Competing Para-Sovereignties in the Borderlands of Europe

This article is broadly concerned with how we conceptualise the geography of the tensions between the nominally stable orders of the modern state system against the turbulence of the past few decades in relation to that order, especially in the realm of border controls. Specifically, it considers the rescaling and relocation of border enforcement in the European Union in relation to state sovereignty. The article argues that existing “soft” conceptualisations of the EU’s relationship to sovereignty and bordering—“shared,” “joint,” “multi-level,” “consociational”—are inadequate to understand the transformations of exercises of sovereign power in European borderlands. Instead, we are witnessing the emergence of competing para-sovereignties acting within the same spaces, with both traditional states and the incipient state-like EU fulfilling particular bit roles in realms that were traditionally viewed as the exclusive responsibilities of modern, sovereign, territorial states. This dynamic is made visible in recent years in observing individual humans negotiate and subvert the fluid political geographies of European border space. Examples are taken from the activities of the EU border agency Frontex in southeastern Europe.     

Teaching Ecological and Feminist Economics in the Principles Course

It can be difficult to incorporate ecological and feminist concerns into introductory courses, when one is also obliged to teach neoclassical analysis. In this essay we briefly describe how one might extend existing “multi-paradigmatic” approaches to feminist and ecological concerns, and then present an new alternative approach that may be more suitable for some students. This “broader questions and bigger toolbox” approach can be applied in both microeconomics and macroeconomics introductory classrooms.     

Understanding the effectiveness of environmental offset policies

In the real world, taxes and cap-and-trade systems are rarely implemented in their pure form. In this paper, we examine a related approach that has been used widely in practice—which we refer to as an “offset.” The idea behind offsets is to encourage firms or entities that may not be a part of the main regulatory system to produce environmental improvements. These improvements can then be used to offset pollution reduction requirements for regulated entities. This paper analyzes how offsets are used in practice, and identifies key economic and political factors that help explain the use of offsets in certain situations. We find that offsets may often fail to take adequate account of environmental or ecosystem damages. We argue that the effectiveness of an offset policy depends on the political and institutional context in which it is developed.     

State capitalism and the rent-seeking conjecture

The notion that state capitalism (an economic system “in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain”) is a new form of capitalism emerging in the global arena has been recently advanced by several authors. This paper explores the problem of the nature of this system in the light of these claims to novelty. What are its main features as described by these authors? Is state capitalism distinctive from other forms of capitalism or other types of economic systems? Are we really witnessing the emergence of a new type of economic system? To address such questions the paper starts by trying to place the model of state capitalism within the traditional comparative economic systems framework. The inconclusive result leads to a different approach in which the concept of rent-seeking society is used to underlie the structural similarities between mercantilism, real life socialism and state capitalism. The article argues that the conjecture that what has been labeled “state capitalism” is yet another form of rent-seeking system is both robust and worth further investigating.     

Geopolitics and the Genealogy of Free Trade Zones in the Persian Gulf

Free trade zones have been championed by policy makers as important mechanisms for the “economic liberalisation” and “globalisation” of the Middle East. While a growing number of political economists have begun to investigate the performance of these projects, few have considered why states voluntarily limit their sovereign powers by establishing these liberalised territories. To address this question, this paper studies the Jebel Ali free trade zone in Dubai (UAE) and the Kish free trade zone in Iran, two of the earliest such projects in the region. Rather than being products of neoliberal ideology or pressure from advanced industrial economies, the essay argues that paradoxically these zones were developed by the Iranian state and Dubai emirate to project territorial sovereignty in turbulent geostrategic settings and moments as well as nodes to circulate rent to domestic and international members of ruling coalitions. The geostrategic and state-building logics informed when, where, and how these projects were developed. More generally, this analysis illustrates that the Middle East is neither absent from the process of globalisation, nor does it simply respond passively and reactively to this complex process. Free trade zones are an example of local strategies working in consort with international processes to fashion new forms of economic and political interconnectedness.     

