In this study, we examine how local government debt responds to environmental policies in China. We show that when an environmental policy impacts the economy, local governments are likely to increase debt issuance, with this effect becoming stronger when local officials have greater career incentives within the Chinese bureaucratic system. Over-accumulation of local government debt, which leads to social welfare losses, is closely tied to the urgency local officials feel to secure promotions. Our analysis offers valuable insights for better coordination between fiscal and environmental policies.

This paper introduces a new set of comprehensive and cross-country-comparable indexes of migration policy selectivity. Crucially, these reflect the multidimensional nature of the differential treatment of migrants. We use these indexes to study the evolution of migration policy selectivity and estimate how they affect migration flows. Combining all publicly available and relevant data since WWII, we build three composite indexes that identify selectivity in terms of skills, economic resources and nationality. First, we use these to characterize migration policies in 42 countries between 1990 and 2014. Second, we examine the relationship between the selectivity of migration policy and migration flows. Each of the three dimensions of migration policy is found to correlate strongly and significantly with both the size and structure of migration flows.

This article encourages critical discussion about the economic and social consequences of the war in Ukraine. This war has global effects in various dimensions of social life: energy policy, the environmental dimension, the economic sphere, and also the political atmosphere. In each of these dimensions, it poses a threat to sustainable development and the interests of the labour class in Europe. It attempts to change the balance of power in global geopolitics and also proves to be a useful cover for attempts to change the model of relations between employees and the state and business in many European countries. Due to the conflict in Ukraine and the ensuing calls for increased efforts to ‘ensure security’, Europe has turned towards a war economy in which the interests of the arms industry are more important than the interests of the working classes. The war in Ukraine has proved to be an excellent justification for governments to lower social standards and get rid of the remnants of the welfare state. From this perspective, the atmosphere of the New Cold War becomes a challenge for the labour movement, the global left and all progressive social circles.

Several scholars anticipated Ludwig von Mises's calculation argument against socialism. The present paper summarises the contributions by the members of the German Historical School of Economics who preceded Mises and provides several examples of anticipation that have not been discussed in the literature. Furthermore, the paper explains why it is not a coincidence that members of the Historical School claimed as early as the nineteenth century that socialism was unfeasible due to calculation and knowledge problems. In their attempts to understand historically specific features of capitalism, they developed an approach to capital that involved the institutions of private property, money, the market, the enterprise, and monetary calculation. Starting from this institutional approach to capital and capitalism, it was only a small step to the question of what it means for socialist systems that those institutions are lacking.

This article uses Loïc Wacquant’s concept of the centaur state to analyse symbolic framings of the meaning and future of work in the Australian policy response to COVID-19 in 2020. In contrast with historical conceptualisations anchored in rights and social security, contemporary Australian social welfare policy discourse is dominated by political representations of the imperative to work. For people currently outside of the labour market, self-reliance through paid work is a primary objective of social security policy. In 2020, economic impacts of national lockdowns were ameliorated by large transfers from the state to businesses and individuals. Concurrent announcements of plans for a ‘business-led’ post-pandemic economic recovery centred the message that the meaning of work lies in its individual and social utility. Prior to the pandemic, transformation of the modes of organisation of work had already brought into question normative claims about the meaning of work, and what is comprehended by the term ‘job’. Analysis of key ‘economic recovery’ policy initiatives illustrates that they combined considerable corporate welfare with a construction of job seekers as having unrealistic expectations of meaningful work, for which there could be no room in the institutional machinery driving economic recovery. In the policy trajectory of the Australian centaur state, the future of work for people currently unemployed is to serve as a resource to fuel the business-led recovery.

Does technological change fuel political disruption? Drawing on fine-grained labor market data from Germany, this paper examines how technological change affects regional electorates. We first show that the well-known decline in manufacturing and routine jobs in regions with higher robot adoption or investment in information and communication technology (ICT) was more than compensated by parallel employment growth in the service sector and cognitive non-routine occupations. This change in the regional composition of the workforce has important political implications: Workers trained for these new sectors typically hold progressive political values and support progressive pro-system parties. Overall, this composition effect dominates the politically perilous direct effect of automation-induced substitution. As a result, technology-adopting regions are unlikely to turn into populist-authoritarian strongholds.

