New Political Economy

Haines-Doran, Tom

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2254727pmid: N/A

This paper investigates the growth of new forms of personal finance used in purchasing motor vehicles – a development which it characterises as ‘financialisation’. It focusses on the case of the rise of the personal contract purchase (PCP) in the United Kingdom market, and seeks to account for its growing popularity, and potential implications. It is found that the rise of PCPs is best understood as a form of financial innovation designed to help car manufacturers overcome long-term profit realisation problems produced by market saturation in mature markets. The way PCPs are structured lowers consumers’ monthly finance payments, allowing them to access to higher value vehicles, and encourages more frequent purchases of new vehicles, all of which allows greater manufacturer profit realisation. However, it does so in a way which increases financial risk, to consumers, car manufacturers, and financial investors. On the other hand, manufacturers’ risk exposure is limited by how the consumers’ car dependency lowers expected default rates. PCPs threaten financial stability, as well as sustaining social and environmentally unsustainable consumption practices.

Arnaud, Ludovic

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2260986pmid: N/A

This paper contributes to the literature on the evolution of North–South trade agreements, which historically involved countries in the global South relinquishing policy space for activist trade and industrial policies in exchange for locking-in preferential and stable market access. It takes as case study the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), drawing on the agreements, media coverage of the negotiations, and 107 interviews with negotiators and stakeholders in all three countries. I show how the renegotiation resulted in changing conflicts: while the Mexican government attempted to preserve its market access and sought to further restrict its policy space due to path dependence, the Trump administration wanted to reduce market access for Mexico and create uncertainty to re-shore production. The Trump administration partially succeeded by undermining the lock-in effect of trade agreements and including unprecedented provisions in USMCA. The actions of the Biden administration indicate a long-term shift in US trade policy towards protectionism. Combined with the USMCA sunset clause, this creates the risk that the US will use USMCA review periods to create market access uncertainty instead of seizing the opportunities to strengthen North American economic cooperation.

Elbra, Ainsley

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2264211pmid: N/A

The politics of climate change in Australia remains highly fraught, this is despite the country experiencing acute impacts of a changing climate including mega-fires, floods, and severe and prolonged drought. Government inaction has led to limited market signals encouraging producers or consumers to move away from carbon intensive energy production to clean energy. In the absence of regulation, Australian shareholder activists are engaging directly with company boards and executives to reform corporate behaviour. This engagement, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) shareholder activism, has proliferated since 2017, much later than in comparable jurisdictions. Activists have targeted the mining, oil and gas, and finance sectors, due to their contribution to the Australian economy and their direct impact on global emissions. This paper explores the reasons for, and the implications of, the growth in ESG shareholder activism in Australia. It argues that the emergence of this activism in Australia was delayed due to complexities in the country's corporations' law. Regulatory attempts at stymying ESG shareholder activism resulted in the emergence of a duopoly of actors, at the cost of broader investor and civil society engagement. It is concluded that the rise of ESG shareholder activism in Australia is linked to growing tension between societal expectations, regulation, and the behaviour of firms. And, that ESG activists have been successful in leveraging this tension. There is evidence that large corporates have responded to activist claims, rendering this form of activism a potentially effective method for addressing some of the most pressing issues facing society.

Lai, Daniela

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2268018pmid: N/A

The article argues for taking political economy seriously in the study of corporate accountability in transitional justice processes. Corporate actors are now commonly involved in transitional justice (that is, attempts at doing justice in the aftermath of mass violence). However, the literature is still limited by an inclination to treat political economy as context, rather than as a structuring factor intervening both on the war-related or authoritarian violence and on the efforts to make corporate actors accountable. This article proposes three shifts towards a better understanding of the political economy of corporate accountability in TJ: from a focus on the proximate economic causes of war to a genealogical view of pre-war, wartime and post-war economies; towards a more holistic view of conflict financing; and from an emphasis on the political economy of war to the political economy of violence. These shifts allow us to analyse a greater variety of political economies of corporate accountability, address more diffuse responsibilities for violence and injustice, and cover forms of violence that extend over longer periods of time. While holding broader relevance for the field, the arguments are illustrated with reference to the former Yugoslav region and the Bosnian War.

Fridell, Gavin

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2268034pmid: N/A

Countless socially responsible trade initiatives have emerged in recent years offering an uncertain mixture of token and substantive changes. After decades of battles over free trade, this marks a significant shift, challenging established debates over free versus regulated markets by promoting labour, gender, human, and environmental rights through trade agreements. This reorientation contains complex contradictions, with trade justice groups conceding to the popularity of trade while simultaneously insisting on a new vision of what trade is ‘about.’ Drawing on the idea of trade fetishism, this article argues that the desire for trade involves not only its material motivations, but its seductive content as a fetishised object of global capital, offering the fantasy of ‘trade’ as a symbolic source of pleasure. Through the case of the new NAFTA 2.0, it points to the relevance of trade politics that aspires not to overcome trade fetishism, but, as Lucas Pohl (2022) suggests, to ‘get with’ it. Through a trade justice ratchet mechanism, advocates have pushed for unanticipated changes, while also ceding to the limitations of the current order. The outcome is a process of contesting the symbolic content of what trade is and is not about, with significant material and policy implications.

