Regulating Finance: Who Rules,Whose Rules?

This project has embedded in it an explanation of the structural and relational power transmission process stemming from “micro-actions” in global financial relations. This paper is about domestic policy adaptation in international and domestic finance and how it occurs. The fundamental contention of this paper is that the way to understand power in global finance is to provide an answer to the question: Who makes the rules in finance—state actors or nonstate actors? The answer to this question is problematic in the IPE literature because of both the enormous influence of finance in the councils of the industrial democracies and the information asymmetries that favor power in finance. Finance, it is argued, has the determining influence on the rules governing its industry. The dependent variable in this analysis is the policy output—the regulation and liberalization decisions of states. The behaviors of the state and of other policy actors in the policy process are the independent variables.     

Feeding finance: a critical account of the shifting relationships between finance,food and farming

Abstract

Whether in the form of commodity index funds, farmland investment funds or commodities trading by agri-food companies, there is evidence of an increasingly close relationship between finance, food and agriculture. While these developments have received some critical attention of late, existing accounts of the ‘financialization of food’ are limited to the extent that they view finance as an external force with emphasis placed on the unnaturalness of its relationship with agriculture and its distortive effects on agricultural markets. Recognizing that finance and agriculture have a long history, this paper offers a more nuanced account of the place of financialization in the agricultural sector. Specifically, it examines how agriculture's emergence as an investment opportunity has reconfigured the terrain of agricultural interests and logics while creating new knowledge demands and agricultural visibilities. These dynamics are explored through a case study of the role of finance and processes of financialization in the recent demise of the Canadian Wheat Board as a state marketing agency. Through this discussion, the paper offers valuable insights into not only the reworking of agriculture as a particular type of financial space, but also the nature and limits of financialization itself as a way of engaging with the world beyond urban financial centres.     

‘A Real Woman Waits’ – Heteronormative Respectability,Neo-Liberal Betterment and Echoes of Coloniality in SGBV Programming in Eastern DR Congo

ABSTRACT

Drawing on archival and field research, this article critically examines the production and distribution of gender roles and expectations in SGBV programming, in particular in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We find the underlying currents in some of these programmes reinscribe heteronormativity and focus on individual betterment which resonates with regulating gender and sexuality during colonialism. In some cases, strongly western-inspired norms of individual agency have been introduced, disregarding structural constraints of people’s lives. To conclude, we explore alternative approaches to SGBV prevention, ones in which international approaches are re-defined and vernacularized for local use – but which also at times inform global understandings.     

Morality of Public Deficits: A Historical Perspective

This article examines the morality of public deficits through the views of political leaders, economists and public finance experts. It looks at the changing attitude about borrowing for the modern state and examines the ability of current generations to shift the debt burden to future generations. The article also explores whether the adoption of an organic or individualistic concept of the role of the state affects conclusions concerning the morality of public debt.     

Competitive partners in development financing: China and Japan expanding overseas infrastructure investment

Abstract

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, with the world in search for new economic engines, China and Japan have explicitly given their answer through their expansion of overseas infrastructure investments. This study focuses on the flagship sector of high-speed railways (HSR) and examines what kinds of development financing China and Japan have adopted in making these investments. It asks the following questions: What similarities are there in the Chinese and Japanese approaches to investments in overseas infrastructure, and how do they differ from traditional Western development financing? Also, in what ways have China and Japan changed their approaches to overseas infrastructure projects during this process? It argues that in the process of expanding overseas infrastructure investments and competing for infrastructure projects, China and Japan have become ‘competitive partners’ in challenging the traditional norms of development financing represented by the Washington Consensus and the Development Assistance Committee (DAC). To be more specific, China and Japan have adopted each other’s practices of tied commercial financing, heavy government involvement, focusing on physical infrastructure and industrialization, and showing respect for host-country forms of governance. In particular, by joining China in the new game of exporting infrastructure and through its own ‘quality infrastructure investment’ initiative, Japan has broken out of the constraints of DAC norms as an aid donor and endorsed some fundamental Chinese approaches to development and development cooperation, which in their turn were inspired by earlier Japanese practices.     

Who Gives? Partisan Donations in Europe

Party finance reformers often call for European parties to increase their financial reliance on small donors, but researchers have made few efforts to establish the feasibility of such strategies. This study examines partisan giving in Europe, investigating the potential for parties and policymakers to increase this type of political participation. It also asks whether there are national-level factors that make such efforts more likely to succeed in some countries. The research uses data from the European Social Survey to examine patterns of contributions to political parties in 16 European countries. It finds that the strength of partisanship predicts political giving independent of party membership, which suggests that European political parties may have some scope to increase their number of individual donors. On the other hand, existing tax policies to encourage political giving do not seem to be effective in increasing this type of partisan political participation.     

