International and Comparative Political Economy

Since the global financial crisis of 2008/09, international cooperation has failed to curb volatile financial markets. Changes in the global rules of finance discussed in the G20 during the last decade remain limited, and it is uncertain whether they are suitable to help mitigate and manage future crises to come. This book offers an alternative to the popular notion that this failure is the result of the ‘nature’ of the international system, the clash of national egoisms, or lack of leadership. It instead investigates problems of international cooperation by looking at their deeper structural origins in the competition of different models of capitalism.
US finance-led, EU integration-led, and East Asian state-led capitalism complement each other globally but have conflicting preferences on how to regulate international finance. This interdependence of capitalist models is relatively stable but also prone to crises caused by volatile financial flows, global economic imbalances, and ‘currency wars’. By bringing together approaches from International Political Economy and Comparative Capitalism, this book shows that regulating international finance is not a technocratic exercise of fine-tuning the machinery of international institutions, but rather a political process. International cooperation can only be successful, if it goes hand in hand with deep domestic changes in each of these capitalist models.

Methodological nationalism is hard-wired into social democratic thought and practice. The methodological nationalism which characterised the political economy of social democracy as a political movement in the 20 th Century is a crucial source of the problems facing social democratic renewal today. The supra-national Keynesianism of the clearing Union so central to Keynes' own initial draft proposals at Bretton Woods was still born. Only a staunchly national version of Keynesian emerged. There is a pressing need for a post-National social democracy. Yet cosmopolitan democratic thought-which entails a scaling up of traditional social democracy notions-indicates the paucity of thinking on this topic. This paper proposes small steps towards social democratic policy thinking beyond the national-focusing on confluence of interest in tackling inequality between Bretton Woods institutions and European social democracy. It considers the post-GFC re-centring of the IMF and others changes the contours of egalitarian policy space. Within the modus operandi of the Bretton Woods economic institutions in the postwar era, adjustment burdens fell on debtors, not creditors, and the emphasis on domestic full employment and egalitarianism was muted at best. In the wake of the GFC Bretton Woods institutions such as the IMF, however, have taken on the inequality (and jobs) agenda in new and interesting ways. Indeed-they are arguably more visible and vocal campaigners on tackling inequality than many social democratic parties. This paper takes this renewed focus on inequality as its starting point for a consideration British and French growth models and how their foundations of competitiveness have evolved since the 2008 financial crash. Focusing on the case of IMF, it compares their efforts and ideas on tackling inequality with UK and French mainstream left parties' policy thinking. The paper explores to what extent this augmented focus on inequality might this create opportunities for social democracy policy activism.

The core European economic policy debates of the last decade, and probably the next, surrounds the wisdom or otherwise fiscal consolidation and other austerity policies, pursued in response to higher public debt and credibility concerns sparked by the Global Financial and Eurozone crises. The IMF and the Politics of Austerity charts how the IMF fed into those debates, promoting one prominent set of diagnostic economic ideas about the crisis, and appropriate responses. In the process, the IMF re-evaluated its understanding of financial markets and their relationship to economic stability, and also reassessed its understandings fiscal policy efficacy for advanced economies it deemed to have 'fiscal space'. In this contribution I address a range of issue raised in this symposium about austerity, the IMF, and the politics of economic ideas. For European politics scholars, the IMF warrants closer inspection than it often receives. This, as Lagarde put it, is 'not your grandmother's IMF'. 1 1 http://freakonomics.com/podcast/not-grandmothers-m-f/

This paper focuses on the cases of Malaysia and Thailand and investigates the possibility of upgrading these countries from the middle-income trap and the possible roles of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)
in this process. The 4IR may induce firms to introduce factory automation to facilitate upgrade into higher segments with local spillovers. A key factor for this positive scenario is local institutions facilitating the
training and upskilling of their local workforce. By contrast, increased problems are expected for other countries with the mid-range level of wages and mid-level of educated population, and firms in these economies mostly execute labor-intensive production and are likely
to be substituted by additional factory automations or their multinational firms may move to neighboring countries for low wages.

Crude oil remains an essential commodity that fuels the economy of countries the world over. On a high demand from time-to-time in the international oil market, countries endowed with the ‘black gold’ produce and export barrels of oil daily at a given price determined by the market forces of demand and supply. Nigeria, the largest oil producing country in Africa, maximum production capacity is 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Heavily dependent on the proceeds from the sales of her Bonny Light crude oil, it is in the best interest of the Nigerian State for oil prices to be high in the volatile international oil market. Hence, it became a full Member State of the cartel – Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1971. Over four decades later, Nigeria’s membership of OPEC became a topic for debate among erudite scholars, astute analysts and professionals in Nigeria’s oil industry following the plummet in oil prices from 2014 which adversely affected the country’s undiversified petro-dollar economy. This research paper weighs the cost and benefit of Nigeria’s membership of the oil cartel in order to ascertain whether Nigeria should remain a member or use the exit door out of OPEC. Theoretically, Realism was adopted for the study. Also used were the historical and comparative approaches with the qualitative method of secondary data collection.