Gouzoulis, Giorgos

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2268038pmid: N/A

This paper argues that rising household indebtedness is associated with the decline of organised labour. Over the last decades, the financial system is increasingly financing working-class households, and recent research shows that indebted employees become more risk-averse at the workplace on the fear of losing their job and defaulting. Thus, since union formation or participation is commonly punished with redundancy, rising household indebtedness is likely to be associated with the aggregate reduction in unionisation. This study examines this argument for a high-, a mid-, and low-unionisation economy over the period 1965–2018: Sweden, Japan, and South Korea, respectively. Regression analysis provides robust support in favour of this argument. The results also suggest that financial regulation and social norms about personal insolvency matter for the size of the effects of household debt on unionisation.

Rey-Araújo, Pedro M.

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2275008pmid: N/A

This paper critically interrogates the meaning attached to social reproduction in the so-called Social Reproduction Theory [SRT]. While SRT represents an improvement over competing approaches to social reproduction along several dimensions, its understanding of social reproduction as referring exclusively to the ongoing reproduction of labour-power does not fully capture the extent to which the reproduction of social life is mediated by the reproduction of capital. Instead of defining social reproduction in opposition to capitalist production, it is argued that their relation should be reformulated as one between a transhistorical content, namely, the need of any society to reproduce itself through a division of labour that mediates its metabolic interaction with nature, and a historically specific form it adopted, as myriad uncoordinated acts of individual production linked together by the incessant circulation of capital along its different value forms in search of self-expansion. Inasmuch as the reproduction of social life thus requires the concomitant reproduction of capital’s abstract nexus as the key mediating link between human life and its condition, the reproduction of social life and that of capital need to be framed as two mutually co-mediated moments within overall capitalist social reproduction.

Dogru, Havva Ezgi

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2275014pmid: N/A

The mass-scale expansion of student loan schemes in Turkey over the last two decades has been accomplished by a governance technique which the article defines as authoritarian debtfarism. By restructuring the Credit and Dormitories Institution (KYK) as subordinated to the executive and insulated from democratic intervention, the authoritarian neoliberal state in Turkey has sought to fulfil its new economic function, i.e. enabling the societal reproduction of the youth by increasing their financial dependency on credit money. The state-led student loan expansion in Turkey emerged in a tuition-free higher education setting without a sophisticated financial infrastructure and in an economic environment marked with perpetual graduate unemployment as well as inflationary pressures on repayment amounts. Based on a detailed interrogation of the official documents and in-depth interviews with defaulters, this article argues that authoritarian debtfarism has imposed a rigid market discipline over the university youth by using non-transparency and arbitrariness as its governance mechanisms. Consequently, future labour of the graduates is put on hold through a long-term debt relation, compelling them to integrate into labour market precariously as a new segment of the relative surplus population.

Haas, Tobias

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2275017pmid: N/A

Various analyses show that right-wing populist parties (RWP) tend to be sceptical of climate science and policy. This points to a blank space in the dominant analyses of populism: their blindness towards society-nature relations. This paper aims to develop an approach grounded in Cultural Political Economy (CPE) that can be used to decipher the mediation of RWP within the context of economic, political, and cultural developments as well as society–nature relations. Against this background, the argument is developed that RWP is concerned not only with countering migration and processes of societal liberalisation, but also with defending an existing way of life that is firmly rooted in the destructive appropriation of nature. As a current of right-wing politics, RWP defends the imperial mode of living by expressing scepticism towards the existence of anthropogenic climate change. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the political economy of RWP by linking the dimensions of social domination with the appropriation of nature.

Sancak, Merve

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2023.2279077pmid: N/A

This article combines the comparative political economy of skill formation literature with the one on growth models to analyse the state's role in skill systems of late industrialising countries. It focuses on Mexico and Turkey, which constitute crucial cases for a most similar case analysis. The article shows that Mexico and Turkey followed different growth models after their economic liberalisation, which led to distinct state roles in two key skill system institutions, namely the minimum wage and the vocational education and training (VET) system. In Mexico, the state aligned these institutions with the ‘dependent-downgrading' growth model, which was reliant on external demand and investments with low industrial upgrading and sometimes downgrading, and minimal working-class cohesion. Minimising labour costs was prioritised to attract foreign investment and to reduce the prices of exports, leading to extremely low wages and a liberal VET system in Mexico. In Turkey, the growth model was ‘domestic-upgrading’ with higher role of domestic investments and demand, and some improvements in industrial upgrading and working-class social cohesion. Ensuring high minimum wage and comprehensive VET system constituted key strategies for the state to maintain this growth model in Turkey, leading to relatively higher minimum wage and a statist VET system.