The Political Economy of Debt

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Menz
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Models ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Debt ◽  
Credit Access ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The explosive rise in not just public, but also private debt has recently attracted more scholarly attention. This is a novel development and might expose politico-economic models of governance to instability from an angle previously underappreciated. The liberalization of credit access in the Anglo-American countries, and, somewhat later, beyond those, might be seen as liberating for some, but they also create the potential for entrapment in debt. The term ‘privatized Keynesianism’ has been proposed to suggest a systematic agenda behind the facilitated access to lending. In this chapter, the broader access to investment vehicles is also being scrutinized, although upon closer inspection any claims of mass ownership of shares turn out not to be tenable.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Inequality in Chile and Mexico: Two Tales of Neoliberalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgos Gouzoulis ◽  
Collin Constantine
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Single Equation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Government Consumption ◽  
Private Debt ◽  
Correction Model ◽  
Wage Share ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Empirical Estimates ◽  
Robust Evidence

This paper undertakes a comparative study on the topographies of neoliberalism in Latin America (Chile and Mexico) and provides empirical estimates of how the varied geographies of neoliberalism affect functional income inequality between 1980-2011. Our empirical strategy employs a single-equation Unrestricted Error-Correction Model that tests an exploratory baseline specification. We find robust evidence that government consumption is a positive driver of the respective wage shares. Since Chile has entrenched austerity as opposed to Mexico, it is a fundamental explanation for its falling wage share. Private debt is the second most important explanation for why wage shares have fallen in Chile. We find no evidence of this channel in the Mexican case. The article also finds similarly varied effects of globalisation on the respective wage shares. These results demonstrate the importance of country-level studies and how new spatialities of neoliberalism through different state reconfigurations can tell unique distributional stories.

Policy Inconsistencies and the Political Economy of Currency Crises

2017 ◽  
Vol 08 (01) ◽  
pp. 1750004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Puspa D. Amri ◽  
Thomas D. Willett
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Exchange Rate ◽  
Currency Crises ◽  
Economic Models ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Formal Models

Formal models of currency crises have shown that inconsistencies between countries' domestic and exchange rate policies are a major cause of currency crises. To understand why such prolonged inconsistencies exist, we need to go beyond standard economic models and take political economy and behavioral considerations into account. We sketch out ways in which such considerations can be taken into account and highlight recent research that is useful for this project. We also offer some directions for future research and a brief guide to the empirical identification of currency crises and to the measurements of some of the relevant political and economic policy variables.

Ending Discrimination, Legitimating Debt: The Political Economy of Race, Gender, and Credit Access in the 1960s and 1970s

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 200-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Hyman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Department Store ◽  
The Political ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Subprime Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
Credit Access ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Today, in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, there is a foreboding sense that it is too easy for Americans to borrow. Living beyond our means on our cards and our mortgages, Americans borrowed at an unsustainable pace, and what put us here, the logic goes, was the unfortunate collision of lenders' greed and borrower's cupidity. Yet free-for-all borrowing defined another moment's economy as well, but without the ill consequences: the postwar period. After World War II, cheap credit underpinned the suburban prosperity, through government-insured loans, auto financing, and even department store Charga-Plates.

Book review: Ceti medi senza futuro? Scritti, appunti sul lavoro e altro, written by Sergio Bologna Book review: Vita da freelance. I lavoratori della conoscenza e il loro futuro, written by Sergio Bologna and Dario Banfi Book review: Felici e sfruttati. Capitalismo digitale ed eclissi del lavoro, written by Carlo Formenti

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 425-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Boffo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Knowledge Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Class Composition ◽  
Hardt And Negri ◽  
American Academia ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Many

This paper reviews the recent writing of Sergio Bologna and Carlo Formenti. These authors are proposed as post-workerist dissenters with respect to Hardt and Negri’s conceptualisation of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, while the latter has risen to prominence within Anglo-American academia astheradical (post-workerist) account of the political economy of the knowledge economy, the work of Bologna and Formenti is here presented as providing alternative accounts of contemporary capitalism and its dynamics. In doing so, this work challenges the Anglo-American reception of post-operaismo. However, these analyses are also assessed by showing the many similarities they share with Hardt and Negri’s account (not least with respect to the category of class composition). These similarities are argued to pose immanent limits, impeding this post-workerist dissent’s ability to carryoperaismobeyond Hardt and Negri.

The Political Economy of Violence: The War-System in Colombia

1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazih Richani
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Violence, in its criminal and political aspects, largely reflects the contradictory impulses set in motion by modernization and serves as an expression of the various dislocations — social, economic, psychological and cultural — which accompany that process. Violence increases when the prevailing institutions fail to mediate among the various antagonistic forces unleashed by socio-economic and political change. Colombia represents a country where violence has risen overwhelmingly in recent years, reaching extremes of both extent and duration. A phenomenon well worth scholarly attention, the subject of violence has given rise to an impressive body of literature concerned with exploring its many aspects: its causes, trajectory, and variety of manifestations (see Sánchez, 1991).

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