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The Village Fund in Indonesia has been praised as a breakthrough policy in eradicating rural poverty. This article, based on a study of a "best practice village" in central Java, however, reveals that the Village Fund has simply facilitated the triumph of the village ruling class. Though village political institutions have adopted good governance measures (participation, transparency, accountability, and so on), the poor remain largely powerless and are unable to gain a significant share of the Village Fund. In contrast to existing "elite capture" literature which has often highlighted local elite domination, this article moves beyond this limited view. By looking at the economic bases of the powerful actors occupying village political positions and institutions, this article shows how members of the village ruling class are primarily capitalist farmers whose power lies in land ownership and agricultural commodity production. As a result, development projects in rural areas continue to be the "prize" for the village ruling class when there is no re-organisation in the structure of land ownership and production relations in the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism is getting more intense in line with the increasing democratization of Indonesia's post-Reformation political economy. The discourse of neoliberal freedom that positions individuals as a commodity and an object of administration leads to a process of depoliticization of the subject which is increasingly becoming a serious challenge for the Indonesian norm of collectivity. In moving toward an answer to this challenge, this experience-based article presents the spirit of Laku Aktor in the Indonesian theatrical acting system as a form of political subject category that can be positioned as a counter-discourse to the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to synthesize the extant literature that brings sociological analysis to the context, production and perpetuation of the antiracist identity. Our aim is to distinguish this analysis from the huge body of literature written from inside antiracism. Antiracism began in the latter half of the twentieth century. This examination reveals antiracism as an identity and a project of organizational production maintained through discursive and symbolic formations and institutionalized forms of governance. Its members espouse easily digestible 'common sense' ideologies of racism and anti-racism premised on a belief in the 'absolute nature' of categories of ethnicity and race. It then builds on this discursive framing with commensurate solutions at these levels. It does this through discursive projects and codification of institutional self governance. However, this racializing identity work may perpetuate racism through its classifications and its obfuscation of class privilege and economic inequalities. Its ever-expanding codified extension into organizations, businesses and global grassroots movements calls for a critical lens to direct historical, economic and political analysis onto the obfuscating work of this identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the central Indian cotton belt, I examine two historical moments: (1) the expansion of agrarian capitalism and absorption of market logics into the peasant household in the colonial period; and (2) changes in seed technology and gendered labor required for cultivating hybrid cotton in the postcolonial era. Through these transformations, cotton farmers have maintained a harvest ritual in the fields. Through a comparison of contemporary and historical versions of this ritual, a new theory of ritual emerges, one that displaces the primacy of the linguistic sign, instead considering the semiotic force of the image. Ritual, in this rendering, is not only a material archive of social history but also an aesthetic and creative practice through which women farmers sacralize their own labor. Amid transforming regimes of cash‐crop agriculture, the ritual situates regimes of cotton growing in the bodily and affective labor of the female farming body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2023, Argentina elected Javier Milei, a right-wing former television personality, as its president. Milei promised to implement radical, libertarian policies such as abolishing the central bank and eliminating public institutions. His victory, with 56 percent of the vote, was supported by sections of the working class, particularly young males in the informal sector. This election marks a potential transition to a new political and social regime in Argentina. The country has previously been governed by populist left and neoliberal right governments, but neither type of government has been able to fully address the country's economic challenges. [Extracted from the article]

Care work is shaped by the context in which it is carried out. This study explored the context, content, conditions and consequences of work in two fields of social care in Sweden: eldercare and disability services. Policy documents and statistical sources were used to analyse the context. Job content, working conditions and consequences of work were analysed using survey data collected in 2015 and 2017 in eldercare and disability services (N = 1307). The analysis of the political and economic context showed that the disability sector is characterised by a higher ambition level in legislation and funding. The survey of care workers reflected this difference: the work content differs; and the working conditions and their consequences are significantly worse for the eldercare staff than for the disability service staff. Possible explanations for these differences are discussed in terms of policy‐framing, ageist notions and unintended consequences of policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of political economy scholarship stressing the class antagonisms that undergird housing systems. Despite differences, these contributions focus on housing as a component of a nation's economy and the role of political institutions as managers of that system. Our goal is to help assess the value of emerging discussions that focus on the centrality of housing assets to ideas of class and the structuring of social opportunity. We identify four key elements of such approaches: first, a concern with changes within capitalism since the GFC; second, an interest in the continued role of the State; third, the ideological position of housing and tenure; and, finally, a concern with the class-tenure antagonisms that feature in many urban settings. We argue that while an emerging body of work now