Pensions Imperilled

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Berry
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
Population Ageing ◽  
Private Pensions ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Neoliberal Ideology ◽  
State And Market ◽  
Policy Elites

Private pensions provision in the United Kingdom is in crisis—but it is not the crisis often depicted in political and popular discourses. While population ageing has affected traditional pensions practice, the imperilment of pensions is due in fact to the incompatibility of pensions provision’s peculiar temporality with the financialization of the wider economy. This book offers a political economy perspective on the development of private pensions, focusing specifically on how policy elites have sought to respond to perceived crises of demographic change, undersaving, and fund deficits, and in doing so absorbed imperatives to subject individuals to a market-led regime under the influence of neoliberal ideology. This terrain is explored through chapters on the historical and comparative context of UK pensions provision, the demise of collectivist provision, the rise of pensions individualization (and the state’s role as facilitator and regulator in this regard), and the financial and economic context in which pensions provision operates. The book offers an original understanding of the unique temporality and materiality of pensions provision, as a set of mechanisms for coping with generational change and forecast failures in capitalist economies. Accordingly, it also offers a nuanced account of pensions statecraft, challenging a tendency in the existing literature to focus on the boundary between state and market, rather than how the pensions market operates (and the state’s role in this). The book ends by outlining a coherent and radical programme of progressive pensions reform, steeped in the author’s experience as a policy practitioner.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Craig Berry
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Population Ageing ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Private Pensions ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk

The UK pensions system is in danger. How did we get here? Moreover, what exactly is it that is endangering UK pensions? This introductory chapter explores the main narratives of pensions crisis in elite and public discourse in the UK—centred around population ageing and increased longevity—and argues instead that pensions imperilment is a product of the UK’s dysfunctional political economy. Traditional private pensions practice has become increasingly incompatible with the financialization of economic life. The chapter introduces the book’s key analytical concepts, such as financialization and statecraft, and explore how the social sciences, particularly political economy scholarship, tend to treat generational change and inter-generational relations. Understanding private pensions provision as a set of temporal management mechanisms, organized cross-generationally, is integral to understanding the source of pensions imperilment—and how it can be overcome.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 247-260
Author(s):  
Craig Berry
Keyword(s):  
Demographic Change ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Public Pension ◽  
Defined Benefit ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Tax Relief ◽  
New Public ◽  
Workplace Pensions ◽  
Over Time

The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main arguments, distilling its implications for how we understand pensions provision, and specifically its relationship to the wider financialization process, capitalist organization, and generational change. It also reflects more explicitly on some of the book’s implicit themes, such as the implications of pensions individualization for women and low earners, and industrial relations. Crucially, this chapter also offers a programme of reforms to overcome pensions imperilment in the United Kingdom, encompassing: expanded coverage for workplace pensions and employer contributions; new forms of state-managed provision in relation to annuities; increasing the state pension’s generosity over time; abolishing pensions tax relief as it currently exists; nationalizing residual defined benefit provision in order to capitalize a new public pension; and establishing transparent processes for aligning retirement ages with demographic change.

Different Resources, Different Conflicts? The Subnational Political Economy of Armed Conflict and Crime in Colombia

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Conflict Behavior ◽  
Drug Trade ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Sustainable Peace ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This book explores some of the risks associated with sustainable peace in Colombia. The book intentionally steers away from the emphasis on the drug trade as the main resource fueling Colombian conflicts and violence, a topic that has dominated scholarly attention. Instead, it focuses on the links that have been configured over decades of armed conflict between legal resources (such as bananas, coffee, coal, flowers, gold, ferronickel, emeralds, and oil), conflict dynamics, and crime in several regions of Colombia. The book thus contributes to a growing trend in the academic literature focusing on the subnational level of armed conflict behavior. It also illustrates how the social and economic context of these resources can operate as deterrents or as drivers of violence. The book thus provides important lessons for policymakers and scholars alike: Just as resources have been linked to outbreaks and transformations of violence, peacebuilding too needs to take into account their impacts, legacies, and potential

IV. J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: Reform, and the Integrity of the Empire, 1865–1870

1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. D. Steele
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Complete Agreement ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Harsh Criticism ◽  
Irish Question

The first part of this study of Mill sought to show how much less radical he was on the subject of Irish land reform than is often supposed. In the earlier editions of the Principles of Political Economy from 1848 to 1857 there were passages which constituted a terrible indictment of landlordism, and insisted on the need for legislation to convert the tenant farmers into joint owners of their holdings: but in another passage this harsh criticism was substantially withdrawn, and the demand for fixity of tenure effectively retracted. Although they continued to reproduce the criticism and the call for a drastic measure, the editions of 1862 and 1865 were more moderate still in their conclusions on Irish land. With the progress of the changes in the economy and society set in motion by the Great Famine, Mill became more strongly convinced that the country should be left to evolve slowly under the existing law of tenure, only slightly amended. One cannot imagine Mill saying, ‘tenant-right…is equivalent to landlords' wrong’: but he and Palmerston were none the less in nearly complete agreement by 1865 on the degree of laissez-faire that was desirable in Ireland. For all his strictures upon aristocratic misgovernment and middle-class prejudice, Mill was too warm an admirer of British institutions to want to undermine their social basis over a wide area of the United Kingdom. The second part of this study deals with his action and his motives, in briefly advocating, without any reservations this time, the revolutionary land legislation from which he had always previously shrunk, despite his brave words written for the earlier editions of the Principles.