Συλλογιζόμενοι τις πολιτικοοικονομικές συγκυρίες των τελευταίων 30 ετών,
όπως οι δύο πετρελαϊκές κρίσεις(1973, 1979), όσο και η μεταβολή από τις σταθερές
στις κυμαινόμενες συναλλαγματικές ισοτιμίες με το διάγγελμα Nixon (1971) και την
κατάρρευση του συστήματος Bretton Woods, γίνεται αντιληπτό πως το μέχρι τότε
Κευνσιανό μοντέλο πολιτικοοικονομικής οργάνωσης παρέπαιε εντελώς. Καθώς η
παραγωγή ήταν ισχνή και δεν κάλυπτε το χρέος των δημόσιων δαπανών, ο
αυξανόμενος πληθωρισμός δεν ανταποκρινόταν στην αύξηση της παραγωγής
δημιουργώντας παράλληλα και ανεργία. Το φαινόμενο αυτό ονομάστηκε
στασιμοπληθωρισμός. Όλη αυτή η πολιτικοοικονομική κατάσταση δημιούργησε το
γόνιμο έδαφος για τις δράσεις των νεοφιλελεύθερων πολιτικών, που βρίσκονταν σε
πειραματικό στάδιο, από την επομένη της κρίσης του 1929. Κύριοι εκφραστές
υπήρξαν ο Friedrich Von Hayek και Milton Friedman, οι οποίοι δόμησαν αλλά και
στηρίχτηκαν σε ιδεολογικά οπλοστάσια, όπως το Ινστιτούτο οικονομικών υποθέσεων,
τη σχολή Adam Smith, τη σχολή Μον Πελερεν και τη σχολή του Σικάγο. Βασική
έμπνευση ήταν ο κεντρικός ρόλος της αγοράς που φαλκιδεύεται από την κρατιστική,
Νεοκορπορατιστική μέγγενη του κράτους, προσπαθώντας διανοητικά τον
επαναπροσδιορισμό της αντίληψης που υπήρχε για την οικονομία. Χώρες όπως το
Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο και οι ΗΠΑ υπήρξαν οι κύριοι εκφραστές αυτών των πολιτικών
επί Margaret Thatcher και Ronald Reagan. Ο σκοπός της Διπλωματικής Εργασίας
είναι η μελέτη της πολιτικοοικονομικής δράσης των νεοφιλελεύθερων πολιτικών
όσον αφορά την κοινωνική ευημερία, το εισόδημα και την ανισότητα στο διεθνές
γίγνεσθαι. Επίσης αναλύονται η επέκταση του χρηματοπιστωτικού τομέα και η μορφή
που πήρε ως αποκύημα των νεοφιλελεύθερων πολιτικών, η τεχνολογική επανάσταση,
η απορυθμισμένη χρηματιστικοποίηση και αν απέδιδαν σε παραγωγικές επενδύσεις
και πραγματικές τιμές, με γνώμονα την καλύτερη κατανομή και πληροφόρηση.

This seminar examines theoretical and empirical work about the interactions between politics and markets. The course studies both how economic performance affects politics and how variation in political institutions and patterns of political behavior shapes economic outcomes. We will interact with related literatures on democratization, elections, interest groups, and globalization.

As Egypt builds a “new Cairo”, they want international branch campuses (IBCs) to be a part of it. Governments increasingly view internationalization as a means for advancing national policy priorities, driven by a combination of enhancing economic competitiveness and global reputation.  Such government attention toward internationalization can be a welcome advance, as well as fraught with potential negative policy and practical implications.  This paper explores some of these tensions.

This book examines the relationship between development economics, social protection and democratization in the specific context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Moving existing theories of transformation into a new terrain, it sheds light on the exclusive origins of dictatorship and democracy.

URL Palgrave Macmillan: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780230299795

Available Upon Request to Scholars Living in Sub-Saharan Africa (Free of Charge). Please email request to: ceramial@gmail.com


Table of contents
Introduction: Permanent Emergency Welfare Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa
Theoretical Framework: Democracy, System Transformation and Welfare Regimes
Pathways of Development
Systemic Problems and Structural Challenges
Poverty and Human Development
Labor Market, Poverty Relief and Health
Education, Child Protection and Gender Equality
Hunger, Food Security, Safe Water and Sanitation
Social Conflicts and the Politics of Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa
Democratization and Consolidation of Democratic Institutions
The Exclusive Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Reflecting the intensive debate on the economic and social prerequisites of democracy (cf. Lipset 1959; Przeworski et al. 2000; Merkel 2010) establishing efficient welfare regimes - (Esping-Andersen 1990) appears as the most important element for democracy promotion, institutionalization and consolidation. As described elsewhere (Cerami 2012), welfare regimes - understood as ‘a particular constellations of social, political and economic arrangements that tend to nurture a particular welfare’ (Taylor-Gooby 1996: 200)- play three extremely important system-stabilizing functions: a modernizing, a democratizing and a consolidating function.

This article examines the important role of oil prices and oil price cycles in the modernization and democratization of contemporary societies. The main argument put forward is that oil, oil prices and oil price cycles greatly influence the prospects for economic growth of a country, and the ways in which different waves (and reverse waves) of modernization and democratization take place. A particular attention here is given to the ‘oil revolution’ that has occurred in the post-war period, and its impact on the processes of modernization and democratization of contemporary societies.

This paper aims at exploring the relationship between Europeanization, Enlargement and social policy developments in Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, it examines the importance of ideas, interests and institutions in the making of contemporary public and social policies, as well as focusing on other mechanisms that may lead to institutional change. Here, the “goodness of fit” thesis developed by Börzel and Risse (2000) is analyzed, and other elements that may lead to EU convergence are also examined. These elements are identified in the strategic negotiations of actors, in policy learning processes, in social policy diffusion of ideas and in the emergence of new forms of transnational solidarity. Contrary to common assumptions that address the role of EU institutions as being minimal in the formation of post-communist social policy, it is argued that the European Union did play a crucial role in the process of systemic transformation by helping the introduction of new social policy ideas, interests and institutions.