examines the role of housing assets in shaping class-based fissures there remains a need to consider the policy histories affecting the shifting position of particular tenures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the human ecological model views neighbourhood instability as a function of household-level decisions, the present study draws on a political economy of place perspective to highlight how the profit-seeking interests of outside actors shapes instability, with consequences for neighbourhood crime. Using data on neighbourhoods in Los Angeles County from 2007 to 2013, I decompose levels of stability according to housing dynamics (displacement, development, changing rents, sales, low-income units), and assess their direct and indirect association with violent and property crime. I find that, over a 7-year period, poorer neighbourhoods are more vulnerable to these exchange-value pressures, stability is more consequential to crime in high-poverty neighbourhoods, and certain housing dynamics are associated with increasing crime through their detrimental effect on renter stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives some states to liberalise immigration policies while others resist doing so? Why do states expand rights for some migrants and not for others? Building on Hollifield's [(2004). 'The Emerging Migration State'. International Migration Review 38 (3): 885–912] theory of the migration state, this article explores how the process of political economic development in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan shaped their citizenship regimes and, later, their immigration policies. We argue that the specific patterns of migration management in East Asian democracies – characterised by partially open borders and discrete institutionalised rights for specific subcategories of migrants – is not a reflection of an incomplete liberal migration state but rather, migration control by (formerly or contemporary) developmental states that have historically prioritised economic development, social stability, and national security over democracy and equality. Based on an analysis of archival, policy, and legal documents collected in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan from 2010 to 2019, this article analyzes the emergence of the 'developmental migration state' that correlates migrants' access to rights and permanent settlement with their utility towards national developmental goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Led by the emerging growth models perspective, research in comparative political economy has recently reintroduced demand drivers of economic growth into the centre of political-economic analysis. While this marks a significant advancement, current scholarship has, so far, focused mainly on explaining the endurance of existing growth models rather than the process of change. To begin addressing this gap, we identify one route to growth model change: the inclusion of organised labour into growth coalitions. Our proposed framework expands the role of growth coalitions in growth models by incorporating insights from the established literature on institutional change. Building on these insights, we distinguish between broad and narrow coalitions based on their scope, composition, and inclusive nature. With this distinction in mind, we argue that when a previously narrow coalition is broadened by incorporating organised labour, it can 'balance the scales', i.e. shift the growth model from a purely export-led model into a more balanced one. This shift occurs as labour's influence on policy promotes wage growth and redistribution which, in turn, fuel wage-based consumption. We demonstrate our theoretical framework through a comparative analysis of the primary case study of Israel and two additional cases of Brazil and Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between labor, finance, and rent in the construction industry. The author argues that there is a conflict between the deflationary nature of capitalist production and the inflationary nature of rentierism. These two forms of accumulation are seen as opposing forces that can hinder productive growth. The article also discusses the financialization of construction labor, which has led to new hybrid forms of accumulation. It explores how changes in contractual relations in residential construction impact rentierism and labor exploitation. The text also delves into the historical shift from feudalism to industrial capitalism in housing production and the role of contractors in hiring wage laborers. It suggests that the production and rentierization of property are influenced by financial and rent logics. [Extracted from the article]

Madelaine Moore's book, "Water Struggles as Resistance to Neoliberal Capitalism: A Time for Reproductive Unrest," offers a critical political economy perspective on social change and social movements. The book examines the class politics of water and the tensions between the reproduction of conditions for profit-making and life-making. Moore analyzes water grabs as a form of capitalist accumulation and explores movements in Australia and Ireland that emerged in response to the crisis of profitability. She argues that these movements redefine the value and relationship to water and contribute to a conjuncture of reproductive unrest. The book also develops a social reproduction theory approach and highlights the intersections between social reproduction and agency within political economy. Overall, the book provides valuable insights for scholars and activists interested in water, social movements, class, and environmental politics. [Extracted from the article]