Complexity Economics as Heterodoxy: Theory and Policy

Complexity economics has quickly become a powerful research program for real-world economics in recent years. This article provides an overview of complexity economics, and argues that it is incompatible with the “equilibrium” and “optimality” conceptions of the mainstream and its “market economy.” Instead, it develops older heterodox — including evolutionary-institutional — issues like self-organization, emergence, path?dependence, idiosyncrasies, lock-ins, or skewed power distributions. Also, the space for emergent institutions through the “intentionality” of agents, including their improving collective performance, reducing complexity, and others, is investigated. This article considers complex adaptive systems through “games on networks” in an “evolution-of-cooperation” perspective. Moreover, a surge in policy implications of economic complexity has emerged, even if still rather general. With some more specific implications derived, the article again reveals the close similarities with long-standing heterodoxies: namely, pragmatist policy conceptions in this respect.     

生态伦理观在公共经济政策中的培育与运用

生态环境危机是当今各国政府面临的重大难题,用生态伦理思想对待自然、协调入与自然之间的关系至关重要。生态伦理为公共经济政策的制订提供重要支持和参考。本文从伦理学和经济学角度阐述了生态伦理与公共经济政策的关系,提出了诸如加强生态环境法制建设、以技术创新为先导、鼓励发展潜势产业以及开征环境资源税等措施,探讨了矿区这一生态脆弱区的先进经验和有效做法,认为充分尊重并遵循生态伦理思想是新时代公共经济政策的必然选择。     

Vested Interests and the Common Man as Seen Through Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Flooding Wall Street or Main Street?

There are many angles through which a critical observer can analyze the divergent class interests in most aspects of macroeconomic management. We examine the insistence of financial authorities of all major economies on reviving economic activity through monetary — and not fiscal — policy as a particularly clear example of favoring vested interests over the interests of the common man. Nearly a century after Thorstein Veblen wrote on the subject, one can find many parallel elements to the political landscape of the times. Today, the common man is often expressed by the “99%,” and many accept that the dominant vested interest is that of global banks. Unlike in Veblen’s times, economists today have many historical experiments in economic management that they can consult. By employing logic, historical experience, and an understanding of our current global finance-led capitalism, we offer a preliminary institutionalist analysis of the mechanisms of current monetary policy that “flood” Wall Street, while leaving employment, production, and investment — Main Street — all but forgotten. We then explain how vested interests have abandoned fiscal policy and left a deflationary macroeconomic environment.     

国际“过度旅游”现象述评

“过度旅游”对可持续发展具有关键性的负向影响。人类旅行与旅游活动经历了一个漫长的发展过程,2000年前后,全球大多数国家和地区都已经或开始进入大众旅游时代。旅游发展的各种影响——经济的和非经济的、积极的和负面的——都在不断扩大。从总的趋势而言,当人类旅行与旅游活动人数规模、访问区域、增长速度和影响较小的时候,对旅游发展的反对声音多局限在特定地区、时段和人群,但随着旅游规模扩展与速度逐渐加快,“拥挤度”加大的情况下,反对的声音则越来越强烈,甚至开始从情绪上反对转变成社会行动。到21世纪第二个十年的后期,“过度旅游”开始变成一种“全球关注”,关注的群体由最初的旅游目的地居民扩展到学术界、国际旅游机构、旅游业界、国家政府相关机构以及各类媒体,旅游者本身也参与其中。这一关注在2018年形成高潮,“overtourism”正式被英国《牛津英语词典》选入当年的年度词汇。于是,国际社会越来越关注“过度旅游”现象,并以不同的方式确定其含义,评估其影响,探讨产生的原因和谋划应对策略与行动。尽管对“过度旅游”现象的认识还存在着很多分歧,政府、业界、社会乃至旅游者对待这一现象的态度大相径庭,但毕竟这一现象引起了全球的关注,因此,了解和研究这一现象,探讨其发展趋势,应当是旅游相关学术机构的责任。本文旨在为对“过度旅游”现象的来龙去脉做一个初步的梳理,以期推进我国学术界关注这个“全球关注”现象的研究,促进我国旅游业健康有序地发展。也许“过度旅游”在中国尚未成为严重问题,但未雨绸缪、防患于未然是非常必要的。更何况,在全球更加开放,全球化不断深化的国际背景下,一个遍及全球的问题,恐怕中国也很难独善其身。     

Study on Medium- and Long-Term Fiscal Policies to Cope with Climate Change under the “Dual Carbon” Goals

