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"John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s.

This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours.

Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability."

"Combining the key theoretical and empirical approaches of political economy and EU scholarship, this textbook is key reading for studying the European political economy.
Drawing on theoretical debates and recent policy case studies, a team of expert editors and contributors help students apply theories and methods to real life issues in European political economy. This textbook offers a clear analysis of some of the most pressing challenges confronting Europe, such as the political impact of rising inequality, the functioning and the effects of Economic and Monetary Union, the future of the 'European' social model, the ongoing impact of Brexit, Europe's role in a changing global economy, and Europe's response to the Covid-19 pandemic."

"The purpose of this paper is to develop a political economy approach able to examine the multiple, global crises of our times, a crisis of global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global ecology. Based on the philosophy of internal relations, I make three claims in this paper. First, we need a historical materialist approach to comprehend the historical specificity of capitalism. Second, we need an expanded conceptualization of capitalist accumulation, understanding that capitalist reproduction depends not only on the exploitation of wage labour in the sphere of production, but equally on different forms of expropriation in the sphere of social reproduction. Third, to reveal the internal relations between these different crises, we need to focus on class struggle in our analysis, defining both class struggle and labour movement broadly when doing so."
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

"Taking Back Control? examines the ongoing tug of war between the forces of globalism and those of democracy, between centralisation and decentralisation, and between the unifica­tion and the differentiation of states and state systems. On this territory are fought the defining geopolitical struggles of our era, which will determine the advance of global capitalism and shape the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.
The neoliberal revolution of the 1990s gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralisation and unification of states and state systems. This was the "New World Order" proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But it proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combina­tion of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy, and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalisation called forward various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward trans­fer of state authority in its tracks.
Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, Wolfgang Streeck formulates a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, he discusses the potential outlines of a state system that allows for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation­states."

"Although political economy (PE) has long engaged with environmental issues, climate change has remained at the margins of the field until very recently. This article argues that fully addressing the transformative challenges brought up by climate change requires a fundamental rethinking of core PE concepts related to the state, distributional struggles, economic growth, varieties of capitalism, and markets. Rather than treating the state as a neutral regulator or market facilitator, we conceptualize the green state as actively structuring transitions through mitigation policies, adaptation strategies, and the governance of just transition conflicts. Green transitions generate new distributional conflicts—within and across countries, between incumbent and emerging industries, and among social groups with unequal exposure to climate risks and transition costs. Climate policy also challenges growth-centered economic models, raising questions about the viability of green growth versus degrowth strategies. Different varieties of capitalism are evolving in response, with distinct institutional pathways shaping the speed and character of transition efforts. Finally, we critique market-based approaches that assume price mechanisms alone can drive decarbonization, highlighting the role of non-economic values, institutional constraints, and distributional struggles in shaping green markets. By linking climate change to core debates in comparative and international political economy, we identify new research agendas for understanding the uneven and contested pathways of green transitions across economic systems. This article, along with the others in this special issue on Greening the Economy: Toward a New Political Economy, aims to bridge some of these critical gaps."

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.

"Computer-based models are valuable tools for investigating scenarios for aligning near-term actions and policies with long-term goals. Nonexperts who contribute to climate mitigation decision-making need to be able to evaluate these models and recognize that there is no “best” model that answers all policy questions. This issue brief provides guidance to nonexperts on what to look for in reading and evaluating studies that model climate mitigation. It describes seven dimensions to consider when reading modeling studies—primary goals, the scope, the modeling framework, scenarios and data inputs, uncertainty, results, and process aspects—and determine if the studies are transparent about the assumptions and key inputs they use."

"In this paper, Nicholas Stern argues that the COVID-19 and climate crises, and the weaknesses that produced them, should be tackled together and that the response must be a new sustainable, resilient and inclusive approach to growth and development. The paper explores relevant policies and actions and then turns to the changes to economics necessary to pursue these ideas and imperatives.

The core finding of The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review – that the costs of inaction on climate change are much greater than the costs of action – was compelling when the Review was published in 2006; 15 years on it is even stronger. While greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise and the impacts of climate change have manifested faster and with greater intensity than expected, the costs of clean energy technologies have been falling further and more quickly than anticipated. Any reasonable estimate of the costs of inaction would be still higher now, and the costs of action lower, than in 2006. The deeper understanding of the problem that we now have, the paper argues, implies that we must shift the focus of our economic analyses towards the dynamics of change, the fostering of investment and innovation necessary, the management of disruption, and the great opportunities that lie in a new form of development."