Many traditional regions are being transformed as industries restructure. Paradoxically, the global economic downturn offers opportunities to innovate on policies to regenerate areas experiencing deindustrialisation, with one emerging focus being the development of ‘green skills’ to facilitate the transition of these places to ‘green economies’. In this article, we explore similar policy objectives (i.e. regeneration activity based (in part) on green economy transitions) across three deindustrialising/deindustrialised regions – Appalachia (United States), Ruhr (Germany) and the Valleys (South Wales) – to provide an account of the ways in which different regions with similar industrial pasts diverge in their approach to moving towards greener futures. Our argument is that the emphasis in such transitions should be the creation of ‘decent’ jobs, with new economic activity and employment initiatives embracing a ‘high road’ (i.e. high skill/high pay/high quality) trajectory. Utilising a ‘varieties of capitalism’ analysis, we contend that an effective, socially inclusive and ‘high road’ transition is more likely to emerge within co-ordinated market economy contexts, for example, Germany, than within the liberal market economy contexts of, for example, the United States and United Kingdom. In identifying the critical success factors leading to ‘high road’ green economy, the implications for any such transition within the liberal market economy context of Australia are highlighted.

This article analyses the 2008 economic crisis and its outcomes for the Baltic states. It then gives a genealogy of European economic policy responses to the crisis, tracing them from the emerging ‘freshwater’ school of economics (e.g. University of Chicago) that arose in opposition to Keynesian theory. The more immediate cause of the 2008 crisis, long in the making, was its reliance on private debt to sustain economic demand in light of profit-enhancing wage suppression. Following the 2008 financial shock, European Union policymakers crafted policy that placed the burden of adjustment on labour. A programme of austerity was chosen in much of the European Union, at odds with the post-war European ‘social model’. This represented a retreat from the notion of a European project that encouraged liberalisation of economic policy but at the same time could be harmonised with a social dimension to create a distinctive ‘Social Europe’. Nowhere was this austerity more vigorously applied than in the Baltic states. Its effects are examined here, along with lessons to be derived from that experience.

The process of financialisation has been cast as a major contributor to increasing inequality of wealth and income in a number of advanced industrialised economies, but the nature of the link requires precise clarification. In this article, we argue that financialisation in Australia has advanced inequality, but in a particular way. Charting several features of ‘financialisation of the macroeconomy’, we accept that this process has contributed to increased inequality in the sense that the wealthy have increased their wealth faster than households and individuals at the lower end of the wealth distribution. However, there is limited Australian evidence to suggest that income redistribution has occurred as a result of the ‘financialisation of the firm’. At the level of the firm, increased inequality of wealth can be attributed directly to financialisation if firm practices are oriented to increasing shareholder value at the expense of returns to other stakeholders such as workers or suppliers, and increased income inequality can be linked specifically to financialisation through increases in earnings to financial agents. We suggest several reasons for the relative absence of a firm-level dimension of financialisation but caution that such a trend remains possible, particularly if regulation of the labour market is weakened.

In 1945 the Curtin Labor Government declared it had the capacity and responsibility to permanently eliminate the blight of unemployment from the lives of Australians in its White Paper ‘Full Employment in Australia’. This was the culmination of a century of struggle to establish the ‘right to work’, once a key objective of the 19th century labour movement. Deeply resented and long resisted by employer groups, the policy was abandoned in the mid-1970s, without an electoral mandate. Although the Australian Labor Party and union movement urged public vigilance to preserve full employment during 23 years of Liberal rule, after 1978 they quietly dropped the policy as the Australian Labor Party turned increasingly to corporate donors for the money they needed to stay electorally competitive. While few leading lights of today’s Labor movement care to discuss it, it is right that Australians celebrate this bold statement of our right to work, and the 30 years of full employment it heralded.

This paper tests the hypothesis pertaining to the interdependencies between trade and environmental policies in the presence of industry/firm lobbies, which is captured through industry/firm size. For an unbalanced panel of manufacturing firms in India at the five-digit National Industrial Classification (NIC), 2008 for the period 2008–2019, I find that firm size has a positive and significant impact on trade policy. The same holds true for a subset of firms that are polluting in nature (based on the Central Pollution Control Board classification). It is found that larger firms have a greater influence on those trade policies that are set unilaterally by the government. Also, there is no empirical support in favour of trade and environment linkages in the Indian context. This could be due to the fact that these two policies come under the domain of independent ministries of the government. Moreover, environmental safety assumes less significance and tends to adversely affect the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. Notwithstanding the fact that environmental regulations are in place, the enforcement and monitoring mechanisms are remarkably weak on account of weak environmental institutions.

This paper introduces the concept of institutional resilience based on a population game. Agents in an economy are randomly matched to play a coordination game with two strategies, cooperate and defect. A breach of contract can be adjudicated in court. Agents can update their strategy, which is modelled using the replicator dynamic. In this context, cooperation is defined as the informal institution, whereas the legal system (contract law) constitutes the formal institution. Institutional resilience is defined by how the formal institution of a functioning legal system complements the informal institution of cooperation in a dynamic way. In the wake of an adverse exogenous shock, the formal institution can prevent a total breakdown of cooperation in the population.

