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.

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 Clean Energy Transitions

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Ghg Emissions ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Clean Energy ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Era ◽  
Policy Experimentation ◽  
Country Level ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Emissions

The 21st Conference of the Parties (CoP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) shifted the nature of the political economy challenge associated with achieving a global emissions trajectory that is consistent with a climate. The shifts generated by CoP21 place country decision-making and country policies at centre stage. Under moderately optimistic assumptions concerning the vigour with which CoP21 objectives are pursued, nearly every country in the world will set about to design and implement the most promising and locally relevant policies for achieving their agreed contribution to global mitigation. These policies are virtually certain to vary dramatically across countries. In short, the world stands at the cusp of an unprecedented era of policy experimentation in driving a clean energy transition. This book steps into this new world of broad-scale and locally relevant policy experimentation. The chapters focus on the political economy of clean energy transition with an emphasis on specific issues encountered in both developed and developing countries. Lead authors contribute a broad diversity of experience drawn from all major regions of the world, representing a compendium of what has been learned from recent initiatives, mostly (but not exclusively) at country level, to reduce GHG emissions. As this new era of experimentation dawns, their contributions are both relevant and timely.

Organized Labor and Depression in Europe: Making Power Explicit in the Political Economy of Health

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-358
Author(s):  
Megan M. Reynolds ◽  
Veerle Buffel
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Depressive Symptoms ◽  
Union Membership ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Union Density ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
The Political ◽  
Power Resources ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Political Economy Of Health

Despite engagement with the construct of power relations, research on the political economy of health has largely overlooked organized labor as a determinant of well-being. Grounded in the theory of power resources, our study aims to fill this gap by investigating the link between country-level union density and mental health while accounting for the compositional effects of individual-level union membership. We use three waves of the European Social Survey (N = 52,737) and a variation on traditional random-effects models to estimate both the contextual and change effects of labor unions on depressive symptoms. We find that country-level union density is associated with fewer depressive symptoms and that this is true irrespective of union membership. We discuss our findings vis-à-vis the literatures on the political economy of health, power resources, and fundamental causes of disease.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Tobacco in Mozambique and Zimbabwe: A Triangulation Mixed Methods Protocol

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (12) ◽  
pp. 4262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael Lencucha ◽  
Jeffrey Drope ◽  
Ronald Labonte ◽  
Benedito Cunguara ◽  
Arne Ruckert ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Focus Group ◽  
Tobacco Control ◽  
Smallholder Farmers ◽  
Tobacco Consumption ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Household Level ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Tobacco Production

Changing global markets have generated a dramatic shift in tobacco consumption from high-income countries (HICs) to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); by 2030, more than 80% of the disease burden from tobacco use will fall on LMICs. Propelling this shift, opponents of tobacco control have successfully asserted that tobacco is essential to the economic livelihoods of smallholder tobacco farmers and the economy of tobacco-growing countries. This nexus of economic, agricultural and public health policymaking is one of the greatest challenges facing tobacco control efforts, especially in LMICs. To date, there is a lack of comparative, individual level evidence about the actual livelihoods of tobacco-growing farmers and the political economic context driving tobacco production. This comparative evidence is critically important to identify similarities and differences across contexts and to provide local evidence to inform policies and institutional engagement. Our proposed four-year project will examine the economic situation of smallholder farmers in two major tobacco-growing LMICs—Mozambique and Zimbabwe—and the political economy shaping farmers’ livelihoods and tobacco control efforts. We will collect and analyze the existing data and policy literature on the political economy of tobacco in these two countries. We will also implement household-level economic surveys of nationally representative samples of farmers. The surveys will be complimented with focus group discussions with farmers across the major tobacco-growing regions. Finally, we will interview key informants in these countries in order to illuminate the policy context in which tobacco production is perpetuated. The team will develop country-level reports and policy briefs that will inform two sets of dissemination workshops in each country with relevant stakeholders. We will also conduct workshops to present our findings to the survey and focus group participants, and other members of these tobacco-growing communities, so they can directly benefit from the research to which they are contributing.

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