Financial Markets Matter More than Fiscal Institutions for the Success of the Euro

Many argue that the euro is handicapped as a currency because European governments are unwilling to pool responsibility for fiscal policy in common institutions. This argument is derived from the theory of optimum currency areas and fuelled by analogy with US experience. It is mistaken. A monetary union does not need a fiscal union to work. Worse, efforts to build European fiscal institutions are likely to distract European policymakers from a more important agenda. Europe needs a fully functioning banking union with a common risk-free asset if Europeans want to stabilise the euro as a common currency. Moreover, it would need these things even if the euro did not exist and all it had was the common market. Financial stability – and not fiscal federalism – is the key to Europe's future. European policymakers should focus their efforts on building the necessary institutions.     

Why Solidarity Matters: The Political Strategy of Welfare Design

Reporting on our recent book, The Solidarity Society, this article explores the way in which the design of welfare programmes interacts with and shapes the underlying quality of social relations between members of society—and, through this, public attitudes to welfare. Given that sustaining generous welfare over long timescales requires the support of electorates, this ‘relational’ dimension of welfare policy is crucial for the long‐term strategy of tackling poverty and inequality. The article looks in particular at the ‘welfare dilemmas’ that can arise from tensions between targeting and universalism and between need and entitlement, where the distributional and relational elements of welfare policy work against one another. We conclude that entrenching a generous welfare settlement will require strong elements of both universalism and reciprocity in the design of welfare.     

Fiscal Decentralization and Natural Disaster Mitigation: Evidence from the United States

How decentralized government structure influences public service delivery has been a major focus of debate in the public finance literature. In this paper, we empirically examine the effect of fiscal decentralization on natural disaster damages across the U.S. states. We construct a unique measure of decentralization using state and local government expenditures on natural resources, which include investment in flood control and mitigation measures, among others. Using state‐level panel data from 1982 to 2011, we find that states that are more decentralized in natural resource expenditures have experienced more economic losses from floods and storms. This effect is only pronounced in states that are at higher risks of flooding. Our findings suggest that fiscal decentralization may lead to inefficient protection against natural disasters and provide implications for the assignment of disaster management responsibilities across different levels of government in the U.S. federal system.     

我国财政权限配置的不足与改进

我国财政权限的配置还存在一些不足.我国未来财政权限的配置在总体上应该采取非对称型模式,即将财政收益权在各级政府间进行适当划分,并偏向中央政府,使中央政府保持足够的财力;在对财政收益权进行划分的同时,对财政立法权则应基本保持集中,由中央政府享有主要的权力;进一步协调财政(税收)征收权在两套征管机关之间的行使;赋予各级地方政府相对独立的财政预算权.     

The OBR and the March 2023 Budget: The Travails of UK Economic Growth and the Politics of Technocratic Fiscal Governance

This article places the Office for Budget Responsibility's commentary on the March 2023 UK Budget in political context. It explores how increased independent expert input has transformed the UK economic policy regime, focussing on the complex relationship between rules-based economic governance, independent oversight and fiscal discipline. The technocratic veneer that enshrines the UK fiscal watchdog obscures the inevitable politics of rules-based fiscal governance. The recent budget revealed OBR scepticism about how far budget measures can address the UK economy's long-term structural weaknesses. This underlined the key role for judgment inherent within technocratic fiscal oversight.     

Sovereign Wealth Fund and fiscal federalism in Nigeria (2011–14): An assessment of contending issues

After more than half a century as a leading oil-producing nation in Africa, Nigeria followed the footsteps of most natural resources rich countries (particularly crude-oil) by establishing the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF). SWF is a large pool of state-owned investment fund composed of diverse financial instruments, invested in whole or in part, outside home countries. Since 2004, ‘Special funds’, of which SWF is part, have become issues of serious contention between the Federal and state governments in Nigeria. On 22 May 2011, the 36 state Governors approached the Nigerian Supreme Court, requesting the Court to use its judicial powers to squash plans by the Federal Government of Nigeria to withdraw $1 billion from the Excess Crude Account to float the planned SWF. The bone of contention surrounds issues of constitutionality, ownership and prudency in the management of the fund. Relying on extant literature, Acts of Parliament as well as commentaries, opinion pieces, editorials and news articles from Nigerian newspapers, this paper examines the controversies that surround the establishment of SWF in Nigeria within the context of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), and assesses the conflict mitigating capacity of the Nigeria’s federalism especially in the light of the nation’s fiscal practices.     

