Account Of Political Economy Research Articles

The political economy of monetary-fiscal coordination: central bank losses and the specter of central bankruptcy in Europe and Japan

Central banks and finance ministries have been faced with growing calls for better monetary-fiscal coordination in recent years as the solution to an array of macroeconomic policy problems, promoted by an ever-wider range of stakeholders. Yet, how can the silver-bullet solution of coordination be expected to play out across very different political-economic contexts? This paper sheds light on this question by introducing a novel typology of monetary-fiscal coordination that can help us make sense of formal and informal coordination efforts in the post-2008 era. It zooms in on a peculiar but key aspect which monetary and fiscal authorities have sought to achieve coordination on: The fiscal backing of central banks’ balance sheets to insure monetary policy against losses and ‘insolvency’. To understand central bankers’ aversion towards loss-making despite their ability to create currency, the paper develops a political economy account which emphasizes policy-makers’ interpretations of their own independence and their desire for fiscal protection, in contrast to traditional accounts of delegation that treat independent agents as discretion-seekers and power-maximizers. The typology is illustrated with case studies of the European Central Bank, Bank of England, and Bank of Japan between 2008 and 2023, each representing a different type of monetary-fiscal coordination post-crisis.

WeChat subscription accounts (WSAs) in Australia: a political economy account of Chinese-language digital/social media

This article is a political economy account of Australia-focused subscription accounts on the social media platform WeChat, based on an analysis of 50 top-ranked WeChat subscription accounts (WSAs) in Australia over a 1-week period in July 2019 and empirical data collected from 2 large surveys conducted among Chinese Australians in 2018 and 2019. It provides a nuanced understanding of the institutional context, regulatory framework and modus operandi of these WSAs, illustrating the development of and connection between the following three components: online Chinese-language media content, WeChat as a content delivery platform and WSAs as business initiatives. The article argues that the status of Chinese-language digital/social media in Australia is confined by a pre-existing technological infrastructure and regulatory framework, rather than any direct intervention of a specific authority, media outlet or platform, and that these media outlets and platforms should best be understood as an instance of transnational entrepreneurship.

Why did Turkish democracy collapse? A political economy account of AKP’s authoritarianism

After decades of multiparty politics, Turkey is no longer a democracy. A theory-upending case, the country has descended into a competitive authoritarian regime under the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP), despite rising income and education levels and strong links with the West. What accounts for democratic breakdown in such an unlikely case? Instead of ideological and institutional factors, we offer a political economy account. We contend that the coalitional ties that the AKP forged with businesses and the urban poor through the distribution of public resources has altered the cost of toleration for the party leadership and their dependent clients, while reducing the cost of suppression for incumbents. This new political calculus led to increasing authoritarianism of the AKP government through securitization of dissent, mounting repression, and systematic violation of civil liberties.

Public goods in Michael Oakeshott’s ‘world of pragmata’

Michael Oakeshott’s account of political economy is claimed to have found its ‘apotheosis under Thatcherism’. Against critics who align him with a preference for small government, this article points to Oakeshott’s stress on the indispensability of an infrastructure of government-provided public goods, in which individual agency and associative freedom can flourish. I argue that Oakeshott’s account of political economy invites a contestatory politics over three types of public goods, which epitomize the unresolvable tension he diagnosed between nomocratic and teleocratic conceptions of the modern state. These three types are the system of civil law, the by-products of the operation of civil law and public goods which result from policies. The article concludes that Oakeshott offers an important corrective to political theories which favour either market mediation or radical democratic governance of the commons as self-sustaining modes of providing and enjoying goods.

Decompensating domestically: the political economy of anti-globalism

ABSTRACT The rise of populism across advanced industrial countries presents a challenge to the institutions and norms that make up the current global order and threatens to undo the global system that has enabled decades of free trade and investment. We outline in this paper a domestic political economy account of the contemporary crisis of the global order, rooted in disenchantment with the redistributive bargain between globalization’s winners and losers. We present individual and local-level evidence that is consistent with this account, first documenting the decline of the embedded liberal compromise over the past 40 years in Europe, and then providing individual-level evidence from the United States of growing protectionism and xenophobia in response to import exposure, particularly among respondents whose occupational profile is most risk-exposed.

Super-exploitation of Adivasi Migrant Workers: The Political Economy of Migration from Southern Rajasthan to Gujarat

This article offers a political economy account of labour migration of Adivasi workers from southern Rajasthan to growth centres in Gujarat. It unpacks the structural forces that shape this labour mobility, which erupted only as recently as 30 years back. The article focuses on three industries that are key employers of migrant workers—construction, textile as well as small hotels and restaurants in the Gujarati cities of Ahmedabad and Surat. It presents evidence on labour market segmentation and resulting unequal wage distribution between migrants in this corridor by their social group. This is complemented by an extensive mapping of the informal practices that violate applicable legal provisions found in these industry segments. Through these, the article teases out the mechanisms by which the community undergoes what in Marxian terms are referred to as surplus extraction and super-exploitation. The article finds that Gujarat’s economy utilizes the historically low socio-economic position of Adivasis for capitalist accumulation, such that the community’s poverty and disadvantaged position is reproduced inter-generationally, instead of being interrupted by their employment in the growth centres of the state. JEL: O15, J61, N35

Unilateral or Reciprocal Climate Policy? Experimental Evidence from China

The traditional political economy account of global climate change governance directs our attention to fundamental collective action problems associated with global public goods provision, resulting from positive or negative externalities as well as freeriding. The governance architecture of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol uses the traditional approaches of international diplomacy for addressing such challenges: legally binding commitments based on principles of reciprocity and (fair) cost/burden sharing via formalized carbon-budgeting. Yet, the 2015 Paris Agreement has essentially abandoned this approach, as it now operates on the basis of internationally coordinated and monitored unilateralism. On the presumption that public opinion matters for government policy, we examine how citizens view this shift in climate policy from reciprocity to unilateralism, after many years of exposure to strong reciprocity rhetoric by governments and stakeholders. To that end, we fielded a survey experiment in China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter. The results show that there is, perhaps surprisingly, strong and robust public support for unilateral, non-reciprocal climate policy. To the extent China is interested in pushing ahead with ambitious and thus costly GHG reduction policies, our results suggest that China can leverage segments of public support in order to overcome domestic obstacles to GHG mitigation policies.