Precarious work arrangements have become a dominant feature of twenty-first-century political economy. One employer strategy that has contributed to eroding workers' rights and protections is misclassifying employees as independent contractors, avoiding the obligations that come with employee status. Recently, policymakers in some states and at the federal level have sought to combat this trend by expanding the definition of employment, notably by adopting the three-prong standard known as the ABC test. The misclassification problem has received much attention in both legal scholarship and public discourse, but these discussions have not sufficiently addressed how these reforms affect a particularly vulnerable subset of precarious workers: undocumented immigrants without federal employment authorization. Immigrant workers often depend on independent contractor status to work. Federal immigration law requires employers to verify that all employees--but not independent contractors--are permitted to work in the United States. As a result, immigrants can work as independent contractors without having to claim fraudulent work authorization. New reforms may improve working conditions for immigrants in precarious occupations by extending to them many of the protections of labor and employment law. However, these reforms may also have the unintended consequence of shutting immigrant workers out of the formal economy by defining more work arrangements as employment. This Article examines how efforts to combat employee misclassification can include immigrants without federal work authorization. It argues that immigrant workers can hold a hybrid status: defined as employees under new, broader labor and employment law definitions of the term while remaining independent contractors for immigration purposes. As a result, these reforms do not trigger new work authorization verification requirements for employers that make it harder for immigrants to work. At the same time, allowing this hybrid status to exist between work law and immigration law contexts will likely require action on the part of both state legislatures and federal agencies. In the fast-evolving context of immigration federalism, promoting hybrid status for unauthorized workers promises to be a powerful tool for states seeking to implement an inclusive immigration agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the policy dismantling process in the Brazilian innovation system since mid-2010. The research describes how this policy change has been undertaken and explains the strategies deployed and major causes. The study is theoretically grounded in the debate of policy dismantling, meaning changes that result in cuts, reductions, or even abolition of budget, rules, capacities, and instruments of a governmental area. A mixed-methods approach, both quantitative and qualitative, is employed. First, it examines the dismantling process in the last years, focusing on the budget execution patterns of the major policy instruments and agencies in charge of innovation at the federal level. The research relies on the stakeholders' perception by conducting semi-structured interviews with experts regarding strategies, rationale, reactions, and effects. The empirical findings show the dismantling occurs in both dimensions: density (number of tools reduced) and, mainly, the intensity (budget cuts), varying according to government areas. The interviewees highlighted the prevailing strategy as active dismantling, in which the fiscal austerity aggravated by the COVID-19 crisis, an ideological shift in the government coalition, policy particularities, and a low level of prioritization in innovation by the domestic business community are the main factors that affect the politicians' preferences to dismantle. Finally, the process seriously affects the national innovation system, such as the loss of bureaucratic and policy capacity, brain drain, and lag in technology, productivity, and consequently, in the country's economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is a political-geographical analysis of political and economic relations between the Slovak Republic and the countries of the world from 1993 to 2019. We spatially analyze more than 15,000 trips of Slovak government officials to countries around the world and their relation to foreign trade. Using the statistical method of correlation, we examine the degree of relationship between trade indicators and political interactions (represented by government visits) in more than 150 countries around the world. We cartographically define spatial concentration, especially the high direct correlation between trade and trips, and examine the factors and causes of this correlation on the example of selected countries with significant values. The countries of the Eastern Partnership, the Middle East, the Western Balkans, and East Asia have the highest correlation coefficients. Our article seeks to contribute to the discussion on the effectiveness of economic diplomacy using geographical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Marxist and psychoanalytic frameworks, I collect notes and reflections about the experience of contingent work in the Writing Center at Amherst College, a private liberal arts college in the United States. Taking the tradition of workers' inquiry as a source of inspiration and point of departure, I chart the material relations of the job alongside its social and affective dimensions. Connecting the form that writing takes (in classrooms and scholarly publishing) to the political economic relations of higher education, I reframe writing as a means to make sense of experience rather than as a mode of professionalized conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world": And what's economic geography going to do about it? It is against this looming future that Henry Yeung ([13]) has written "Troubling economic geography" about the discipline's looming future. The paper is a critical commentary of Henry Yeung's paper, 'Troubling economic geography: new directions in the post-pandemic world'. In Kuhn's example, one now saw only bunnies, whereas before it was only ducks.[4] Or, in the case of economic geography, as John Hudson said, he saw now only "points and lines", whereas before he saw regions and Hartshornian element complexes.[5] The second is economic geography after the 1970s crisis of deindustrialisation and Fordism. [Extracted from the article]

Despite women being increasingly engaged in labor-platform activities, little of the research conducted on this topic to date has included a feminist perspective. However, the platform economy has direct impacts on the social organization of social reproduction and is changing the main dimensions of the world of work with crucial gendered effects. This study deploys a feminist political economics approach to assess the impacts of digital labor platforms on the reconfiguration and regeneration of intersectional inequalities. The findings of this analysis of digital platforms in the care sector in Spain reveal how they profit from regulatory contexts that perpetuate existing gender, race, and migrant status inequalities, as well as labor market vulnerability, with migrant women segregated into lower-paid and more insecure jobs. JEL Classification: J3, J5, J7, O3 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review research on the history of education policy in colonial sub-Saharan Africa and among the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil through a political economy lens. While the supply of education was severely constricted in all of these