This book examines Croatia's economic and political transformation over the last 30 years. It brings together the best political scientists, macroeconomists and public finance experts from Croatia to provide an in-depth analysis of the Croatian policy-making context and the impact of Europeanization upon its domestic institutional framework. The second part of the book scrutinizes the political economy context and Croatia's long-term macroeconomic under-performance, especially in comparison to other transition economies. The final part explores sectoral public policies, including cohesion policy, education, health, pensions, and local government. The book offers a unique blend of Croatia's political economy framework and public policy analysis.
In many European countries, the process of financialisation has been exacerbated by the project of closer EU integration and accelerated as a result of austerity policies introduced after the Euro crisis of 2010–2012. However, the impact has been felt differently in core and peripheral countries. This book examines the case of Portugal, and in particular the impact on its economy, work and social reproduction. The book examines the recent evolution of the Portuguese economy, of particular sectors and systems of social provision (including finance, housing and water), labour relations and income distribution. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive critical analysis of varied aspects of capital accumulation and social reproduction in the country, which are crucial to understand the effects of the official ‘bail-out’ of 2011 and associated austerity adjustment program. The book shows how these have increasingly relied on deteriorating pay and working conditions and households’ direct and indirect engagement with the global financial system in new domains of social reproduction. Through its exploration of the Portuguese case, the book presents a general theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of financialisation processes in peripheral countries. This text is essential reading for students and scholars of political economy, development, geography, international relations and sociology with an interest in examining the uneven mechanisms and impacts of global finance.
With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three regional shocks: the recession of the early 1990s, the rolling global financial crisis that started in July 1997, and the political shocks that attended EU enlargement in 2004.Bohle and Greskovits show that the postsocialist states have established three basic variants of capitalist political economy: neoliberal, embedded neoliberal, and neocorporatist. The Baltic states followed a neoliberal prescription: low controls on capital, open markets, reduced provisions for social welfare. The larger states of central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics) have used foreign investment to stimulate export industries but retained social welfare regimes and substantial government power to enforce industrial policy. Slovenia has proved to be an outlier, successfully mixing competitive industries and neocorporatist social inclusion. Bohle and Greskovits also describe the political contention over such arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia. A highly original and theoretically sophisticated typology of capitalism in postsocialist Europe, this book is unique in the breadth and depth of its conceptually coherent and empirically rich comparative analysis.
Successive Enlargements to the European Union membership have transformed it into an economically, politically and culturally heterogeneous body with distinct vulnerabilities in its multi-level governance. This book analyses core-periphery relations to highlight the growing cleavage, and potential conflict, between the core and peripheral member-states of the Union in the face of the devastating consequences of Eurozone crisis. Taking a comparative and theoretical approach and using a variety of case studies, it examines how the crisis has both exacerbated tensions in centre-periphery relations within and outside the Eurozone, and how the European Union’s economic and political status is declining globally. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of European Union studies, European integration, political economy, public policy, and comparative politics.
Europeanization" is a term increasingly used in the social sciences to descibe the impact, convergence or response of politicians and institutions in relation to the European Union. This volume explores the concept in a variety of different settings in order to clarify its meaning.
Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one? In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global economy. Bosma finds that the region’s contact with colonial trading powers during the early nineteenth century led to improved health care and longer life spans as the Spanish and Dutch colonial governments began to vaccinate their subjects against smallpox. The resulting abundance of workers ushered in extensive migration toward emerging labor-intensive plantation and mining belts. European powers exploited existing patron-client labor systems with the intermediation of indigenous elites and non-European agents to develop extractive industries and plantation agriculture. Bosma shows that these trends shaped the postcolonial era as these migration networks expanded far beyond the region. A wide-ranging comparative study of colonial commodity production and labor regimes, The Making of a Periphery is of major significance to international economic history, colonial and postcolonial history, and Southeast Asian history.
Europe is suffering from a bipolar economic disorder. Financial journalists divide the continent into two groups of nations - centre and periphery - not by geography but by credit rating. Europe on the Brink is a critical investigation of the root causes of this sovereign debt crisis, and the often misguided policy choices made to resolve it. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, together with two other finance experts, compares debt contagion in Europe with regional financial crises elsewhere, while Roberto Lavagna, former economics minister in Argentina, provides a poignant comparative analysis with his own country’s experience. Crucially and uniquely, Portuguese, Greek and Irish economists provide hard-hitting case studies from the perspective of the periphery. This much-needed book offers a heterodox economic perspective on the causes, symptoms and solutions of the biggest economic issue currently facing Europe.
This title was first published in 2002. This rich comparative analysis looks at security policy reorientation in four European states located at the periphery of the European continent. During the post-Cold War period, Greece, Bulgaria, Sweden and Finland conducted a security policy that was heavily influenced by their close proximity to the iron curtain . Probing this transition during a decisive phase of the post-Cold War reconstitution of the wider European security order, the author analyzes national security policy making from the standpoints of three international relations traditions - realism, institutionalism and political anthropology. This engaging work is invaluable for students, scholars and policy analysts working in the field of international relations and European politics.
This book revisits the forgotten history of the 'European Dependency School' in the 1970s and 1980s, explores core-periphery relations in the European integration process and the crises of the contemporary European Union from a dependency perspective, and draws lessons for alternative development paths. Was disintegration of the European Union foretold? With the benefit of hindsight, the critical analysis of the European integration process by researchers from the 'European Dependency School' is most timely. The current framework of the European Union seems to be haunted by issues that had been very familiar to the researchers of the 'European Dependency School', such as a lack of a common and balanced industrial policy. How do the situations compare? What lessons can be learnt for alternative development policies in contemporary Europe? Weissenbacher tackles these issues, which are of relevance to all interested in political economy, political science, development studies and regional development.
