Documents economic system 80 results

"Since the early 2000s, scholars from a variety of disciplines have used the concept of financialization to describe a host of structural changes in the advanced political economies. Studies of financialization interrogate how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the underlying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of democratic society. This paper evaluates the insights of more than a decade of scholarship on financialization. Three approaches will be discussed: the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, the ascendency of the shareholder value orientation and the financialization of everyday life. It is argued that a deeper understanding of financialization will lead to a better understanding of organized interests, the politics of the welfare state, and processes of institutional change."

"The theory of Varieties of Capitalism is conceived as a systems theory. Without using systems theoretical language, different varieties are constructed as entities whose parts are complementary. Critics argue that this thwarts understanding of institutional change. While joining in this criticism I will argue that a systems perspective, more precisely a perspective of open and relatively loosely ordered social entities revealing systemness, is appropriate for analyzing politico-economic development. For human survival, political economies need this systemness. A political economy cannot be competitive without a considerable degree of functionality. But a functionalist logic automatically leading to systemness does not exist. As the parts of political economies (firms, stock markets, state departments) are relatively autonomous, the relevant actors often do not know what is functional, and reference frames, consisting of economic, social and environmental goals, are contested. Moreover, there are equi-functional ways to bring about identical results. These aspects of openness are the basis for institutional change that is kept in check by forces of path inertia."

"The French apparel industry has always had a distinctive industrial organization based on agglomeration economies of common skills and the need for direct coordination among fashion designers, manufacturers, suppliers and buyers. Often referred to as ‘garment districts', these local clusters of apparel-related firms were dominated by small and medium-sized (SMEs) firms until the 1960s when mass markets encouraged the development of large firms using mass production methods and hierarchical contracting with smaller suppliers. Since the 1980s, delocalization of production along with dramatic changes in apparel retailing have almost completely destroyed large manufacturers and their hierarchical contracting arrangements. What remains is an industry in which SMEs are largely the survivors. While many of these firms remain marginal, there is a significant core that is developing new business strategies, more diversified competencies and new types of horizontal production networks. This paper examines the recent evolution of the French apparel industry from district to network forms of organization in two of France's main apparel and knitwear regions, based upon nearly 20 years of field research. This research identifies a set of countervailing factors to global outsourcing in which SMEs can have a competitive advantage."

"This paper outlines an institutionalist political economy approach to capitalism as a specific type of social order. Social science institutionalism considers social systems to be structured by sanctioned rules of obligatory behaviour. Its perspective is one of collective ordering, or governance, through regularization and normalization of social action, either by public authority or by private contract. Political economy looks at the interrelations between collective action in general, and collective rule-making in particular, and the economy; it extends from economic and social policy-making to the way in which economic interests and constraints influence policy, politics and social life as a whole. The approach proposed in this article looks at society and economy as densely intertwined and closely interdependent, which is exactly what traditional concepts of capitalism stood for. Proceeding from an institutionalist perspective, it elaborates a concept of capitalism not as a self-driven mechanism of surplus extraction and accumulation governed by objective laws, but as a set of interrelated social institutions, and as a historically specific system of structured as well as structuring social interaction within and in relation to an institutionalized social order. "

"Strengthening linkages between climate change adaptation and mitigation policies can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of actions in support of a low-carbon, climate-resilient economic development. This policy paper provides an overview and a discussion of linkages, shedding light on the synergies that can be achieved as well as the trade-offs that could arise between the two policy agendas, but also across other environmental or social policy objectives. It aims at inspiring reflections of fostering linkages, especially as part of countries' ongoing discussions on designing green recovery measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Policy Paper was prepared as a background document for the G20 Climate Stewardship Working Group discussions under the G20 Presidency of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

"The economic system's interdependent relationship with nature is fraught with contradictions. While over half of global GDP moderately or highly depends on nature and subsidies to sectors driving nature's decline, e.g., agriculture, fossil fuels, forestry, amount to trillions of dollars annually, funding for biodiversity conservation and restoration remains woefully inadequate. Bridging the biodiversity funding gap is crucial but alone does not ensure ecosystems' health. Beyond innovative economic instruments and the elimination or reform of harmful subsidies, a selective downscaling of production and consumption has been proposed as a transition strategy to lower the overall ecological footprint of the economic system. Only by aligning economic flows with the biophysical limits of the planet can we envision a future where human well-being coexists with ecological integrity."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"'The most important book about our economy and society to be published in my lifetime' Irvine Welsh From Paul Mason, the award-winning Channel 4 presenter, Postcapitalism is a guide to our era of seismic economic change, and how we can build a more equal society. Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system by which entire societies function, has reached its limits and is changing into something wholly new. At the heart of this change is information technology: a revolution that, as Mason shows, has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership - in fact, he contends, it is already doing so. In this groundbreaking, Sunday Times top ten book, Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy."

"The structural change of the economy towards an increasing share of services is seen in environmental economics as a fundamental driver of ‘decoupling' between economic growth and environmental pressures. The environmental and socio-economic consequence of structural change, however, can be less straightforward when economic interdependencies are considered. In this paper we evaluate the implications of structural change towards services in the EU in terms of environmental pressures (aggregate and by sector, direct and indirect). The changing patterns in environmental pressures are analyses vis à vis the corresponding changes in the distribution of employment and value added. For carrying out this integrated assessment we use Environmentally Extended Multi Regional Input Output modelling applied to data from the World Input Output Database (WIOD). The results suggest that the service sectors is characterized by a lower emission intensity than the industrial sectors, when looking at direct emissions (‘production perspective') but this gap is much smaller when considering also indirect emissions in a ‘vertically integrated' approach (‘consumption perspective'). Moreover, changes in the production structure of the EU economy in absence of relevant changes in the composition of the final demand induce an increased reliance on environmental pressures, employment and value added generated abroad. The integrated assessment of these ‘global footprints' suggests that the EU is transferring worldwide more emissions that value added and employment. This form of ‘unequal exchange' can be relevant for development and environmental policies, in particular those on global climate change."