cases, demand for education remained strong. Thus, even as authoritarian states have attempted to restrict educational supply for social control, the strength of the demand—and the accompanying pedagogical, organizational, and political innovations—illustrates the power of education to empower marginalized communities. Through reviewing work in economics, history, and political science, we highlight the transformative effects of formal education in Black communities as well as the centrality of Black people in demanding access to higher education and innovating new political ideas and pedagogies that saw education as a force for liberation. Governments and citizens must continue to work to correct the inherited distortions in the supply of education in Black communities in Africa as well as in the diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that opium's pivotal role in nineteenth-century political economy and aesthetics constructed addiction as a relationship between labor and capital that has persisted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discourses on opium addiction frame it as a crisis of sovereignty for individuals and masses in ways that veil its relationships to labor, collectivity, and community. Yet addiction arises within broad systems as much as it does within individuals: in this exemplary case, of labor, empire, opium, and logistics. This essay rereads nineteenth-century discourses of opium addiction through "the logistical sublime," in which all manufacturing and distribution processes go smoothly, and "the logistical nightmare," in which they descend into chaos. It reframes opium addiction as a logistical technique that secured and maintained the preeminence of British, and later, Chinese and US imperial capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the novelties brought into contemporary political economic analysis by the burgeoning growth model literature is that legitimacy is inherent to the politics of growth. However, the way popular legitimacy is understood in this literature remains limited to discursive acts, namely public discourse by state officials and political parties. We argue, instead, that growth model legitimation towards groups outside the dominant social bloc also includes material (re-)distribution measures. Furthermore, these measures may not necessarily be in line with growth requirements or with growth-model logic, and may even be counter-productive to those requirements. We demonstrate our arguments by analyzing the Israeli case, where legitimacy problems of an export-led growth model led the government to implement legitimacy-seeking policies that included the liberalization of consumer-goods imports and of credit for households and small business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates critiques of the contemporary university elaborated by scholars under the umbrella of critical university studies (CUS) by grappling with the theoretical and conceptual commitments to neoliberalism as a framework to discuss the political economy of higher education and its concomitant practices. Through a Black feminist critique of CUS's engagements with the "neoliberal function" of higher education, this article suggests the inability of neoliberalism as an analytical frame to consider the history of colonization and chattel slavery in the structuring of the contemporary university. Put another way, the emphasis on neoliberalism in many cultural critiques of the contemporary university disallows an analysis of Black fungibility as the internal logic of neoliberalism and the necessary relation that stabilizes the modern university and allows for the reproduction of post-slavery university subjects. Specifically, this argument coheres to the materialized scene of the university as a site of struggle. Reading Black student leaders' denigration of the university through a Black feminist lens, this article invites a reconfiguration of the contemporary university critique that both constitutes the current neoliberal paradigm and exceeds the onto-epistemic configurations of the educational subject that enable the emergence of the "neoliberal critique" of the university itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the secondary sources, this paper examines the link between ethnic political parties and religion in Pakistan, focusing on case studies of BNP-M in Balochistan, ANP in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and QAT in Sindh provinces. ANP aimed for freedom from Punjabi political dominance without challenging religious sentiments. However, they faced opposition from Pashtun Taliban, perceiving ANP as a threat to religious narratives. ANP's liberal stance was seen as a threat to religious practices and contributed to their loss in the 2018 general elections. BNP-M has appeared neutral on the state's religious narrative and seeking inspiration from leftist transnational political parties in neighboring countries. BNP-M avoided affecting religious sentiments and focused on common social, political, economic, and human rights issues related to the local people. QAT openly adopted a liberal and leftist ideology, taunting religious groups, which negatively impacted local sentiments and hindered their popularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Progressive movements today call for transformative state-led investment in renewable energy and other climate infrastructures—in the United States, a vision that confronts inherited legacies of austerity. I argue that a significant obstacle is the neoliberal toolkit through which the US federal government subsidizes renewables, an indirect, highly opaque system of tax credits and incentives. For forty years, tax subsidies have 'paid' private financial players to invest in renewables, via allowing them to claim legal tax shelters against their other income. In this political economic analysis, I question, first, how US renewable energy acquired this peculiar form of public finance 'through the tax code', unique in the global industry. Second, I explore how the model has shaped US renewables financing, development, and ownership. I center two decisive moments: the California 'wind rush' in the 1980s, and the ongoing renewables boom of the last fifteen years. This history articulates financial experiments and tax sheltering scandals of the Reagan Administration with exploitation returned today in more organized (and lucrative) form, as 'tax equity' finance. Via tax equity, a handful of major US banks dominate financing for renewables and other politically embattled public goods. They exert a troubling ability to extract rents for their