Carbon peaking and carbon neutrality constitute an extensive, profound and systemic economic and social change. It is worthwhile to explore how fiscal policy, as a key institutional arrangement in the public policy system to cope with climate change, can play a fundamental and pillar role. Based on literatures, theories and empirical materials, this paper systematically explores the relationship between climate change and public finance. The fiscal impact of climate change will eventually be reflected in fiscal behavior, fiscal costs and fiscal relations, and the fiscal system has the adaptability of an “automatic stabilizer” and the proactiveness to enable the Discretionary Approaches function when facing climate change impacts. This implies such a governance logic of fiscal policy that is systematic, forward-looking and flexible in addressing climate change. In the future, it is necessary to further incorporate climate change or related environmental factors into the fiscal policy framework, target the two key aspects of mitigation and adaptation, and carry out a holistic, systematic and forward-looking reform of the existing fiscal expenditure policy, fiscal revenue policy, fiscal investment and financing policy, government budget system, government procurement policy and ecological compensation policy. While highlighting the “governance” function of fiscal policy in addressing climate change, Chinese government needs to strengthen the coordination and collaboration between fiscal policy tools and other public policies, and magnify the governance effectiveness of fiscal policy in the process of addressing climate change. This paper helps understand the positioning, role and influence of fiscal policy in the process of addressing climate change, provides a basis for better playing the fundamental and underpinning role of the modern fiscal system in the governance of ecological civilization, and presents an analytical framework for building a theoretical system of ecological fiscal governance.     

The Role of Income Effects in Early Retirement

We provide a long‐term perspective on the individual retirement behavior and on the future of retirement by emphasizing the role of (negative) income effects. We consider a political economic theoretical framework, with actuarially “fair” and “unfair” early retirement schemes, and derive a political equilibrium with positive social security contribution rates and early retirement. A reduction in the wages in youth, consistent with the recent labor market trends since the massive introduction of temporary jobs, induces workers to postpone retirement, and—in the “unfair” system—leads to lower contribution rates. A reduction in the growth rate of the economy has opposite effects on the retirement decisions, leading—in the “unfair” system—to more early retirement. Aging induces a negative income effect, but has also an opposite political effect on social security contributions and retirement decisions. For an actuarially “fair” social security system, we provide conditions for the political effect to dominate; in an “unfair” scheme, numerical simulations confirm a slight predominance of the political effect, as contribution rates increase. These results may shed some light on the future of early retirement in aging societies.     

When is a “wait and see” approach to invasive species justified?

Predictions of damages and damages that might be avoided from invasive species control policies are marred by uncertainty that has both economic and ecological roots. Public policies directed at invasive species typically lag their detection. One possible explanation is the coupling of uncertainty with political and economic commitments creates an incentive to delay a policy response in order to gain more information on how damaging the invasion will be – a “wait and see” approach. We investigate whether this rationale is justified by identifying invasion characteristics that require the wait and see approach often adopted by lawmakers and government agencies. The model shows that the source of uncertainty and degree of policy irreversibility matter and allows the classification of invasive species with a low rate of spread and low levels of uncertainty as those where policies can be optimally timed in the future.     

Environmental (De-) Regulation, Competition, and Policy Rules

This article analyzes some problems regarding our knowledge of environmental policy. Sustainable development as the prospective enlargement of the political agenda has been identified as a long-term challenge for economic policy which could get trapped in a new form of interventionism. The evolutionary market approach that is presented here focuses on development risks of environmental policy that are mostly neglected in standard theory. A transfer of the Hayekian concept of negative rules to the realm of environmental policy is critically discussed. A straight-forward transfer of Hayek's theory stressing the importance of negative rules cannot be recommended, since even the negative rules carry some development risks in the realm of environmental policy. Some preliminary political consequences are drawn which are appropriate to limit the extension of environmental targets in the future.     

The individual and the market: Paul Samuelson on (homothetic) Santa Claus economics

Paul Samuelson often used the term “Santa Claus economics” for mathematical models with empirically unrealistic assumptions. I focus on one particular member of the Santa Claus family that Samuelson was very sceptical about: homothetic general equilibrium models (where all agents have identical homothetic preferences). I argue that Samuelson's concerns about these models provide insights into how he viewed the relationship between the individual and the market, a relationship that has implications for not only his economic theorising, but also his broader political–economic vision. His criticisms are also relevant to some ongoing debates within contemporary economic theory.     

