases with time. iii) More than a third of the period is affected by recessive years for the cyclical component of the profit rates. The largest declines are recorded, in descending order, after the rupture between China and the Soviet Union (1961-63), during the Cultural Revolution (1968), in the course of the 1950s, during the post-Mao transition (1976-77), when a neoliberal experiment was tried (1989-91), and with the spread of globalization crises (which affected China in 1998, 2001, 2009, then since 2012). iv) It is mainly the increasing organic composition of capital that tendentiously pushes down the macro rate of profit.JEL Codes: C13, C22, C52, C82, E22, N15, O53, P31

Lessons from Georgia's neoliberal experiment: A rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats

Between 2004 and 2012, Georgia implemented one of the most comprehensive packages of neoliberal economic reforms ever. These reforms have certainly helped to spur growth, but their social effects remain under-researched. To narrow this gap, this article investigates the effects of growth on poverty in Georgia using the official household survey data. The analysis shows that contrary to popular expectations, poverty has decreased only slightly throughout this period and remains high despite a number of progressive measures adopted by a successor coalition government. These findings provide further evidence on the inappropriateness of the neoliberal model as a poverty reduction strategy.

What Kind of Urban? A Case Study of Kullu, A Small Indian Town

This article examines the kind of urbanisation that is emerging in Kullu, a small but quickly growing North Indian mountain town. It does this both within the context of the town itself, but also by studying its relationship to nearby villages that are increasingly a part of the town’s remit as it emerges as a new metropolitan region. What the article seeks to highlight is that despite rising incomes, urban and spatial expansion and in-migration, many of the markers of new urban growth commonly found in other metropolitan Indian cities are absent in Kullu. These include increasing corporate real estate development, middle class and public consumptive cultures, neoliberal experiments with governance and rising urban inequality. The article locates the area’s tepid response to the templated ‘new’ Indian urban in a continuing orientation and attunement of Kullu residents to the high alpine Himalayan landscape within which the town is located and by which it is hemmed wherein belonging and dwelling are predicated on a continuing attentiveness to the unfolding landscape, and on rurality, in which many urban residents continue to have a stake. This, even as relatively widespread land distribution among those considered ‘local’ ensures a relatively well-distributed and languid prosperity in the area as a whole. In this context, the article argues for the rethinking of singular definitions of urbanisation and of the relationship between urban and rural areas, particularly in light of dominant metropolitan experiences, and to consider the alternative forms of urban life that Kullu presents. Simultaneously, however, it discusses new and emerging fault lines that threaten Kullu’s existing rural–urban compact in the concluding section, namely new youth cultures and the building practices of locals themselves.

Tourism concessions in National Parks: neo-liberal governance experiments for a Conservation Economy in New Zealand

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the use of concessions for tourism business in protected areas, including National Parks (NPs), in New Zealand, with specific reference to their financial and in-kind contributions to conservation work. A holistic approach is taken, examining the design and implementation of policies affecting concessions, and their interactions with wider governance arrangements for NPs. The case study considers a range of legal and policy questions, informed by 42 non-structured interviews with concessionaires, park staff and other stakeholders. It explores neo-liberal government policies implemented since 2009, as part of a Conservation Economy vision, aiming to stimulate economic growth by opening-up business access to natural heritage and resources in NPs. More and longer contracts have been granted against the promise of conservation, environmental and infrastructural gains from concessionaires. The research found that, so far, there is no evidence of improvements in the latter aspects, and expectations of gains from donations and voluntary business action have remained only symbolic. Powers to impose such contractual responsibilities are unused. Other significant, and related, neo-liberal governance changes have been implemented or under consideration, raising concerns that a tipping point in NPs' governance towards unsustainable tourism development may be on the horizon.