Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy – serie

Colin Hay argues that the crisis in which we are still mired is best seen as a crisis of growth and not as a crisis of debt. It is a crisis of and for an excessively liberalised form of capitalism and the Anglo-liberal growth model to which it gave rise.

What has gone wrong with economics? Economists now routinely devise highly sophisticated abstract models that score top marks for theoretical rigour but are clearly divorced from observable activities in the current economy. This creates an 'uneconomic economics', where models explain relationships in blackboard rather than real-life markets.

Britain remains mired in the most severe and prolonged economic crisis that it has faced since the 1930s. What would it take to find a new, more stable and more sustainable growth model for Britain in the years ahead? This important volume written by a number of influential commentators seeks to provide some answers.

The authors suggest that China's renewable energy system, the largest in the world, will quickly supersede the black energy system that has powered the country's rapid rise as workshop of the world and for reasons that have more to do with fixing environmental pollution and enhancing energy security than with curbing carbon emissions.

Craig Berry assesses UK economic policy in the wake of the financialcrisis through the lens of the austerity agenda, focusing on monetary policy,economic rebalancing, industrial and regional policy, the labour market,welfare reform and budgetary management.

This book opens a window into how two ambitious countries – India and Brazil – are seeking to become knowledge powers in the 21st century.

Britain remains mired in the most severe and prolonged economic crisis that it has faced since the 1930s. What would it take to find a new, more stable and more sustainable growth model for Britain in the years ahead? This important volume written by a number of influential commentators seeks to provide some answers.

This book opens a window into how two ambitious countries – India and Brazil – are seeking to become knowledge powers in the 21st century.

‘This book is different from most other attempts to understand the politics of Indian economic development. Breaking down the last 65+ years of Indian development into several episodes of growth, it provides a rich set of insights into the political economy of the Indian development process and is a valuable addition to the literature.’ –Pranab Bardham, University of California, Berkeley, USA‘Sustained economic growth in the world's largest democracy is critically important to human well-being, but the ups and downs of growth in India are not well-understood. This book provides a fresh and insightful approach to understanding what drives the starts of booms and the onset of slowdowns.’ –Lant Pritchett, Harvard University, USA‘This is a little book with big arguments. The authors' explanation of the changing character of the deals done between political and business elites makes for the most original contribution to studies of the political economy of Indiandevelopment since Pranab Bardhan's seminal work of the early 1980s’ –John Harriss, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, CanadaThis book moves beyond the usual economic analysis of the Indian growth story and provides a fresh perspective on the determinants of growth episodes in post-independence India, based on its political economy. Using a robust and novel technique, the authors identify four such episodes during this period. The first, running from the 1950s to 1992, was mostly characterized by economic stagnation, with a nascent recovery in the eighties. The second, covering the period 1993 to 2001, witnessed the first growth acceleration in the economy. A second acceleration ran from 2002 to 2010. The fourth and final episode started with the slowdown in 2010 and continues to this day. The book provides a theoretical framework that focuses on rent-structures, institutions and the polity, and demonstrates how changes in these can explain the four growth episodes. Kar and Sen argue that the transitions from one growth episode to another can be explained by the bi-directional relationship between growth outcomes and institutional arrangements, and by the manner in which institutional arrangements and their transitions are determined by the political bargains struck between the elite groups in Indian society.

Adopting a broadly critical political economy lens – which gives analytical weight to the relationship between economic and political dynamics – the book will draw on the research of eminent scholars to assess divergence in the foundations of economic competitiveness and their social repercussions.

This book is required reading for students and scholars interested in the fractious political economy of British capitalism after the crisis. “Lavery’s book on the flawed political economy of Britain’s hybrid variant of capitalism after the 2008 financial crisis is a tour de force.

Wellbeing, resilience and sustainability are three of the most popular ideas in current usage and are said to represent a much-needed paradigm shift in political and policy thinking.