The United States,Japan, and the European Union: comparing political economy approaches to China

Abstract

This paper examines US, Japanese, and European political economy approaches to China, and their effect on US–Japan and US–EU relationships. Great powers with a greater security concern in dealing with another major country care more about power while those with less of a concern are preoccupied with calculations for wealth. China's rise and its actions have posed a far greater security challenge to the United States and Japan and are driving the two countries closer together. The political economy game involving China reveals a dominant welfare motive among the advanced market economies. The ambition to transform China politically has diminished. China's integration into the global market makes a relative gains approach difficult to implement. Globalization simply limits the ability of a state to follow a politics-in-command approach in the absence of actual military conflict, which explains why the political economy approaches of the United States, Europe, and Japan are not that different in the scheme of things. China's own grand strategy to reach out to the world to outflank the US–Japan alliance has also contributed to a divergent European policy toward China although there are severe limitations to Beijing's ability to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe.     

POLITICS, PLANNING, AND CAPITALISM: NATIONAL ECONOMIC PLANNING IN FRANCE AND BRITAIN

Abstract. This study examines explanations for the success or failure of planning efforts of the 1945 British Labour Government and the French Government ofthe Fourth Republic. Most conventional views of British postwar planning depict it as hopelessly weak and disorganized while French planningisseen as reasonably well-armed and effectively organized. However, these views reflect excessive attention on purely administrative as well as political-cultural explanations and tend to ignore the critical underlying role of domestic politics and power. The French planning effort was only one element of a broader, relatively uncoordinated collaborative process. carried on among bureaucratic state elites and large industry, which effectively accelerated industrial investment and economic growth. Its success hinged on the inability of organized labour effectively to defend its wage interests within the political structure. In the British case, manipulation of capital markets was only marginally productive given the power and autonomy of the finance sector while the alternative attempt to plan through manpower direction failed due to the ability of organized labour to defend its wage interests in the face of chronic inflation. In each case. the structure of political power was most important in determining the success of the divergent technical approaches to planning.     

Constructing and contesting City of London power: NGOs and the emergence of noisier financial politics

Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This paper acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008 the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to global finance, and a more pessimistic reading. We demonstrate how macro-narratives and public story-telling both construct and contest City and financial sector power. In a new pattern since the financial crash, NGOs have moved from campaigns of limited duration and narrow focus, to a more sustained presence on macro-structural issues. Adopting a supply–demand framework for assessing governance and regulatory change, we look at the emergence of TheCityUK as a new advocacy arm and the strategies of three of the more prominent and focused NGOs that have mobilized in the aftermath of the crash: the Tax Justice Network’s (TJN) use of the ‘finance curse’; Positive Money on private endogenous money creation; and Finance Watch counterweight strategies at the level of the European Union. We suggest these mobilizations highlight the need for a more concerted and orchestrated construction of a global institutional civil society infrastructure in finance (a global financial public sphere) to achieve greater access, resources, scrutiny and oversight for a range of specialist expert NGOs.     

Housing and the working class in an Indian metropolis

The paper examines a part of the housing market in the Indian metropolitan city of Bangalore. Some problems of housing finance from the viewpoints of families and of public authorities are indicated. It is argued that it is these financial problems that make access difficult for the poorer half of the population of Bangalore to forms of housing other than inner city slums or urban fringe informal housing. Public housing with its unrealistic standards of service provision, but especially its high initial access costs is not well designed to meet the needs of the majority of families. The paper concludes that unless public housing authorities emulate the private housing market they will continue to play a marginal role in housing in a city such as Bangalore. There are signs that this is happening in India with experimentation in both housing finance and lower service standards.     

Institutional Power and the Risk of Finance

ABSTRACT

This article examines the nature of financial reason and the firm-level processes shaping and sustaining financial accumulation. It argues that the standard views of financial reason offered by neoclassical theory and international political economy prevent a nuanced understanding of key corporate power systems. Drawing on Hilferding’s theory of finance capital as well as his unique methodological approach, the paper shows that these accounts fail to consider properly the range of forces constituting financial rationality.     

