The Corporation in a Globalized World

Author(s):  
Ronen Palan

The chapter addresses the nature of the power relationships between the business world and the state as seen from the perspective of a relatively new field of study called international political economy. Theories of corporate power in a globalized economy evolved along two parallel lines. On the one hand, the globalization literature of the 1990s has tended to assume there was a marked shift of power from states to markets. Recent literature questions these assumptions, not least in light of the experience of the great recession of 2007–2008. In parallel, conceptualization of power has evolved from relatively simplistic theories of relational power to theories of structural power and, increasingly, arbitrage power. Arbitrage power is the ability to arbitrate legal systems against each other, or against themselves, for pecuniary purposes.

Author(s):  
Michael Berlemann ◽  
Vera Jahn ◽  
Robert Lehmann

AbstractIn a globalized world with high international factor mobility, crises often spread quickly over large parts of the world. Politicians carry a vital interest in keeping crises as small and short as possible. Against this background we study whether the type of company of owner-managed SMEs, in Germany well-known as Mittelstand firms, helps increasing an economy’s crisis resistance. We study this issue at the example of the Great Recession of the years 2008/2009. Using micro panel data from the ifo Business Survey, we study the comparative performance of Mittelstand enterprises and find supporting evidence for the hypothesis that Mittelstand firms performed more stable throughout the Great Recession than non-Mittelstand firms. We also show that owner-managed SMEs performed significantly better than SMEs and owner-managed large enterprises. Thus, it is rather the combination of firm size and owner-management that leads to more crisis resistance.


2019 ◽  
pp. 31-64
Author(s):  
Demetrios Argyriades ◽  
Pan Suk Kim

With the Great Recession receding, but crises still afflicting large swaths of the world and a climate of rampant distrust adversely affecting governance, it may be time to ask whether and, if so, how and where our field went wrong. Have we been willing victims of sleep-walkers using metaphors as models? This paper argues as much. Specifically, it contends that, foisted on the world as the one- size-fits-all prescription for good governance, nationally and internationally, it has ended turning governance and democracy on their heads, while also undermining the very foundations on which a global order, based on peaceful coexistence and constructive cooperation through the United Nations, was predicated. The prevalence of symptoms of hurt and discontent should lead us to conclude that the roots of our predicament and problems go much deeper, to a might counter- culture, which triumphed in the 1990s but still goes strong, in places.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Aronson

Based on 153 interviews at a mid-sized, commuter university, this article examines the disjuncture between students and alumni on the one hand, and faculty, academic staff and administrators on the other in their perceptions of the challenges facing students who graduate during the Great Recession. Findings reveal a culture of despair in response to economic insecurity for students and graduates: they pursued degrees primarily for a workplace credential, were fearful about the future, and experienced and expressed uncertainty in their post-college plans. While university employees were sympathetic to student problems, only a small number of faculty, staff and administrators viewed student despair as resulting from large-scale structural problems. Instead, the majority of faculty and all of the administrators and academic staff emphasized the need for an individualized response to the social problem of the Great Recession.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Freire ◽  
Luís Cabrita ◽  
Mariana Carmo Duarte ◽  
Hugo Ferrinho Lopes

Using data from the European Election Study 2014, this article focuses on workers’ EU political alignments during the Great Recession. It deals with two research questions. First, how does the attitude of (manual) workers towards the EU compare to that of the middle and upper classes in the aftermath of the Great Recession? Second, when it comes to workers’ support for the EU, are there systematic differences between countries affected by the crisis? The article finds that, on the one hand, in terms of patterns of workers’ EU political alignments, there are no systematic differences between countries affected to varying degrees by the Great Recession. On the other hand, workers still feel fundamentally detached from the EU, especially when it comes to the manual workers. However, high levels of generalised detachment from the EU are not clearly translated into preferences for Eurosceptic parties, since there are high levels of vote fragmentation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 177-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Abromeit

This is a review article of the following five recent studies on populism: 1) Ruth Wodak’s <em>The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean</em> (Sage, 2015); 2) Benjamin Moffitt’s <em>The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation</em> (Stanford University Press, 2016); 3) Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s <em>Populism: A Very Short Introduction</em> (Oxford University Press, 2017); 4) Jan-Werner Müller’s <em>What is Populism?</em> (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and 5) John B. Judis’ <em>The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics</em> (Columbia Global Reports, 2016). The review argues for a return to early Frankfurt School Critical Theory to address some of the shortcomings of these studies.


