Financialisation in the European Periphery

Financialisation in the European Periphery
Author: Ana Cordeiro Santos
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0429801416

In many European countries, the process of financialisation has been exacerbated by the project of closer EU integration and accelerated as a result of austerity policies introduced after the Euro crisis of 2010–2012. However, the impact has been felt differently in core and peripheral countries. This book examines the case of Portugal, and in particular the impact on its economy, work and social reproduction. The book examines the recent evolution of the Portuguese economy, of particular sectors and systems of social provision (including finance, housing and water), labour relations and income distribution. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive critical analysis of varied aspects of capital accumulation and social reproduction in the country, which are crucial to understand the effects of the official ‘bail-out’ of 2011 and associated austerity adjustment program. The book shows how these have increasingly relied on deteriorating pay and working conditions and households’ direct and indirect engagement with the global financial system in new domains of social reproduction. Through its exploration of the Portuguese case, the book presents a general theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of financialisation processes in peripheral countries. This text is essential reading for students and scholars of political economy, development, geography, international relations and sociology with an interest in examining the uneven mechanisms and impacts of global finance.

Managing Risks in the European Periphery Debt Crisis

Managing Risks in the European Periphery Debt Crisis
Author: G. Christodoulakis
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2014-12-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1137304952

The European Periphery Debt Crisis (EPDC) has its roots in the structural characteristics of the individual economies affected. This book offers a full diagnosis of the EPDC, its association to the national and international structural characteristics and a full analysis from a risk management point of view of the available policy options.

Personal Debt in Europe

Personal Debt in Europe
Author: Federico Ferretti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-04-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108426735

Analyses personal debt and the over-indebtedness of consumers in the European Union from the multi-disciplinary perspectives of economics, policy, and law.

Households and Financialization in Europe

Households and Financialization in Europe
Author: Marek Mikuš
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000393976

Households and Financialization in Europe develops a processual, relational and critical transdisciplinary approach to household financialization in Europe, utilizing a range of national and local case studies. It does so by drawing on debates in Marxist, feminist and radical IPE, anthropology and other fields. The book explores the household as simultaneously a micro-level social institution specializing in social reproduction, distribution and other activities; a building bloc of larger economic and social structures; and an object of multiple systems of power/knowledge. Putting this conceptualization to use in original research, the authors identify geographically and historically situated ways in which financialization transforms households and their relationships with the wider economy and society. The book traces these transformations in case studies of variegated financialization in Eastern and Southern European (semi-) peripheries where households have faced particularly severe financial issues since the global financial crisis, such as over-indebtedness and asset devaluation. Key themes recurring throughout the book include: the key role of housing in household financialization, the co-constitutive relationship between financialization and social and spatial inequalities, specific patterns in the relations of financial actors and households in semi-peripheries, and the implications of semi-peripheral forms of real and financial accumulation for household financialization. With its transdisciplinary approach, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of finance, financialization, household economics, international and global political economy, uneven development, economic anthropology, and economic sociology. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license.

Consumer Debt and Social Exclusion in Europe

Consumer Debt and Social Exclusion in Europe
Author: Hans-W. Micklitz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317161254

This book analyses the dichotomy between the goal of social inclusion and the effect of social exclusion through over-indebtedness since 2008 in Europe. Filling a vital gap in the current literature on the effects of the financial and economic crisis, this volume puts into context academic discussion with the real-life dimension of over-indebtedness. Reports from six European countries provide socio-economic and legal information on over-indebtedness as well as the regulatory and judicial responses to the problems entailed by over-indebtedness. They form the empirical background for five analyses of different aspects of the inclusion-exclusion dichotomy. It becomes clear that in the context of credit expansion, individual over-indebtedness has turned into a social issue, which the current design of the consumer credit and mortgage system in Europe has helped to produce while disregarding the consequential danger of social exclusion.

Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery

Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery
Author: Dorothee Bohle
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801465664

With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three regional shocks: the recession of the early 1990s, the rolling global financial crisis that started in July 1997, and the political shocks that attended EU enlargement in 2004. Bohle and Greskovits show that the postsocialist states have established three basic variants of capitalist political economy: neoliberal, embedded neoliberal, and neocorporatist. The Baltic states followed a neoliberal prescription: low controls on capital, open markets, reduced provisions for social welfare. The larger states of central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics) have used foreign investment to stimulate export industries but retained social welfare regimes and substantial government power to enforce industrial policy. Slovenia has proved to be an outlier, successfully mixing competitive industries and neocorporatist social inclusion. Bohle and Greskovits also describe the political contention over such arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia. A highly original and theoretically sophisticated typology of capitalism in postsocialist Europe, this book is unique in the breadth and depth of its conceptually coherent and empirically rich comparative analysis.

