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Insightful study that identifies the underlying factors contributing to countries continually accumulating immense debt
How do countries' political and policy choices affect the credit ratings they receive? Sovereign ratings influence countries' cost of funding, and observers have long worried that rating agencies - these unelected, unappointed, unaccountable, for-profit organizations - can interfere with democratic sovereignty if they assign lower ratings to certain political and policy choices. The questions of whether, how, and why ratings react to policy and politics, however, remain unexplored. Rating Politics opens the black box of sovereign ratings to uncover the logic that drives rating responses to political and policy factors. Relying on statistical analysis of rating scores, interviews with soverei...
The crisis in the euro area is a defining moment in the history of European integration. It has revealed major flaws in the architecture of the European Union; it has challenged European institutions to shape an appropriate response; and it has tested the patience of a European public that is eager to see their economic prospects improve again. This volume brings together some of the world’s top economists and policymakers to explain how this crisis came about and what is to be done. The policy agenda these chapters establish is going to be difficult to implement, not least because of popular misunderstanding and political opposition. This book argues, that it is essential that European policymakers push forward this agenda or they run the risk of seeing Europe’s economies fall back into crisis. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.
This book challenges the common perception or assumption that greater state intervention and re-centralization will result in convergence towards a more equitable and inclusive growth model in China. Instead of asking whether local agency matters, this project examines the conditions and latitude of local agency under initial decentralization followed by increasing top-down re-centralization. The central argument is that in response to common policy directives and pressures from above, disparities in local growth strategies have interacted with political institutions in generating “embedded” sub-national welfare mix models, with varying articulations of state, market, community, and family in Chinese welfare production. The bottom-up feedback effects from these embedded models have somewhat offset growing top-down pressure for re-centralization, contributing to persistent sub-national variations. This author contributes to a growing literature of comparative political economy that seeks to examine the political and economic logics of social policy in non-western and authoritarian political systems.
Reconfiguring European States in Crisis offers a ground-breaking analysis by some of Europe's leading political scientists, examining how the European national state and the European Union state have dealt with two sorts of changes in the last two decades. Firstly, the volume analyses the growth of performance measurement in government, the rise of new sorts of policy delivery agencies, the devolution of power to regions and cities, and the spread of neoliberal ideas in economic policy. The volume demonstrates how the rise of non-state controlled organizations and norms combine with Europeanization to reconfigure European states. Secondly, the volume focuses on how the current crises in fiscal policy, Brexit, security and terrorism, and migration through a borderless European Union have had dramatic effects on European states and will continue to do so.
"Much has been written since the publication in 1990 of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism on the concept of welfare regime as an analytical tool to study social policy stability and change in Europe and beyond. As a concept, welfare regime emphasizes both stability over change and divergence between country clusters over convergence. Studying on concrete policy instruments rather than spending patterns and focusing on policies introduced to protect workers against the risk of unemployment and the loss of income, this chapter explores potential patterns of commonality and difference in the social policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in four distinct welfare regimes...
This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.
This volume focuses on the aftermath of the euro crisis and whether the reforms have brought about lasting changes to the economic and political structures of the crisis countries or if the changes were short-term and easily abandoned post-bailout and post-recovery. Starting with an analysis of the state of euro area governance at the onset of the crisis and the ensuing reforms, the book considers structural conditions as well as those specific to the domestic political economy of most of the countries affected by the crisis, including Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy. It presents up-to-date and incisive analysis of the aftermath of the crisis and suggests how we can situate it within our understanding of different national growth models in Europe. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners interested in the Euro Crisis, Economic and Monetary Union, European Union and European politics and more broadly to Comparative Politics, Political Economy, International Relations, Economics, Finance, Business and Industry.
How Governments Borrow reveals how annual borrowing decisions are informed by domestic politics. The book traces the annual fiscal policymaking process in Emerging Markets (EM) to show how a government's partisan policy preferences are a primary determinant of annual external borrowing decisions and thus patterns of debt accumulation. That sovereign debt composition has partisan political roots provides insights for scholars in political science, international relations, economics, sociology, and public administration that work on sovereign debt. Sovereign debt composition enhances or limits the capacity of an EM government to contribute to social and economic development. Many EMs depend on...