2015 ◽  
Vol 101 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Richard Ohmann

In a famous imaginary exchange, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The rich are different from us."  Ernest Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have more money."   Most critics have thought the epigram attributed to Fitzgerald more perceptive about class in the United States than the one attributed to Hemingway.  But if we're looking for a wry take on how class has been understood, in the media and among college students, Hemingway's comment is pretty good.  


2017 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-352
Author(s):  
Sadullah Çelik ◽  
Pınar Deniz

The globalization of world economies and the importance of nowcasting analysis have been at the core of the recent literature. Nevertheless, these two strands of research are hardly coupled. This study aims to fill this gap through examining the globalization of the consumer confidence index (CCI) by applying conventional and unconventional econometric methods. The US CCI is used as the benchmark in tests of comovement among the CCIs of several developing and developed countries, with the data sets divided into three sub-periods: global liquidity abundance, the Great Recession, and postcrisis. The existence and/or degree of globalization of the CCIs vary according to the period, whereas globalization in the form of coherence and similar paths is observed only during the Great Recession and, surprisingly, stronger in developing/emerging countries.


Author(s):  
Oleksiy Kryvtsov ◽  
Nicolas Vincent

Abstract Macroeconomists traditionally ignore temporary price markdowns (“sales”) under the assumption that they are unrelated to aggregate phenomena. We revisit this view. First, we provide robust evidence from the U.K. and U.S. CPI micro data that the frequency of sales is strongly countercyclical, as much as doubling during the Great Recession. Second, we build a general equilibrium model in which cyclical sales arise endogenously as retailers try to attract bargain hunters. The calibrated model fits well the business cycle co-movement of sales with consumption and hours worked, and the strong substitution between market work and shopping time documented in the time-use literature. The model predicts that after a monetary contraction, the heightened use of discounts by firms amplifies the fall in the aggregate price level, attenuating by a third the one-year response of real consumption.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (223) ◽  
pp. 11-38
Author(s):  
Velimir Bole ◽  
Miha Dominko ◽  
Ada Gustin-Habus ◽  
Janez Prasnikar

The paper deals with the performance of former Yugoslav countries during the Great Recession. It compares the performance of peripheral countries (Slovenia and Croatia) with those of superperipheral countries (Bosnia, the Republic of North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia). The focus of the analysis is the four channels of crisis transmission and amplification: the capital surge as the external channel on the one hand, and the financial accelerator, the banking credit extension, and liquidity as internal channels on the other. While the external channel drove the dynamics of the crisis, the internal channels amplified, broadened, and prolonged its drastic economic consequences. The paper depicts the trajectory of the consequences of the Great Recession for both peripheral and super-peripheral countries. It shows that, regarding financial stability, peripheral countries outperformed superperipheral countries in the boom phase, but not in the bust and recovery phases. The crucial factor influencing such a deterioration of peripheral countries? financial stability was the policy measures enforced by the European Commission and ECB, calibrated to the needs of the largest and strongest economies of the euro area, while neglecting the asymmetric dynamics of European economies in the bust and recovery phases. The paper concludes with a warning that something similar could happen in the present crisis triggered by the Covid-19 virus.


2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (308) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Eduardo Loría ◽  
Javier Valdez ◽  
Raúl Tirado

<p class="Trabajos" align="center"><strong>RESUMEN</strong></p><p class="Trabajos">Estimamos la tasa de desempleo no aceleradora de la inflación (NAIRU) para México (2002Q1-2018Q2) con la metodología de Ball y Mankiw (2002) utilizando el método generalizado de momentos. Probamos que el cálculo de la NAIRU con esta metodología es más eficiente que el puramente estadístico (filtro HP). Mostramos que: <em>a</em>) la crisis Punto Com y la Gran Recesión generaron efectos reales y duraderos en el mercado laboral; <em>b</em>) probamos que la política monetaria en México ha sido estabilizadora, y <em>c</em>) que la relación entre el desempleo y la inflación se ha fortalecido en los últimos años.</p><p class="Trabajos"><strong> </strong></p><p class="Trabajos" align="center"><strong>ESTIMATION OF THE NAIRU FOR MEXICO, 2002Q1-2018Q2</strong></p><p class="Trabajos" align="center"><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><p class="Trabajos">We estimate the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) for Mexico (2002Q1-2018Q2) with Ball and Mankiw’s (2002) methodology using the Generalized Method of Moments. We prove that, with this methodology, the calculation of NAIRU is more efficient than the one calculated with the HP filter. We show that: <em>a</em>) the Dot Com and the Great Recession crises have had real and lasting effects on the labor market; <em>b</em>) Mexico´s monetary policy has been stabilizing, and <em>c</em>) the relationship between unemployment and inflation has strengthened over the last years.</p>


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