capital, gatekeep what projects get built and by whom, and stall US renewables development altogether. Today, the practice is increasingly strained by these and other problems—growing public costs, private capacity ceilings, and amplification of sectoral crises. Under Biden, it faces probable reform, but may need more comprehensive reimagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the recently decided EU-wide emission trading scheme for road transport and heating fuels. The so-called ETS2 is part of the 'Fit for 55' policy package, which also includes tighter vehicle emission standards, a reform of energy taxation, provisions to enhance advanced fuel infrastructure and a Social Climate Fund to alleviate financial pressure for low-income households. We argue that the ETS2 should be understood as an element of a broader policy mix, which considers multiple market failures, fairness both within and across EU member states within the institutional constraints of EU policy making. We conclude by discussing specific potential modifications to the design of the ETS2 that could help achieve the EU's climate target in an efficient and equitable way. These include linking ETS and ETS2, reducing price volatility, increasing the size of the Social Climate fund, and clarifying penalties for countries missing targets under the Effort Sharing Regulation. • Various measures complement EU carbon pricing in heating and transport. • Distributional concerns, within and across countries, are key to policy design. • Various measures aim to ensure prices in ETS2 remain limited. • Continued inclusion of ETS2-sectors in ESR ensures rich EU countries must mitigate. • We propose further evolution of ETS, including linking, price corridors, larger SCF. Highlights: Political and economic analysis of the policy mix to decarbonize road transport with a special focus on the role of the recently decided new emissions trading scheme for this sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditions within development thought sceptical of market-led development and which emphasise the unevenness and instabilities of global capitalism are experiencing some renewed interest. One such tradition is dependency studies: a school of thought once prominent in the field of development. We critically review the dependency tradition alongside a more recent branch of critical inquiry into development, namely decoloniality. One of our core contributions is to clarify what makes the decolonial tradition substantially distinct from dependency and other traditions in development thought. We locate decoloniality in the context of the "cultural turn" that swept through social theory from the 1970s. Our paper problematises decoloniality's critique of Modernity as inherently colonial and oppressive and finds that its core features are idealism and the strong risk of cultural relativism. We assert that the substantive commitments of the dependency tradition are its strength and reject the equivalence drawn by decolonial theorists between "Eurocentrism" and belief in Enlightenment values and methodologies. Drawing on the work of Samir Amin, we emphasise the need for development theory to retain an analytic focus on a materialist analysis of global capitalism; we echo Amin's critique of culturalism and endorse his defence of universalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1990, A. Sivanandan published an essay subtitled 'The hokum of New Times', which took aim at Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques' theorisation of Thatcherism and the neoliberal revolution. Central to this criticism was Sivanandan's decade-long tracing of the 'new circuits of imperialism' that had been engendered by a new global division of labour and hierarchies of production, technological change and the domestic fall-out of such processes in forms of British state racism and racialised forms of exploitation. Although Hall's work has diffused into the field of international political economy, Sivanandan's take has largely been neglected. This article, developed from a presentation at the 'New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference', King's College, London, October 2022, will briefly return to the Hall and Sivanandan debate to help foreground Sivanandan's international political economy and also highlight how it took racism and imperialism to be integral to the neoliberal order in Britain and beyond. It will show how Sivanandan's anti-racist and anti-imperial international political economy can help us to frame and understand the current crisis of neoliberalism from the vantage points of 'over here, and over there', and how thinking with and through international political economy must be at the heart of contemporary anti-racism's address of the current crisis of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between politics and economic knowledge is highly debated. One general view states that economics should be lacking of politics because of its corrupting effects, while another view conversely argue that politics can be distorted by the impact of economic knowledge. Both views indicate that the solution is to eliminate the influence of one over the other. The relationship between economics and politics can be discussed in two distinct but also intertwined ways, demonstrating a classical and modern relationship. The first arises from the emergence of economic science itself. Because of the natural relationship between economics and politics, economics has been called "political economy." The second relationship between economics and politics is highly novel compared to the first and analyzes politics using an economic method. However, both of the approaches mentioned above are in the context of the famous phrase "political economy". Seen interdisciplinary, the potential relations between economics and politics are emphesized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By combining the achievements of political economics and institutional economics, Anna Ząbkowicz proposed the term 'institutional political economics' in the title. The book reflects on the state-economy relation, including the perspective synthetically combining these two approaches. Ząbkowicz aimed to study the dominant entities in the economy, and the state's role in relation to them. Ząbkowicz claimed that the entities have enough power to impose their agenda on their environment, more often including the state. The state is subject to pressure from various interest groups, including big business, by building key institutions for the functioning of the economy and implementing public policies. In consequence, the modern economy