Does democracy cause gender equality? To address this question, I use the unexpected Second Vatican Council (1962–65) as part of a shock-based identification strategy. The Second Vatican Council brought forward in time transitions to democracy that would have happened anyway and triggered transitions to democracy that would not otherwise have occurred. I use this plausibly exogenous variation in democracy to offer a causal estimate. According to my baseline specification, one standard deviation increase in democracy leads to three-fifths of a standard deviation increase in gender equality. I also peruse qualitative evidence to sketch a causal mechanism.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the contribution of land capital to the growth of emissions and income per capita in the long run. We collect new satellite data from the Earth Observatory to obtain estimates of the Enhanced Vegetation Index at the country level for the period 2000–2015. We use these data and the World Bank wealth estimates of natural capital to calibrate and empirically test an extension of the Green Solow model with land degradation and land capital investment. We show that the model is consistent with the cross-country variation in growth rates of carbon emissions per capita and find that there is convergence at the global level, with the contribution of land capital investment to the growth of emissions being negative and significant in all specifications.

Large migrant inflows have spurred anti-immigrant sentiment, but can small inflows have a different impact? We exploit the redistribution of migrants after the dismantling of the “Calais Jungle” in France to study the impact of the exposure to few migrants, which we estimate using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables. We find that in the presence of a migrant center (CAO), the growth rate of vote shares for the main far-right party (Front National (FN), our proxy for anti-immigrant sentiment) between 2012 and 2017 is reduced by about 12 percentage points. This effect, which crucially depends on the inflow's size, points toward the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954).

This paper engages with and aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the role of economic and political elites in inequality dynamics and their reproduction over time. We reconstruct the distribution of wealth employing a sample of wills from the El Colegio de Sonora database covering the period of 1871-1910. We show that the rapid industrialisation and modernisation process that occurred in northern Mexico during the late-19th and early-20th centuries led to a continuous increment in wealth concentration at the top of the distribution. The Gini index measure of 0.58 for the 1871-1885 period rose to 0.80 in 1901-1910. Rather than a natural or «Kuznetsian» inevitability fundamental (kuznetsian) necessity, however, our subsequent analysis of the wills of the upper classes suggests a critical role played by the political economy at the time and highlights the importance of control over natural resources on inequality dynamics.

We present two models that shed light on two issues in the political economy of populism: incumbents who refuse to give up office following a democratic election; and politicians gambling with major policy shifts when their consequences are uncertain. In the democratic transition of power, common knowledge about the veracity of the election process enables citizens to threaten incumbents with protests if they attempt to retain their seats in power. If doubt over electoral integrity prevails, office-seeking incumbents sometimes reject electoral rules. In considering policy gambles, politicians supply policy shifts in response to voters and elites vying for a greater share of economic output. When the mapping from policy to outcomes is uncertain, voters opt for policy gambles, even though these are detrimental to their ex ante welfare, to redress the division of output. These models underscore the importance of institutions that address the source of each coordination failure.

The deepening distrust in democracy has grown out of a decade of low growth and cuts to public spending, which in turn has consolidated wage decline while also fuelling a wider sense of economic insecurity. As poverty and inequality intensify, social mobility is in reverse and the social contract is under growing strain. Support for populists has recently receded, but the inability of democratic systems to address deep-seated problems sows the seeds for future populist revolts. Both left- and right-wing governments have responded to increasing anger and alienation with policies that exacerbate existing inequalities of income and wealth, combined with disparities of decision-making power and social status. These are ethical as much as economic questions and they demand a much more robust response than technocratic administration. Otherwise, ethical social democracy and communitarian conservatism will fail to defeat the authoritarianism of both radical-right national populists and the tech-utopianism of far-left populists.

Populism is a paradoxical phenomenon that resists easy categorisation because it both rejects and intensifies certain elements of technocracy. Populist politics is at once a backlash against liberal-technocratic ideology and policy and an attempted corrective of some of its worst excesses, such as increasing inequality or pressures on wages. Despite deep differences, both rest on a binary logic that conceals alternatives to the convergence around variants of techno-populism defended by either ‘corporate populists’ or ‘insurgent populists’. One alternative is a public policy programme focused on the building of an economic democracy with more democratic workplaces and a greater emphasis on the dignity of decent jobs, besides policies to reduce regional disparities and foster shared prosperity. But policies alone cannot fully address the deep-seated grievances fuelling the support for populists. Fundamental institutional reform is needed to devolve power and wealth to people and the places where they live and work.

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada's longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of North America (EFNA) index, is positively associated with multiple measures of income mobility for people in the lowest income deciles, including (a) absolute income gain; (b) the percentage of people with rising income; and (c) average decile mobility. For the overall population, economic freedom has weaker effects.