The Impact of the Fiscal Crisis on Public Administration Reforms: Comparison of 14 European Countries

Abstract

This study aims to empirically test a widespread assumption that fiscal crises instigate administrative reforms. The empirical analysis relies upon an international comparative study of the responses of 14 European governments to the fiscal crisis of 2008–2013. It is found that fiscal crisis and public administration reforms are not necessarily closely connected. In the majority of cases, the fiscal crisis did not have an instant effect of triggering structural public administration reforms or substantial shifts in existing reform trajectories. The crisis intensified the pressure to reform public administration to some extent, but the European governments’ responses predominantly followed a combination of straightforward cutbacks and incremental change. More substantial reforms were carried out in countries most severely hit by the crisis and/or where administrative reforms were conditioned by international financial assistance.     

Contemporary Women’s Autofiction as Critique of Postfeminist Discourse

ABSTRACT

While commentaries on the phenomenon of postfeminism have centred on its manifestations in media and popular culture, this article highlights the potential of literature for extending existing debates within postfeminist studies. I argue that the emergence of contemporary women’s autofiction offers the possibility of a literary response to the individualising narrative of a neoliberal and postfeminist sensibility. I advance this contention via an analysis of two texts: Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2012) and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014). Their writing practice is resolutely political because it employs the confessional mode, as indebted to the emancipatory roots of the feminist movement, to reflect on the enduring marginality of female artistic identity. By foregrounding the inherently provisional nature of their being, both texts emphasise that the search for a viable artistic consciousness and experiments in artistic method are as crucial as the final product itself, especially when the definition of woman as artist still remains contested. I thus locate the existence of these texts in a wider social imaginary conducive for feminist organising. In this respect, the rising popularity of contemporary women’s autofiction may offer strategies crucial for remediating an otherwise diminished feminist politics of the present.     

Racial structural solidarity

Abstract

Effective political action against racial injustice requires a conception of solidarity based on the social and material reality of this form of injustice. I develop such a notion of solidarity by extending Iris Young’s notion of ‘gender as seriality’ to race. This notion of solidarity avoids the problems encountered by Shelby’s ‘common oppression view’ and Gooding-Williams’s non-foundational view. On Shelby’s ‘common oppression’ view, solidarity is based solely on the victims’ shared condition of oppression. According to Shelby, all victims of racial oppression can be reasonably expected to endorse a set of principles that will move them to common action. Gooding-Williams sheds doubt on the idea that such shared principles exist and defends instead a view of politics as action-in-concert, marked by reasonable disagreement, and a non-foundational view of solidarity constituted through the controversy of politics rather than given in virtue of pre-political commitments or interests. I argue that the problem with such a notion is that it is unable to link the material and social reality of the unjust structures to the forms of political action that would effectively transform social reality. My notion of ‘structural racial solidarity’ would avoid these problems.     

Postliberalism: The New Centre Ground of British Politics

Brexit and support for anti‐establishment insurgencies suggest that British politics is moving away from the old left–right opposition towards a new divide between the defenders and detractors of progressive liberalism. As this article suggests, progressive liberalism differs significantly from both classical and new liberalism. It fuses free‐market economics with social egalitarianism and identity politics. Both the hard left and the radical right reject this combination and want to undo a number of liberal achievements. British politics is also moving in a postliberal direction. In the economy, postliberalism signals a shift from rampant market capitalism to economic justice and reciprocity. In society, it signals a shift from individualism and egalitarianism to social solidarity and fraternal relations. And politically, it signals a shift from the minority politics of vested interests and balkanised group identity to a majority politics based on a balance of interests, shared identity and the embedding of state and market in the intermediary institutions of civil society. This article argues that postliberalism is redefining Britain's political centre ground in an age where neither progressive liberalism nor reactionary anti‐liberalism commands majority support. First, it charts the ascendancy of progressive liberalism over the past quarter‐century. Second, it contrasts anti‐liberal reactions with postliberal alternatives, before exploring why earlier iterations of postliberalism failed to gain traction with the political mainstream. Third, it provides a discussion and critique of Theresa May's postliberal conservatism, notably the tension between free‐market globalisation and free trade, on the one hand, and the support for national industry and the indigenous working class, on the other.