results largely from a game between the state and said groups. In the perspective adopted by Ząbkowicz, what matters is the relationship between power and dependence, and the institutionalisation of the economic and political process. This approach differs significantly from the neoclassical mainstream in economics, making the reviewed book a very interesting read. The review will comprise two parts. The first one will discuss Ząbkowicz's main ideas. The second one will evaluate the monograph by listing its merits and polemicizing with some of its theses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we reconstruct the mobilisations of rural actors both from 'below' and from 'above' and their connections to Argentina's agrarian political economy between 2001 and 2020. We divide the analysis into three periods and review key protest events and the actions of movements and organisations, paying special attention to two dimensions. First, we consider how rural movements and organisations engaged with institutional politics and the state. Second, we analyse the collective identifications and claims at the basis of coalitions forged within and beyond the rural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments use public–private partnerships (PPPs) as their agents to finance, design, build, maintain and operate their public infrastructure. Despite wide use, many PPPs have produced poor outcomes, including large transaction costs, renegotiations and bankruptcies. Society delegates the authority to build and operate public infrastructure to governments, which must then choose the means of provision. The alternatives are either government-financed design-build contracting, followed by government operation and maintenance—traditional procurement (TP)—or a PPP. We examine this choice using principal–agent and political economy theories. We evaluate the performance of PPPs versus TP against the normative goal of social welfare (economic efficiency). As well, in a review of the empirical literature through 2022, we find no convincing evidence that PPPs provide superior social welfare, nor evidence that many projects been evaluated on this basis. Governments' continued preference for PPPs in many cases is best explained by political goals and political economy theory. A review of recent empirical evidence supports the view that political economy variables contribute to PPP adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to the English School's (ES) understanding of the European Regional International Society (ERIS) through the work of Karl Polanyi. While ES theory has long been interested in regional international societies, its general approach remains limited to a methodologically internationalist frame that fails to capture the dynamism and historical change of regional formations. We therefore aim to better ground the ES account of the ERIS within a more robust political economy framework that incorporates domestic dynamics with international processes. The article first examines the making of the nineteenth-century liberal order and its eventual breakdown during the turn of the century—the "great transformation", which ultimately informed the rationale for the European Community (EC). We then focus our analysis on the EC's Common Agricultural Policy. With specific examination of sugar production, we explore the tensions and contradictions bound up with the formation of a protected domestic and regional sugar market, the pressures it exerted on the wider international society, and the ways in which European officials skillfully exploited the post-Cold War liberalization of international society as a means of (partially) "disembedding" European sugar. Lastly, we hope that this article begins a new conversation on how the tenets of political economy (Polanyian or otherwise) might, at long last, make an impact on ES theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Review of Radical Political Economics is calling for papers for a special issue on climate change and capitalism. The journal is seeking manuscripts that provide a range of critical political economic perspectives on the topic, as well as a variety of methods, approaches, and geographic focuses. They particularly encourage submissions from climate activists, scholars in the Global South, early career researchers, and scholars from historically excluded groups. The journal provides a list of possible subjects for the special issue, including theoretical and empirical interventions, historical or contemporary analyses, critiques of economic analysis, and models of climate justice and anti-capitalist struggles. Submissions must adhere to the journal's guidelines and will undergo peer review. [Extracted from the article]

A core region is the first place for expected shifts in archaeological materials before, during, and after political changes like state emergence and imperial consolidation. Yet, studies of ceramic production have shown that there are sometimes limited or more subtle changes in the ceramic economy throughout such political fluctuations. This article synthesizes recent efforts to address political economic changes via geochemical characterization (neutron activation analysis; NAA) in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin in western Mexico. This region was home to the Purépecha state and then empire (Tarascan; ca. AD 1350–1530), one of the most powerful kingdoms in the Americas before European arrival. The combined ceramic dataset from four sites in the region result in eight geochemical groups. Our analysis indicates that the region experienced long-term and relatively stable ceramic production that was not substantially altered by the emergence of the state and empire. In addition, we find evidence for (1) dispersed, localized production; (2) long-lived compositional ceramic recipes; and (3) a complex ceramic economy with differential community participation. We discuss why documenting local ceramic production and craft production more generally is important for the study of past political economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deindustrialization became a pressing political issue and an object of research almost simultaneously in North America. This article inquires into the intellectual origins and radical roots of the deindustrialization thesis in Canada and the United States. Though the two countries share much in common, their distinctive formulations of the deindustrial problem in the 1970s and 1980s reflected key economic and political differences between them. Radical political economists in Canada and the United States turned to dependency theory and capital flight, respectively, in their theorization of deindustrialization. