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An Ocean Apart? Comparing Transatlantic Responses to the Financial Crisis
No full textHas the EU-US relationship become a sideshow or is it still central to the global economy? Conflicting signals have been sent out since the outbreak of the global crisis. The creation of the G20 and its designation as ‘the premier forum for international cooperation’ suggest that attention and priorities have moved away from the traditional G7 focus on the transatlantic economy. But most of the key policy debates of the last two years have retained a characteristically transatlantic flavour. This applies to the controversy about the pace of consolidation which resulted in an open US-German rift at the Toronto summit in June 2010; to the discussion on the new bank capital ratios which again was essentially a Euro-American affair; and to the broader conversation on the priorities of financial regulatory reform, for which the big action agendas have been the US Dodd-Frank Act and the European endorsement of a blueprint for coordinated supervision and a single European macroprudential body. True, other issues – the global rebalanc-ing, or the creation of global financial safety nets – have had a distinctive G20 scope. But at least a fair share of the international debate has been transatlantic. There are reasons for this state of affairs. To start with, what is known as the global crisis has been first and foremost a transatlantic crisis. As discussed in several contributions in this volume, the wake of the crisis financial integration through portfolio diversification essentially remained an EU-US phenomenon. Accordingly the subsequent financial turmoil primarily affected the European and American financial systems, and other economies indirectly only, through trade or capital outflows. It is therefore natural to see the same two regions take the lead in setting the agenda for financial reform. Second, the problems they are facing in the aftermath of the shock – the travails of deleveraging, unemployment, the need for unconventional policy responses, the lowering of the growth potential, the rise of public debt, political pressures for protection – are largely common. Third, while they are not the main contributors to world growth, the EU and the US still constitute the bulk of the global economy, and what happens to them matters considerably for all.
The US and the EU however are not responding to the same shock in the same way and this is what makes the comparison interesting. It is telling that the sovereign debt crises developed in Europe in the first half of 2010 and triggered a move towards consolidation while the US fiscal situation is by most standards worse than the aggregate European situation. It is telling also that the priorities of financial reform have not been the same. Clearly neither the policy space nor the policy traditions are identical and this portends significant divergence across the Atlantic. How far this divergence will go and whether policymakers on the two continents will disagree or agree to disagree is one of the key questions for the future of the global economy in the years to come.
All this justifies a revival of the transatlantic economic conversation. The joint Banca d’Italia-Bruegel-Peterson Institute conference, held in Rome on 10-11 September 2009 with the support of the European Commission, aimed to contribute to the conversation through research and policy discussions. We hope that the papers collected in this volume will help foster a fact-based, analytically sound discussion
The European Educational Model and its Paradoxical Impact at the National Level
No full textAs contemporary education becomes increasingly tied to global economic power, national school systems attempting to influence one another inevitably confront significant tensions caused by differences in heritage, politics, and formal structures. Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the reform movements that seek to homogenize schooling around the world. Informed by historical and sociological insight into a variety of nations and eras, these in-depth case studies reveal how and why sweeping, convergent reform agendas clash with specific institutional policies, practices, and curricula. Countering current theoretical models which fail to address the potential pressures born from these challenging isomorphic developments, this book illuminates the cultural idiosyncrasies that both produce and problematize global reform efforts and offers a new way of understanding curriculum as a manifestation of national identity
Welfare Democracies and Party Politics. Explaining Electoral Dynamics in Times of Changing Welfare Capitalism.
No full textEurope's political landscapes are in turmoil, and new radical parties challenge the established political order. This book locates Europe's contemporary challenges within the longer economic and political trajectories of its 'welfare democracies'. The book argues that it is imperative to understand the specific structures of political competition and voter-party links to make sense of the political and economic turmoil of the last decades. In four distinct European welfare democracies (Nordic, Continental, Southern, and Anglo-Saxon), the political economy, the party system, and the structure of the political space are co-determined in a specific way. Accordingly, different packages of policies and politics and distinct patterns of alignment between core electoral groups and political parties exist in the four welfare democracies and shape the reactions of European welfare democracies to the current turmoil.
This volume provides an analytical framework that links welfare states to party systems, combining recent contributions to the comparative political economy of the welfare state and insights from party and electoral politics. It states three phenomena. First, concerning electoral politics, the book identifies a certain homogenization of European party systems, the emergence of a new combination of leftist socio-economic and rightist socio-cultural positions in many parties, and, finally, the different electoral success of the radical right in the north of Europe and of the radical left in the south. Secondly, the contributions to this book indicate a confluence toward renewed welfare state support among parties and voters. Thirdly it demonstrates that the Europeanization of political dynamics, combined with incompatible growth models, has created pronounced European cleavages
When do you get Economists as Policy-Makers?