Staying dry on Spanish wine: The rejection of the 1905 Spanish-Italian trade agreement

After a long debate on wine import tariffs, the Italian Parliament rejected the Spanish-Italian trade agreement on 17 December 1905. This decision left Spain and Italy without a bilateral trade treaty for an entire decade. In the literature, broader political issues and local interests are alternatively indicated as the main drivers of the rejection. Based on a new database which collects economic and political variables (including MPs personal features) and using a probit model, this paper provides a quantitative analysis of the vote. Results show that constituency interests had a role in determining the result of the vote on the trade treaty. Moreover, constituency interests were also important for the “vote switchers”, i.e. those MPs that supported the overall government policy stance in the first round, but opposed the Spanish-Italian trade agreement in the second.     

Coordinating China's economic growth strategy via its government-controlled association for private firms

Scholars in economics and political science argue that one major function of government is to overcome coordination failure in economic development, especially during times of rapid environmental changes. But, how and through what means does the state coordinate firms to follow the changing directions of its economic objectives? This paper focuses on the case of a government-controlled business association, namely the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (ACFIC), and shows that the ACFIC may be serving, at least partially, as a means of avoiding the kind of coordination failures that are often associated with policy reform programs in authoritarian regimes like China when the government deems it necessary to radically and suddenly change its policy objectives. It does so by comparing the activities of firms that are members of ACFIC with non-members before and after the world financial crisis of 2008–09 which induced a significant change in government objectives. Before that crisis when priority in government objectives was “outward” (to stave off balance of payments crises that had befallen many other developing countries), ACFIC member firms were able to engage in exports and foreign investment to a greater extent than non-member firms, and even than those whose owners are members of the Congresses or Chinese Communist Party. After viewing the crises in international markets, and government objectives had turned more “inward”, ACFIC members were more likely to focus on domestic sales and investments.     

The Monetized Economy Versus Care and the Environment: Degrowth Perspectives On Reconciling an Antagonism

This paper addresses the question of how the current growth paradigm perpetuates existing gender and environmental injustices and investigates whether these can be mitigated through a degrowth work-sharing proposal. It uses an adapted framework of the “ICE model” to illustrate how ecological processes and caring activities are structurally devalued by the monetized economy in a growth paradigm. On the one hand, this paradigm perpetuates gender injustices by reinforcing dualisms and devaluing care. On the other hand, environmental injustices are perpetuated since “green growth” does not succeed in dematerializing production processes. In its critique of the growth imperative, degrowth not only promotes the alleviation of environmental injustices but also calls for a recentering of society around care. This paper concludes that, if designed in a gender-sensitive way, a degrowth work-sharing proposal as part of a broader value transformation has the potential to address both gender and environmental injustices.     

“Austerian” economics: Does the Vienna school favor fiscal deficit reduction even in a subpar economy?

Does the economic analysis associated with the modern Austrian school favor a policy of restraining the government’s fiscal deficit even in a subpar economy, as suggested by those who (pejoratively) label such a policy “austerian”? Because resources are not superabundant even in a subpar economy, the answer is yes, unless (implausibly) the return on the last (lowest-payoff) dollar of government expenditure exceeds the return on private investment.     

Atoms,Bits, and Wits: A New Economics for the Twenty-First Century—Part II

Learning also affects the organization of economic activity as a “force locomotif” of growth. Bounded rationality opens a theory of planning horizons as an ordinal measure of wits. The realm of wits shines a novel light on the nature of interdependence, since the balance of substitution and complementarity is horizonal: longer and broader horizons shift this balance away from substitution in favor of complementarity, augmenting concerts of interest over conflicts in social relations. Atoms, bits, and wits are modeled to show why substitution only applies to short-run atoms; a case for complementarity rises from both increasing returns and bits, where wits strengthen the case for cooperation as efficient. With complementarity, competition—not collusion—stifles output. The social and institutional implications of this are addressed theoretically in this paper.     

TWO OR THREE PROBLEMS CONCERNING SOCIAL STABILITY AND OUR MEASURES OF WELFARE: WHAT CAN ECONOMISTS LEARN FROM OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES?*

This paper takes up several problems that are related to psychology, political science and ethics—disciplines that we regard as neighbours on the boundaries of economics. I pay particular attention to such topics as mass psychology and social stability, democracy and economic performance and the notions of wellbeing and happiness. After laying out some of the history of academic discourse on these problems and notions, I reconsider the nature of discrepancy between microlevel motivations and macrolevel phenomena, trade‐offs between equality and liberty and the problem of measurement of social welfare and “happiness” from the perspective of “dissociation of intention and consequence”.