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's 1982 book, The Deindustrialization of America , in particular, is a founding text for the burgeoning field of deindustrialization studies. We can learn much from re-engaging with this early scholarship. In doing so, however, we need to bridge the continuing analytical divide between micro-level labour histories of working-class communities and macro-level studies of political economy and the international division of labour. La désindustrialisation est devenue un enjeu politique pressant et un objet de recherche presque simultanément en Amérique du Nord. Cet article interroge les origines intellectuelles et les racines radicales de la thèse de la désindustrialisation au Canada et aux États-Unis. Bien que les deux pays partagent beaucoup de points communs, leurs formulations distinctes du problème désindustriel dans les années 1970 et 1980 reflétaient des différences économiques et politiques essentielles entre eux. Les économistes politiques radicaux du Canada et des États-Unis se sont tournés vers la théorie de la dépendance et la fuite des capitaux, respectivement, dans leur théorisation de la désindustrialisation. Le livre de Barry Bluestone et Bennett Harrison de 1982, The Deindustrialization of America , en particulier, est un texte fondateur pour le domaine en plein essor des études sur la désindustrialisation. Nous pouvons apprendre beaucoup en renouant avec cette première bourse. Ce faisant, cependant, nous devons combler le fossé analytique persistant entre les histoires de travail au niveau micro des communautés ouvrières et les études au niveau macro de l'économie politique et de la division internationale du travail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the designation "platform urbanism," there is growing scholarly recognition that platform intermediaries are reconfiguring urban industries, processes, and relationships through the collection and manipulation of big data. Central to realizing this economic project is financial speculation on platforms' ability to coordinate network effects—a phenomenon in which the more users there are in a networked system, the more valuable and useful it becomes. In this paper, I argue that while the existing literature recognizes the importance of network effects, it has also adopted a limited conceptualization that understands platform firms as the primary agents generating and capturing the economic benefits of network effects. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, I work to expand this understanding through attention to the social lives of network effects—the ways in which platform architectures are always embedded in social relations created and sustained in everyday urban life. I show how ride-hailing drivers have attempted to mitigate the risks of their work through building socio-technical networks of their own, for their own purposes. Doing so reveals that it is not only platform firms and venture capital that speculate on network effects; rather, a range of actors in the city-region seek to tap into driver networks to advance their own social, political, and economic ends. In conclusion, I suggest that attending to these practices opens up space to reframe platform urbanism beyond its current preoccupation with macro political economic analyses, while also establishing new lines of inquiry for "speculative urbanism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the globalisation of Saemaul Undong, a South Korean rural development programme. While multiple actors promote contradictory versions of global Saemaul, suggesting strategic incoherence, all these initiatives are tied together by a coherent political economic agenda, namely the export of a will to compete in the developing world. By focusing on the interests of Saemaul's globalisation, this article shows that for converging local and global actors, Saemaul is an instrument to enrol villagers in capitalist development and to enforce extended processes of primitive accumulation. Saemaul aligns with the neo-liberal agendas of development agencies: it fits the imperative of participatory development and its contemporary advocates emphasise its Schumpeterian qualities and its ability to promote social competition in rural communities. Saemaul also seeks to achieve social change by changing minds, while its globalisation also aligns with the World Bank's recent behavioural agenda of transformation of the mind for capitalist purposes. This transformative endeavour reflects the coinciding materialist interests of global development agencies and the Korean state-chaebol nexus. By promoting the principle of agricultural value chain integration in Saemaul programmes, South Korean governments also use Saemaul to respond to the business interests shaping the country's Official Development Assistance provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poor quality of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Indonesia is due in part to failures of governance at the institution level. Drawing on an analysis of conflict and contestation in three Indonesian HEIs, this article argues that these failures reflect the dominance of predatory officials and business groups in institutional governance and the relative marginalisation of elements who support improved research, teaching and community service in line with either neo-liberal or idealist conceptions of quality. It also argues that some degree of change in governance has been possible when reformist elements have gained control of a HEI and driven change from the top down or such elements have challenged predatory HEI management by leveraging support from external actors with influence. Instances of such change hold out hope for improved governance at Indonesian HEIs in the future. But they also indicate that even if the dominance of predatory elements within HEIs can be overcome, further struggle will be required to define the precise nature of governance reform given competing reformist agendas with markedly different implications for how academic quality and integrity are understood, measured and implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian economy went from being amongst the most promising areas of "new settlement," to producing one of the most "mediocre" rich-country performances, only to later enjoy a "miraculous" revival. This is the second part of a two-part article that presents an account of this Australian trajectory that is critical of mainstream traditions. Drawing on key insights of Marx's critique of political economy, this