The European Periphery and the Eurozone Crisis

The European Periphery and the Eurozone Crisis
Author: Neil Dooley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351691988

This book provides a new understanding of the eurozone crisis across three of the worst hit cases: Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. In contrast to accounts which stress the ‘immaturity’ of the European ‘periphery’, as well as more critical narratives that understand these countries as victims of German and core ‘economic domination’, this book recognises that individual peripheral countries have followed dramatically different paths to crisis, making it difficult to speak of the eurozone crisis as a single phenomenon. Bringing literature from Comparative Political Economy into dialogue with scholarship on Europeanisation, this book contributes the concept of ‘divergence via Europeanisation’. It explores the much-overlooked ways in which the negotiation of a ‘one size fits all’ project of European financial integration has been generative of precarious patterns of economic growth across Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. The book shows that far from their failure or inability to do so, it has been the European periphery’s attempt to ‘follow the rules’ of European integration that explains their current difficulties. This novel understanding of the eurozone crisis should appeal to students and scholars in International Political Economy, European and European Union Studies, Comparative Political Economy, Irish Politics, Greek Politics, and Portuguese Politics.

Macroeconomics After the Financial Crisis

Macroeconomics After the Financial Crisis
Author: Mogens Ove Madsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317300092

How should Europe cope with the negative and still unfolding economic consequences of the current economic crisis? And why does Europe seem to be more conservative than the USA in dealing with the crisis? Since the outbreak of the current international economic crisis in 2008, the USA and many of the European countries have been tormented by high levels of unemployment and low levels of inflation, interest rates close to zero and fiscal policies of austerity. As such, the modern economic mainstream has been challenged by these empirical facts. Today, several years after the outbreak of the international economic crisis, supply side effects do not seem to be increasing employment as the modern mainstream claimed they would. Aggregate demand has to play a more important role in macroeconomic analysis than hitherto. That is, there is a need for alternative explanations of how a modern macro economy is expected to function and how the macroeconomic outcome could be manipulated by the right economic policy proposals. As expressed by the contents of the present book, a Post Keynesian understanding proposes such an alternative theoretically, methodologically and in terms of policy measures. This book will present new materials and approaches, especially new evidence and new views on the potential problems of public debt, the European Union and the present crisis, Central Banking, hysteresis in an agent based framework, the foundations of macroeconomics and the problems of uncertainty.

Inequality and Uneven Development in the Post-Crisis World

Inequality and Uneven Development in the Post-Crisis World
Author: Sebastiano Fadda
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1315388812

In the years following the financial crash, two issues have become central to the debate in economics: inequality and the uneven nature of sustainable development. These two issues are at the core of this book which aims to explain three key questions: why inequality has increased so much in the last three decades; why most advanced economies are stagnating or are experiencing moderate economic growth; and why, even where economic growth is occurring, the quality of that growth is questioned. Inequality and Uneven Development in the Post-Crisis World is divided into three parts. The first part concerns the theoretical aspects of inequality, and ethical issues regarding economics and equality. The second part explores empirical evidence and policy suggestions drawing on the uneven levels of development and unprecedented levels of inequality experienced among advanced economies in the context of global financial capitalism. The third part focuses on sustainable development issues such as full employment, social costs of global trade liberalization, environmental sustainability and ecological issues. Along with inequality these issues are central for capitalism and for economic development. This volume is of interest to those who study political economy, sustainable development and social inequality.

Peripheral Europe

Peripheral Europe
Author: Ksenija Vidmar Horvat
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2020-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527560120

This book looks at the financial (2007-2008) and the refugee (2015-present) crises and post-crisis development in the EU. The key argument here is that the (mis)management of these crises has been in part conditioned by the specific course of the Europeanisation which occurred during the integration of the post-socialist East. The enlargement processes ran on the premises of a shared European identity, in effect turning the social contract of the new Europe into a cultural contract. This has resulted in betraying the commitment to core values of democratic development, both East and West. The book specifically studies the impact of the “cultural turn” through the discourse of the transition in the Balkan periphery of the ex-Yugoslavian region. Based on rich theoretical and regionally specific empirical research, it will be of interest to scholars in the fields of EU integration, Eastern European studies, cultural studies, studies of post-socialism, and border studies.