The concept of the political legacy, despite its importance for institutionalist and historically-minded political analysts more generally, remains both elusive and undeveloped theoretically.

The concept of the political legacy, despite its importance for institutionalist and historically-minded political analysts more generally, remains both elusive and undeveloped theoretically.

This book demonstrates the variation in the reaction of the UK’s ‘big four’ banks – RBS, Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC – to the Great Financial Crisis 2008. Over a decade on from the financial crisis, this book asks: have banks in the UK learned lessons from the crisis?

This book demonstrates the variation in the reaction of the UK’s ‘big four’ banks – RBS, Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC – to the Great Financial Crisis 2008. Over a decade on from the financial crisis, this book asks: have banks in the UK learned lessons from the crisis?

Since the creation of the Department for International Development, the purpose of UK development policy and aid has changed significantly.

Since the creation of the Department for International Development, the purpose of UK development policy and aid has changed significantly. This book provides a comprehensive evaluation of these changes, their causes, and their implications. It argues that UK development aid as an act of solidarity, economic justice, or redistribution, which has always been undermined by donor interest and colonialism, has been abolished. The authors present a new framework for understanding the UK’s current approach to development policy and aid, the ‘nationalisation’ of aid, which prioritises narrow domestic commercial and political interests at the expense of sustainable development and the UK’s international reputation. Based on new quantitative and qualitative data, the book offers a nuanced and comprehensive exploration of the UK's approach to aid and development, contributing to broader discussions on the evolving nature of development assistance and its implications. With a combination of rigorous research methods and insightful analysis, it not only advances scholarly understanding within the fields of Politics, International Relations, Development Studies, and International Political Economy, but also provides practical guidance for policymakers and practitioners seeking to navigate the complexities of contemporary development assistance.

This book examines the rise of exclusionary neoliberalism by assessing how far-right populist actors impact economic policy change.

Crisis has become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary life which is increasingly dominated by financial collapse, global pandemics, geopolitical upheavals, and climate breakdown. Too often, however, the contours, causes and consequences of crises are taken for granted. Adapted from the popular SPERI Presents... podcast series Crisis Point, this volume seeks to understand the role of crisis in the development and reproduction of capitalism. Each chapter is an interview with an expert political economy scholar, also weaving through the editors’ own analysis. By examining capitalism's historical crises, the volume makes sense of contemporary crisis dynamics from housing to populism to climate. Combining the theoretical and historical rigour of scholarly analysis with an accessible conversational style, the volume makes intelligible the structural drivers of crisis for scholars, students, activists and informed observers of global politics alike.

Critically synthesising a range of disparate literatures and debates, this book asks what is at stake in mounting a decisive response to the ‘socio-ecological crisis’ - a crisis of humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature that places social life as we know it in jeopardy.

This book explains the place of oil in the economic and political predicaments that now confront the West.

This book challenges amoral views of finance as the leading realm in which mammon – wealth and profit – is pursued with little overt regard for morality.

This book explores two recent crises in British political economy: the crisis of 1976–9, for which the trade unions were impugned, and the 2007 economic crisis, for which bankers were (at least initially) blamed.

This book analyses the discourses of economic liberalization reform in six Western European countries – Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria.

This book explores the politics of local economic development in Northern England. As such, Berry and Giovannini seek to locate Northern England within a broaderunderstanding of the political dimension of economic development, and outline a series of ideas for enhancing the North’s prospects.

This book provides a timely warning of the dangers still present and building in the global economic system, whose frailty was exposed by the global financial crisis, and the Eurozone crisis it spawned.

This book investigates the causes and consequences of crisis in four countries of the Eurozone periphery – Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. The work debates what made these states particularly susceptible to crisis, the response to the crisis and its resultant effects, as well as the manifestation of resistance to austerity.

Critically synthesising a range of disparate literatures and debates, this book asks what is at stake in mounting a decisive response to the ‘socio-ecological crisis’ - a crisis of humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature that places social life as we know it in jeopardy.