Neoliberal energy transitions in the South: Kenyan experiences

What is the relationship between the direction and form of an energy transition and the political economy within which it is embedded? This paper explores how the nature of (low carbon) energy transitions is strongly influenced by the process of neoliberalisation that shape energy policy in the South. We seek to understand emergent energy transitions and to advance their theorisation through an account of the political economy of energy transition in Kenya. In contrast to the often techno-managerial orientation of literatures on socio-technical transitions, we explore the political terrain upon which competing visions of energy futures and material interests collide and seek to accommodate one another. We develop a political economy account that emphasises the structural and disciplinary power of capital and global institutions to set the terms of transition. This expresses itself in both delimiting the autonomy of state actors and by reconfiguring domestic institutional and social power in ways that shape the distributional politics of transitions.

‘Don't Waste a Crisis’: Opening up the City Yet Again for Neoliberal Experimentation

AbstractThis essay calls for a systematic investigation of the financial‐economic crisis as a source of new urban governance rationalities across Europe. We propose combining an understanding of neoliberalization as a variegated social phenomenon with a cultural political economy approach sensitive to the discursive dimension of variegation and the evolutionary mechanisms through which discursive variation is translated into geo‐institutional differentiation. We illustrate how this theoretical framework may help to analyse the impact of the crisis on urban governmental rationalities. Rather than offering a complete cultural political economy account of the responses of European cities to the financial‐economic crisis, we analyse how the crisis and the responses to it have been represented in discourses on urban policies and development by focusing on two discursive sites that are of strategic importance, namely OECD LEED and URBACT. Our preliminary findings suggest a re‐assemblage of existing discourses rather than the emergence of a new post‐neoliberal urban government rationality.

Partisanship, Inequality and the Composition of Public Spending on Education

This article explores the determinants of the configuration of public educational expenditure. Recent contributions to the political economy debate about public education have rightly emphasised that the redistributive consequences of state intervention may vary across levels of education. But they focused mainly on the explanatory role of government partisanship in understanding spending at different levels of education. In this article, I propose a more comprehensive political economy account by considering the interaction of the ideological preferences and electoral motives of governments to explain variation in the allocation of educational budget. Through a time-series cross-sectional analysis of several developed industrial democracies observed in recent decades, the article demonstrates that the ideological orientation of governments and the position of the median voter do influence decisions regarding the distribution of public educational resources between different schooling levels. While right-wing parties prefer to concentrate resources on university, they appear to respond to an economic downturn of the median voter by reducing in a more significant way relative spending on tertiary education.

The political economy of global environmental governance

AbstractThis article develops a political economy account of global environmental governance to improve upon our understanding of the contemporary conduct of environmental politics and to clarify thinking about the potential for, and barriers to, effective environmental reform. By elaborating the key contours of a political economy account on the one hand and opening up to critical enquiry prevailing understandings of what is meant by ‘global’ ‘environmental’ and ‘governance’ on the other, such an approach is able to enhance our understanding of the practice of environmental governance by emphasising historical, material and political elements of its (re) constitution and evolution.

Global Neoliberalism and Aids Policy: International Responses to Sub-Saharan Africa’s Pandemic

Like Bavington et al, Colleen O'Manique questions how knowledge has framed political responses in her examination of the African AIDS crisis. She argues that the Western response to the AIDS pandemic in Africa has been informed by biomedicine, epidemiology, and political economy. However, the biomedical and epidemiological approaches to the pandemic are, she argues, consistent and compatible with the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism. Her political economy account of the crisis raises the need to consider the impact of neoliberal reforms—such as privatization of social services and the devolution of responsibility for public health to the local level—on the spread of the disease.

The Abbé de Condillac's Critique of French Dirigism

In March 1776 when Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac, publishedCommerce and Government, he was sixty-one years old, the same age as Francois Quesnay when he first published on economics. According to Jacqueline Hecht he had been a habitué of Quesnay's entresol (1958, p. 252), and Nicholas Baudeau has referred to Condillac's close friendship with Quesnay (1776/1903, p. 443). A book aimed to present a complete account of political economy from one of France's most distinguished philosophers, a member of the Academie franchise (“the immortals”) and the Royal Academy of Berlin, was bound to arouse great interest.

Women's status in peasant‐level fishing

Abstract The women of Minakuppam, a small hamlet of ocean‐going fishermen located just outside the city of Madras in Tamilnadu, India, are more active and less limited in their daily social activities and have more power than women in most Indian farming villages. This contrast is extended with evidence on women's status in fishing and agricultural communities in other predominantly agrarian societies. Several crucial features of political economy account for women's status in these communities. Participation of women in economic production and low status for fishing occupations in societal stratification are the major factors accounting for women's distinctive activities and relationships. These features of the political economy affect women's control and use of resources and their opportunities for social support from kin and other women.