Party Management of Talent: Building a Party‐led,Merit‐based Talent Market in China

This study examines major policy measures that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have adopted to establish a party‐led, merit‐based talent management system to cope with a talent deficit in the reform era. It also assesses the effectiveness of these measures at both national and local levels. This study argues that although merit principles are never entirely missing from China's cadre personnel management, they have been given increasing priority in managing the cadre corps and recruiting global experts to China during the past three decades. This study shows that the CCP personnel management policies are in substantial and adaptive evolution, which is important for understanding the nature of human resource management in post‐Mao China.     

The Problem of Predictability: Unstable Systems, Traffic Dividers and Arms Races

Social scientists seem to do a good job predicting some major events in history and spectacularly poor job with others. This paper is concerned with the puzzle that this poses. It investigates systems of interaction and suggests that, in principle, some criteria can be established to aid our intuitions about what might and might not be predictable. It differs from the more usual approaches which tend to treat history in monolithic terms. Instead it examines a simple concrete model of processes like economic growth and coalition formation.     

State-owned enterprises,state capitalism and social distribution in Singapore

State-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds have ‘insured’ Singapore's domestic economy against financial crisis and restructuring interventions from multilateral institutions, engendered elite cohesion and political stability, binding middle class employees to the political system. This essay analyses paths by which the Singapore government established state-owned enterprises and transformed them into global enterprises. It also examines how sovereign wealth funds contribute to government social expenditure without increasing taxes. Such redistribution through state capitalism resonates with the People's Action Partys social democratic origins, inviting comparisons with contemporary developments in Chinese state-capitalism.     

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REFORM IN POST‐CONFLICT SOCIETIES: LESSONS FROM ACEH,INDONESIA

Post‐conflict reconstruction programs increasingly include components designed to strengthen the performance of the public service and to support public sector reform. Although there is a growing body of literature on the relationship between public administration, and peace and development, there have been few case studies of donor efforts to strengthen public administration as part of post‐conflict reconstruction. This study examines efforts to strengthen the civil service in Aceh, Indonesia, following the province's first post‐conflict elections in 2006. It examines the impact of a donor‐funded program designed to assist Aceh's first post‐conflict administration (2007–2012) to reform its personnel management practices. The case study sheds light on weaknesses in current donor approaches to public administration reform in post‐conflict situations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Debt Policies Make a Difference in Finance Officers' Perceptions of the Importance of Debt Management Factors?

This article explores the importance of various debt policy factors using a national survey of government finance officers. Further, it examines whether the presence of a particular factor in a debt policy influences finance officers' perception of its importance. We find that debt policies tend to be technical in nature and that broad policy issues are most often not included in debt policies. Moreover, we find that the inclusion of debt management factors in debt policies has a powerful influence on their perceived importance by public managers.     

How Municipal Property Tax Responded to State Aid Cuts: The Case of Massachusetts Municipalities in the Post‐2001 Fiscal Crisis

This empirical study examines municipal property tax responses to state aid cuts during the post‐2001 fiscal crisis. Using panel econometric techniques on annual changes in property tax levy by 351 incorporated Massachusetts municipalities in the period of 2002–2006, the results suggest that municipal governments offset about 9 cents of each dollar of net state aid cut through the increase of their property tax rates. It contributes to public finance literature on the extent to which local property tax can be used to stabilize municipal revenues when the intergovernmental revenue shrinks.     

Education finance reform: A dynamic perspective

We use a dynamic Tiebout model to analyze the consequences of moving from a pure local system of education finance to a pure state system of finance in which each student receives the same resources. While much of the education finance literature focuses on the static or immediate effects of such a change, our analysis also examines the dynamic effects. Numerical simulations for a calibrated version of our model indicate that these dynamic effects are very important. Comparing steady states, we find that aggregate welfare increases on the order of 10 percent following the switch to a state system. The key to this welfare gain is that a local system yields inefficiently low investment in human capital of children from low-income families.     

Taxing work

Abstract. This article examines the development of tax regimes across OECD countries in the latter part of the twentieth century. It gives particular emphasis to taxes on labour income. Taxes on labour income represent a major drain on private households. They have become the mainstay of many of these countries' public sector finances. Taxes on labour income rather than on capital appear to be the preferred instrument of finance for those economic and political interests that advocate and support a strong (and thereby expensive) welfare state. There is little 'free lunch' to be had in these welfare states; if anything, 'socialism in one class' seems to be the rule. Coordinated market economies tend to impose higher tax rates on labour because they have higher levels of wage coordination, their governments are more likely to be oriented to the left and their executives are relatively weak in relation to their legislatures.