Economic violence against women: Testimonies from the Women’s Court in Sarajevo

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Tatjana Đurić Kuzmanović ◽  
Ana Pajvančić-Cizelj
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Economic Violence

This article uses a feminist political economy framework to analyse economic violence against women in the context of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the introduction of neoliberal regimes in its successor states from the late 1980s until 2015. The authors’ focus is on the following processes before, during and after the breakup: the wider social, political and economic context of Yugoslavia before the war, already marked by the introduction of orthodox neoliberal standards and practices and combined with nationalism; the period during the war, with escalation of conflict and growing nationalism; and the post-socialist transformation, marked by aggressive neoliberalism. The analysis is based on women’s testimonies given in preparation of (from 2011 until the end of 2014) and during the Women’s Court in Sarajevo in 2015. It points to the conclusion that orthodox neoliberal policy and privatization, intersecting with patriarchy, nationalism and conflict, induced economic violence against women in the region.

scholarly journals The process of demographic ageing in Vojvodina and central Serbia during the last two decades of the 20th century

2006 ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
Vladimir Nikitovic
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Population Ageing ◽  
Human History ◽  
Demographic Ageing ◽  
Functional Relations ◽  
The World

After five decades of insufficient reproduction of Vojvodina?s and Central Serbia?s population, the process of demographic ageing, came into the focus of the broadest public at last. Current Serbia?s population (without Kosovo and Metohija?s population) belongs to the group of the oldest populations in the world according to a number of indicators of demographic change. Considering population ageing as a planetary process without precedent in the human history, we tried to point out the main features of its evolution regarding spatial implications on population living in this part of Europe. The evolution of the process of population ageing during the 1981-2002 period was considered through functional relations between specific age groups. It was ascertained that the process started its spreading over Vojvodina at first, but continued to spread over Central Serbia afterwards moving the pole of demographic ageing to that part of the country. Some specific centres of demographic ageing as well as the regions which are still demographically more vital than the others were located by the analysis at the municipality level.

Unwitting Architect

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Germann
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Export Markets ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Us ◽  
Pragmatic Reasoning ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Crisis Managers ◽  
Policy Elites ◽  
Interest Rate Shock

The global rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s is widely seen as a dynamic originating in the United States and the United Kingdom, and only belatedly and partially repeated by Germany. From this Anglocentric perspective, Germany's emergence at the forefront of neoliberal reforms in the eurozone is perplexing, and tends to be attributed to the same forces conventionally associated with the Anglo-American pioneers. This book challenges this ruling narrative. It recasts the genesis of neoliberalism as a process driven by a plenitude of actors, ideas, and interests. And it lays bare the pragmatic reasoning and counterintuitive choices of German crisis managers obscured by this master story. This book argues that German officials did not intentionally set out to promote neoliberal change. Instead they were more intent on preserving Germany's export markets and competitiveness in order to stabilize the domestic compact between capital and labor. Nevertheless, the series of measures German policy elites took to manage the end of golden-age capitalism promoted neoliberal transformation in crucial respects: it destabilized the Bretton Woods system; it undermined socialist and social democratic responses to the crisis in Europe; it frustrated an internationally coordinated Keynesian reflation of the world economy; and ultimately it helped push the US into the Volcker interest-rate shock that inaugurated the attack on welfare and labor under Reagan and Thatcher. From this vantage point, the book illuminates the very different rationale behind the painful reforms German state managers have demanded of their indebted eurozone partners.

Many Happy Returns? Investment Governance and the Political Economy of Time in UK Pensions Provision

2021 ◽  
pp. 209-246
Author(s):  
Craig Berry
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
Pension Funds ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Pensions ◽  
Pension Schemes ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Uk

We are increasingly conscious that private pension schemes in the UK are primarily financial institutions. UK private pensions provision has always been highly financialized, but the individualization of provision means this dynamic matters more than ever to retirement incomes. Furthermore, individualization has occurred at a time when the UK economy’s capacity to support a long-term approach to capital investment, upon which pensions depend, has declined. The chapter argues that pensions provision essentially involves managing the failure of the future to resemble the present, or more specifically present forecasts of the future. As our ability to manipulate the value of the future has increased, our ability to tolerate forecast failure has declined. The chapter details how pension funds invest, and how this has changed, and provides an original understanding of several recent attempts to shape pensions investment, ultimately demonstrating the limitations of pensions policy in shaping how provision functions in practice.

5. Oil and Political Economy in the International Relations of the Middle East

2019 ◽  
pp. 107-131
Author(s):  
Giacomo Luciani
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Middle East ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Rentier States

This chapter looks at the role of oil in the political economy and the international relations of the Middle East. Oil is commonly considered a political commodity. Because of its pivotal importance as a primary source of energy, governments are concerned with its continued availability and seek to minimize import dependence. Historically, interest in oil — especially in the United Kingdom and the United States — strongly influenced attitudes towards the Middle East and the formation of the state system in the region, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Oil also affects the power balance within the region. The polarization in the region between oil-rich and oil-poor states is thus an essential tool of analysis. The parallel distinction between rentier and non-rentier states helps to explain how oil affects the domestic political development of the oil-rich states and influences their regional relations.

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