Role In Economic Crises Research Articles

DIGITAL LABOR AND RENTIER PLATFORM CAPITALISM: REFORM OR REVOLUTION?

Digital labor has become an umbrella term for describing a range of digitally mediated practices from paid work in the gig economy (Srnicek 2017) to cultivating a personal brand online (Scolere, Pruchniewska, and Duffy 2018). This wellspring of activities now referred to as labor has muddied the waters, making digital labor an ambiguous concept at best (Gandini 2021; Goodwin 2022). This framing of user activity as labor also has limitations, as it necessarily produces reformist, rather than revolutionary, political ends. Following Sadowski (2020), this paper challenges the conceptual framework of digital labor by re-theorizing the user/platform relation as rentier capitalism. Engels (1970) explained how tenants confront landlords not as sellers of labor-power but buyers of a commodity, and we argue that typical social media users confront platforms in an analogous way. Platforms thus only circulate existing value rather than create it, and this distinction matters in understanding their role in economic crises. Because the digital labor concept misidentifies the user/platform relationship and concedes the commoditization of communication, reformist demands emerge from this discourse, like “Wages for Facebook” (Ptak 2014 as cited in Jung 2014) or data ownership as compensation (Chakravorti 2020). Capitalist data relations (Couldry and Mejias 2020) and the profit motive of corporate platforms cannot be addressed by renumerating users. As platforms attain infrastructural status (Plantin et al. 2018), our politics must reflect the need for their transformation into public utilities with democratic accountability, a revolutionary demand that has been displaced in the turn towards digital labor.

Liquidated: US/Japan-Chinese Rivalry, Financial Crises, and Explaining Shifts in Hydropower Finance Regimes in the Mekong

The contemporary US/Japan-Chinese rivalry and tension around dam building in the Mekong region is often mistakenly seen as the US and Japan’s reactive response to recently growing Chinese diplomatic and economic influence in the region. In fact, the United States and Japan have been critical architects of institutional and financial engineering for hydropower development in the Mekong region, which predates involvement by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The factors and dynamics involved in significant lending regime shifts away from a liberal hydropower finance regime to an export credit driven model premised on Asian economic statecraft is an understudied topic. This article fills part of this gap through a case study of evolving hydro-financing regimes in Lao PDR from the 1970s to the present. The study draws on extensive ethnographic work in Laos, Japan, Thailand, and the United States with local and external political elites, hydro-financing technocrats, and business actors and gains additional insights from analysis of primary firm, institutional, and government documents. The article finds that the role of economic crises and their impact on the relative economic power of hydropower financing regimes as well as their ideational impact on borrower regimes are significant in explaining shifting patterns in lending regime dominance.

Hedge Funds Development and their Role in Economic Crises

Abstract The rapid development of hedge funds and their emanating critical role in the financial markets and the financial system globally, combined with the increased frequency of economic crises during the last 25 years, brought them to the centre of discussions concerning the following issue: «To what extent the operation of hedge funds can affect the birth, peak and even geographic expansion of economic crises?». In this context, the present paper aims to contribute to the limited and sporadic discussion of whether the hedge funds could be held responsible for economic crises. To this extend the growth and the impact of hedge funds on financial crises is analysed and evaluated using the HFR database -in their birth, aggravation or even geographic expansion- both from a historical perspective and in relation to the 2007-today crisis. Based on the evidence presented in this paper, hedge funds cannot be blamed for the birth of the crises of the last 25 years. Comparing the data across the different crises, it becomes obvious that, with the exception of the 2007 subprime crisis, where almost all hedge fund strategies suffered considerable losses, in all other crises studied in the present paper, the hedge fund strategies with a negative return were the ones that had an exposure to the specific sector and/or region that was in the centre of the crisis i.e. Emerging market strategy presented substantial negative monthly performance over the Asian crisis, Convertible arbitrage strategy was affected by the dot-com crisis, etc.

Heterodox Political Economy and the Degrowth Perspective

The transition to sustainability will be difficult. Environmental sustainability entails living within the Earth’s limits, yet the majority of scientific studies indicate a condition of overshoot. For mainstream economists sustainability means perpetuating economic growth. Consequently, environmental and economic sustainability are incompatible in the present institutional context. This paper seeks to develop a new theory of sustainability based upon historical and institutional contexts, the role of economic crises, as well as focusing upon energy quality and meaningful work. Mainstream economics, which emphasizes market self-regulation and economic growth, is not a good vehicle for a theory of sustainability. Better insights are to be found in the literature of heterodox political economy and political ecology. Political ecology is based upon the theory of monopoly capital. Monopoly capitalism exhibits a tendency towards stagnation, because the economic surplus cannot be absorbed adequately in the absence of system-wide waste. The Monthly Review School continues this tradition in the context of the metabolic rift, while the Capitalism, Nature and Socialism School develops the idea of a second contradiction of capitalism. The Social Structure of Accumulation school pursues the idea of long swings of economic activity based upon institutional structures that aid or inhibit capital accumulation.