Neoliberal Policy Regime Research Articles

Neoliberal Urban Policy and New Paths of Neighborhood Change in the American Inner City

In this paper, we examine a new form of neighborhood change that appeared towards the end of the 1990s and early 2000s and explore its causes, processes, and effects. We suggest that a neoliberal policy regime focused on revitalizing cities through deconcentrating poverty and increasing low-income and moderate-income home-ownership has created a new funding and decision environment for the redevelopment of select inner-urban neighborhoods. The results have been an emerging process of neighborhood reinvestment marked by land-use and social transformations driven not by rent-seeking private developers but primarily by local political actors and community development organizations struggling in resource-poor environments. This neighborhood change process promotes benefits for those with a vested interest in neighborhood and urban revitalization and for a small group of moderate-income, minority homebuyers. The effect of these revitalization efforts on very-low-income residents who have lived in these neighborhoods through a period of severe disinvestment is uncertain. Despite the rhetoric of neighborhood revitalization, the reality of this reinvestment looks more like a new process of gentrification than a process of community-controlled redevelopment.

Continentalizing Canadian Telecommunications: The Politics of Regulatory Reform

Rideout focuses on the protection of the public interest, a crucial element neglected by most recent studies, and shows that although alliances have been formed between labour, consumers, and public interest activists, significant disagreements over issues such as free trade, long distance and local competition, and a targeted subsidy program for very low-income Canadians have meant that this united front has not been able to counter the forces of the new neo-liberal telecommunication policy regime. Continentalizing Canadian Telecommunications details the complex relationships between the various corporate and government interests, shows how the changes they brought about have locked Canada's telecommunications system into the orbit of the US system, and discusses the implications this has for Canadians.

Global Capitalism, Deflation and Agrarian Crisis in Developing Countries

Periods of economic crisis for agriculture in developing countries have been marked in history by declining incomes and worsening employment possibilities, resulting in adverse outcomes of loss of land rights against debt and declining nutrition levels for the poorer majority of populations. This paper argues that a similar conjuncture of agrarian crisis has become visible in recent years, as had been seen in the prelude to the inter–War Depression, owing to the income–deflation inherent in current macroeconomic policies driven by the dominant global neo–liberal agenda. The argument is illustrated primarily with reference to the experience of India under economic reforms. The question of land rights and gender equity are strongly affected by the dominant policy regime; hence the paper, while not addressing these questions directly, seeks to contextualize them through its critique of the dominant neo–liberal policy regime.

Identifying Shifts in Policy Regimes

One of the mainstays of political sociology and political science for generationshas been debate about the conditions under which onepolicy regime—that is, a distinct mix of public policies—is replaced by another. For instance, a vast literature seeks to identify the factors that caused the shift from orthodox to Keynesian policy regimes in the United States and Europe after the Second World War, as well as the shift during the 1980s to more conservative neoliberal policy regimes (e.g., Campbell 1998; Gourevitch 1986; Hall 1989, 1992;Weir and Skocpol 1985). Similarly, scholars have argued about whether the process through which regime shifts occur is a slow and incremental one, driven by bureaucratic inertia, muddling through, and path-dependent constraints, or a rapid and abrupt one, sparked by cataclysmic events like war that trigger sharp breaks with past policies (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Hall 1993; Krasner 1984; Lindblom 1959; Pierson 1993, 1994). Regime shifts have also captured the imagination of historical sociologists who have recognized that history is marked by critical turning points that differentiate among relatively stable time periods and that this requires scholars to carefully identify historically specific patterns among variables (Abbott 1988, 1992, 1997; Isaac 1997).

The New South in the New Europe: the Case of Sviluppo Italia

On 1 January 1999, Italy was amongst the group of initial countries forming the euro zone; on 9 January, just a few days later, the Comitato Interministeriale per la Programmazione Economica (CIPE) gave final approval to a motion to set up a new agency to promote regional economic development, primarily in the South, called Sviluppo Italia (‘Development Italy’). While there is a tendency to look to European economic and monetary integration as the source of most economic, political and social developments in Italy in the 1990s, the two January developments were not totally unrelated. It may seem strange that the creation of yet another agency would qualify as an important highlight in an eventful year in Italian politics. However, the creation of Sviluppo Italia is an illustrative case study for a number of important political and economic trends of the last few years that came to the surface in 1999. These include economic development in the South in an integrated Europe, regional and industrial policy in an era of an increasingly neoliberal macroeconomic policy regime, and the question of how to address major social demands while state authority and capacity are being ‘hollowed out’ in an increasingly global economy.