article argues that Australia's role in the production of surplus-value on global scale has specifically determined its pattern of long-term economic and political development. Since its creation by British capital, the Australian economy became not only a source of cheap raw materials but also of ground-rent for appropriation by competing social subjects. Part I examined the colonial period. This second part analyses the Commonwealth period. It is argued that the process of inwards-oriented industrialisation, in place until the mid-1980s, was the state-mediated economic form through which capital invested in manufacturing managed to appropriate the largest share of the Australian ground-rent. It also argues that during the neo-liberal era that followed that process, manufacturing capital was increasingly displaced by industrial capital invested in mining and public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The devastating 2020 wildfires in Oregon provide an opportunity to revisit the "discursive creation of homelessness" first identified by Céline Pascale in this journal in 2005. Drawing on physical observation of the unfolding event and discursive analysis of media reporting (print, radio, and television), we find radically different media coverage of people unhoused by wildfires and those previously unhoused but also affected by the fires. Journalistic uses of nomenclature and reported speech, portrayals of agency, and exclusion of marginalized voices provide current examples of the stratification of deservedness. The wildfires, deemed a natural disaster but simultaneously an "unnatural" cause of houselessness, reinforced the differential material treatment of "evacuees" as a special category deserving of aid and support in contrast to people living unhoused before the wildfires. Yet this reasoning ignores the temporal dimensions of displacement and lack of housing, which independent of their causes produce compounding and tangible socio-economic and physical effects on those affected. We argue that as climate change-related disasters such as wildfires displace more people in Oregon and across the United States, the origins of houselessness will be less meaningful while societal response and compassion will matter more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Australian business management improvement programs and provides a critical assessment of their scope, effectiveness, and areas for improvement. It highlights deficiencies in management capabilities, especially within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and discusses the need for better program design, evaluation, and institutional analysis to address persistent issues in program performance.

Television formats (e.g., The Masked Singer) have been traded for 20 years without firm legal protection. This paper performs a political economic analysis of this uncertainty in the legal protection of formats by examining television format copyright infringement disputes in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, and Brazil in the early 2000s. The cases show two dimensions of format copyright: the formation of the authorship of television formats and the construction of infringement. By examining the two dimensions of the cases, this paper demonstrates that the present state of television format copyright was an outcome of an ideological process that was enacted by the interaction between a territorial logic of law and a transnational logic of capital, expressed through actors such as multinational corporations, domestic corporations, and legal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's foreign investment law regime has experienced significant changes in recent years. A milestone came with the passing of the Foreign Investment Law (FIL) in 2019, replacing the laws and regulations that had governed foreign investment in China for four decades. This article first undertakes a political economic analysis to determine the relevance of internal and external factors contributing to the changes. It then discusses the key characteristics of the FIL and reveals how it is designed to create a liberal, stable, fair, transparent and accountable regime to promote and protect foreign investment. Although the passage of the FIL ushered in a new era of foreign investment in China, many important issues remain unresolved and further actions must be taken to ensure its smooth implementation. To support the sustained development of its foreign investment regime, China must address existing laws and regulations that are incompatible with the new regime, clarify key issues that the new law fails to address, issue clearer guidance on national security, shorten its 'negative list', promote opening up and enhance regulatory transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilizes critical political economy to examine how The Coca-Cola Company (Coke) constructs healthy or "natural" messages on food labels and other promotional texts to advertise non-carbonated sugary beverage brands (SSBs) owned by the company. The labeling histories and controversies of two products in particular, VitaminWater and Simply Orange Juice, are analyzed as case studies to illustrate how companies such as Coke have liberally labeled SSBs as healthy with little legal consequence. What results from labeling-related deception are consumers at risk of making ill-informed decisions about their health. However, the cases examined here reveal that current labeling regulation does little to deter from this behavior and allows for the proliferation of misleading claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how health is constructed as an emerging value of quality standards in intensive agriculture in the province of Huelva (Spain) with a specific focus on the health and welfare of female seasonal migrant workers. Based on an ethnographic approach, the research draws on two sources: an analysis of Global G.A.P. quality standards documentation and qualitative in-depth interviews with four key social actors, including local producers, social and professional organisations, healthcare professionals and migrant women working on seasonal contracts. Drawing on theoretical contributions from convention theory and the socio-anthropological approach of political economy, the study identified imbalances between the meanings and practices around health and safety. Principally, the study concludes that norms established by quality standards focus almost exclusively on consumers' health while neglecting the health costs and inequalities experienced by female agricultural workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]