‘Emptying the cage,changing the birds’: state rescaling,path-dependency and the politics of economic restructuring in post-crisis Guangdong

This paper evaluates how economic restructuring in Guangdong is entwined with the politicisation of state rescaling during and after the global financial crisis of 2008. It shows how a key industrial policy known as ‘double relocation’ generated tensions between the Guangdong government, then led by Party Secretary Wang Yang, and the senior echelon of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The contestations and negotiations that ensued illustrate the dynamic entwinement between state rescaling and institutional path-dependency: the Wang administration launched this industrial policy in spite of potentially destabilising effects on the prevailing national structure of capital accumulation. This foregrounds, in turn, the constitutive and constraining effects of established, national-level policies on local, territorially specific restructuring strategies.     

Transition to greener pulp: regulation,industry responses and path dependency

Although the dioxin alarm broke at the same time in Sweden and the US in the mid-1980s, Swedish pulp and paper (P&P) firms led the way towards the new market for low-chlorine and chlorine-free P&P products. This study explores the transition in the Swedish P&P industry and contrasts the Swedish case to the US experience. We highlight the importance of already established technological paths to deal with pollution, paths which were strongly formed by the different national environmental policies since the 1970s. Thus while US P&P firms were technologically locked-in when the dioxin alarm broke, the strategy of Swedish P&P firms to proactively collaborate in environmental research and development (R&D) together with a national policy that favoured process integrated abatement technology, helped Swedish firms take technological leadership. This article particularly stresses the implications of technological path-dependency and different national regulatory styles in understanding the evolution of different modes of corporate environmental strategies.     

Conflict,growth, distribution,and employment: a long-run Kaleckian model

This paper presents a Kaleckian growth model in which (i) the rate of capacity utilization, the profit share, and the rate of employment are adjusted in the medium run, and (ii) the normal rate of capacity utilization and the expected rate of capital accumulation are adjusted in the long run. The long-run equilibrium is a continuum of equilibria and is characterized by hysteresis in that the long-run position of the economy depends on where it starts. An increase in the bargaining power of workers lowers the rate of unemployment in both the medium-run and the long-run equilibrium.