No full textWe analyze when economists become top-level “economic policy-makers”, focusing on financial crises and the partisanship of a country’s leader. We present a new dataset of the educational and occupational background of 1200 political leaders, finance ministers, and central bank governors from 40 developed democracies from 1973 to 2010. We find that left leaders appoint economic policy-makers who are more highly trained in economics and finance ministers who are less likely to have private finance backgrounds but more likely to be former central bankers. Finance ministers appointed during financial crises are less likely to have a financial services background. A leader’s exposure to economics training is also related to appointments. This suggests one crucial mechanism for affecting economic policy is through the selection of certain types of economic policy-makers
The Measurement of Real-Time Perceptions of Financial Stress: Implications for Political Science
No full textHow do politicians and voters respond to financial market stress, and with what political effects? Previous research addressing these questions lacks a crucial variable: a continuous, real-time indicator of the level of financial market stress that policy makers and voters perceived. We need a measure of actors’contemporary perceptions of financial market conditions to understand why they made a given choice and with what effects.
Previous binary crisis measures are constructed post hoc, so tend to be biased towards severe crises and away from circumstances in which governments effectively responded to emerging trouble. As such, they suffer from clear selection bias. Annual post hoc measures do not necessarily capture conditions as they were perceived at the time of events such as elections. As dichotomous indicators, they do not measure crisis severity or how it varies over time. They use ad hoc methods to determine when crises have ended.
Previous continuous measures of financial market stress are less common and suffer from other problems. They capture quantities whose importance, measurement, and reporting varies significantly across countries and over time.
To overcome these issues, we develop a continuous measure of real-time perceptions of financial market stress with a kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) of detailed qualitative data, namely monthly Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) reports. We call it the EIU Perceptions of Financial Market Stress Index, or FinStress for short. FinStress enables new political research possibilities. As a continuous measure, it could be used to examine which policies can effectively prevent or reduce extreme stress, and which political conditions are conducive to implementing these policies. As a comparable continuous monthly indicator, FinStress could be used to test hypotheses that rely on sub-annual data and follow the intensity of stress over time. Here we provide examples for studying the impact of financial market stress on voters’choices and on revisions to European Union government budget figures. We thus contribute to the wider methodological toolkit by showing how KPCA can be used to summarize vast quantities of similarly formatted qualitative texts into continuous cross-sectional time-series indicators
Political Business Cycles in EU Accession Countries
No full textThis paper considers whether political business cycles existed in East European accession countries during the period 1990-9. Based on the Mundell-Fleming model expanded in Clark and Hallerberg (2000), we argue that the type of exchange rate regime and the relative independence of the central bank affects the instruments governments use to influence the economy before elections. In our empirical analysis, we find that accession countries with dependent central banks and flexible exchange rates have looser monetary policies in electoral periods than in non-electoral periods. If a country has a fixed exchange rate regime, it manipulates its economy in election years through running larger budgets instead of through looser monetary policy. The presence of such cycles in Eastern Europe has implications for the introduction of the euro in EU accession countries
The Legitimacy of International interpretive authorities for Human Rights treaties: An indirect-instrumentalist defence
No full textPhilanthropic Foundations and Social Welfare. A Comparative Study of Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom (England)
No full textThis dissertation project investigates philanthropic foundations as organizational form in the social welfare field with a special focus on its institutional embedding in different European welfare systems. To do so, it draws on literature from political economy that provides different regime type classifications: Three especially fruitful approaches can be found in the »Varieties of Capitalism« (VoC) approach based on Hall and Soskice (7889), the »Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism« by Esping-Andersen (9::8), and – specifically with regard to the third sector – the »Social Origins Theory« as originally described by Salamon and Anheier (9::<). The existing welfare regime literature clusters countries according to certain main drivers and identifies differences in welfare state systems. This dissertation asks, can we learn something on the organizational level about the embedding of philanthropic foundations in the field of social welfare?
Foundation literature is dominated by an anglophile perspective which mainly focuses on grant-making foundations. However, these represent only one type of foundation; other varieties exist alongside them. Operating foundations are widely neglected in social science research but play an important role, especially in the history of social welfare provision in European countries. In particular, one type of operating foundation, the carrier foundation, mainly functions as a service provider in the field and thus plays a significant role in any understanding of the foundation landscape in the social welfare field. This investigation is based on the comparative insights from three country cases of Germany, Sweden and the UK (England). Guided by propositions from the theoretical research, comparative explorative case studies based on interview data and secondary sources give insights into the field and the embedding of philanthropic social welfare foundations in the three different welfare state systems.
Investigating the range of foundations in social welfare permits a differentiated view of the different types of foundations. Each has different levels of independence from external constraints and are embedded to different degrees according to the propositions from welfare regime theory. These differences hold further implications for the investigation of foundations as a special organizational form
The Lisbon Treaty: De‐Constitutionalizing the European Union?
No full textCalls to ratify the Lisbon Treaty by referendum have been countered with arguments about the Treaty's ‘non‐constitutional’ nature. Against this backdrop, this article asks how much ‘constitution’ is left in the new document. To answer this question, I assert that little is gained by classifying the Treaty in toto as a ‘European constitution’ or as the epitome of its failure. Instead, I develop an analytical framework that disaggregates the concept of constitution into its formal, material and symbolic functions, and systematically assess how far Lisbon would strengthen (or weaken) Europe's constitutional quality. The article suggests that, rather than transferring new competences to Brussels or making a constitutional saut qualitatif, Lisbon moderately bolsters the Treaties' formal functions; yet, in contrast to the Constitutional Treaty it adds little in material terms and is a decisive setback symbolically. Calls for ratification by referendum justified by the reform's extent are therefore ill‐founded
