How red is China's red capitalism? Continuity and change in China's financial services sector during the global crisis

Chinese capitalism cannot be captured by theoretical frameworks and concepts such as the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach. Despite its integration into the world economy and the financial crises, the country has kept a stable Leninist basis of formal institutions. The case of financial services shows: (i) a resilience of the sector to the ‘Great Financial Crisis’ of 2008 and (ii) the use of the crisis as an opportunity. Examining the control of Chinese financial services shows that private interests and the regulatory authorities are intimately linked to the state apparatus and that there is no radical break in sight with China's unique blend of party state-led capitalism.     

Performance appraisal and MNEs: The impact of different capitalist archetypes

This study explores variations in the incidence of performance appraisals according to setting and multinationality. Using data from Europe and adopting the lens of comparative capitalisms, we found that performance appraisal (particularly, systems linking rating to rewards) is used more in the Anglo-Saxon Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) than in the other market economies found in continental Europe. Foreign owned MNEs tended to use performance appraisal more than other organisations in our sample, which may be a reflection of country of origin pressure (with most originating in LMEs). MNEs were also more likely to make use of more comprehensive forms of performance appraisal than their domestic counterparts, including elements that went beyond review and rewards to encompass training and development and career planning. We found little to suggest a default by firms towards the LME ideal, thus indicating the continued relevance of other national institutional recipes.     

State ownership,political ideology,and firm performance around the world

It is often taken as a stylized fact that state ownership harms the financial performance of firms. Yet we show that this relationship varies greatly across national contexts. We argue that the political ideology of the government, both independently and in conjunction with political institutions (state capacity and political constraint), affects this relationship. We test our hypotheses using meta-analytical techniques on an international sample spanning 53 years and 131 countries. Our research sheds further light on the state ownership – firm performance relationship by highlighting the role of the political ideology of the government, and its interactions with political institutions.     

Host-country effects in coordinated,liberal and hybrid market economies: US subsidiaries in Switzerland,Germany and the UK

The paper addresses two as yet unexplored issues regarding the uptake of host-country employment relations practices, contributing to a better understanding of findings for hybrid host-market economies such as Switzerland. Host-country effects are differentiated by practices that belong to either industrial relations or education and training, as per the varieties of capitalism approach. There follows an investigation of the extent to which foreign subsidiaries' overall uptake of host-country employment relations practices is determined by the subsidiary incorporation type and size for practices related to industrial relations and education and training. Analyses of US subsidiaries in Switzerland, and, in contrast, those in Germany and the UK, on the whole support the propositions that distinguish between industrial relations and education and training-related host-country effects.     

Liquidity Constraints,the Composition of Government Expenditure,and Economic Growth

Abstract

This paper explains how and why the stock market, which is regarded as the embodiment of capitalism, has been allowed to develop and gain a prominent place among China's financial markets. That development has been consistent with the changing vested interests of the central government in its attempts to collect quasi-fiscal revenue from the financial sector, reflecting the stock market's growing importance as a tax-collection venue.     

‘ARE WE JUST KILLING PEOPLE?’: Centering Racial Capitalism in the Green Gentrification of the Atlanta BeltLine

In this article I argue that any analyses of the manifestations of urban natures within urban political ecology must center racial capitalism as a theoretical framework and account for how these manifestations, which rely upon the co-constitutive workings of race and nature, reproduce anti-Blackness and unequal productions of space. I engage urban frontier imaginative geographies as a lens through which to view the ongoing regimes of dispossession within the historical context of the founding of what is today known as Atlanta and the contemporary greening project of the Atlanta BeltLine. Race and nature intersect to function as instruments of power and converge in the spaces of the Atlanta BeltLine to (re)produce an urban green frontier.     

Racism and Far Right Imaginaries Within Neo-liberal Political Economy

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the connections between neo-liberalism and the politics of the far right through the prism of race. Contesting the claims of neo-liberal theorists and politicians as to its ‘post-racial’ character, it seeks to both historise the significance of racism within neo-liberalism through its connections to liberal political thought and practice over the longue durée and examine the relationship between neo-liberalism and far right politics. It does this through (1) highlighting the political significance of the far right in securing the electoral–political hegemony of neo-liberalism within Britain and the United States since the early 1980s; and (2) the way in which the socio-economic insecurities produced by neo-liberalism have helped to provoke far right responses as an alternative form of racialised moral economy. Consequently, while the relationship between the far right and neo-liberalism is contradictory, racial signifiers and racism have provided an important means through which such contradictions have been eased.     

Trapped in Informality: The Big Role of Small Firms in Russia’s Statist-patrimonial Capitalism

Manifestations of patrimonialism such as corruption and state predation on business are widespread in many emerging economies. This paper presents the case of Russian political economy, dubbed ‘statist-patrimonial capitalism’, which is marked by state threats to private property rights through bureaucratic extortion or legal harassment. How can we explain the resilience of Russia’s statist-patrimonial capitalism? Predominant accounts focus on the lack of institutional constraints on state predation. The paper offers a different perspective by exploring the often-overlooked contribution of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). First, statistical data show a steady rise of SMEs in the 2000s despite increasing state predation, suggesting that SMEs are not simply subjugated by the state. Second, in-depth interviews with Russian entrepreneurs reveal that business contributes to the maintenance of the statist-patrimonial system through the mechanism of the ‘informality trap’: firms that choose the informal strategy have difficulties to return to the legal sphere and get stuck in informality. The drivers of informality include firm-specific characteristics, institutional factors and socio-cultural factors dubbed ‘normality’. The mechanism of the ‘informality trap’ highlights the agency of firms in corrupt polities and may be applicable to other emerging economies.     

Moral dividends: Freemasonry and finance capitalism in early-nineteenth-century America

Abstract

Using documents from the Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons of the State of Indiana (USA), I show how the material practices and symbolic orientations of finance capitalism became transposed into Freemasonry in the early-nineteenth century. I briefly discuss why this happened and point to how these developments shaped the institutional trajectory of Freemasonry. Next, I observe that the symbolic moral standing of Freemasonry became transposed onto finance capitalism as undertaken by its members and other white men like them. After a brief explanation, I outline how these developments affected the institutionalisation of finance capitalism.     

国际超级垄断资本主义的特征及衰败——洞察美国金融危机的深层次矛盾

近期国际金融危机正是当代资本主义基本矛盾发展阶段性特征的标志,是二战后矛盾积累的必然结果。1945年至今的60多年中,以美国为首的垄断资本主义进入了国际超级金融垄断资本主义新阶段,具有与以往不同的七大特征,最基本的就是以金融——虚拟资本国际垄断并与信息技术垄断紧密结合而主导经济全球化。经过四个时期的发展,美国的金融膨胀和美元霸权王国,使它必然成为最大的"虚泡王国",爆发牵动世界的经济危机,加剧三大矛盾,宣告新自由主义理论和政策的破产。现在世界经济达到了新的转折点。