Documents financial policy 173 results

"A key feature of the European Union's Green Deal is its sustainable finance agenda, which seeks to bring sustainability considerations into the mainstream of financial decision-making, The aim is to direct financial flows towards the EU's transition to a sustainable economy, relying on the contributions of private capital. The paper suggests that relying so heavily on the financial market actors without fully challenging the capitalist logic by which the sector operates, and without putting in place effective incentives and sanctions to steer their sustainability performance, is little more than a ‘nudge' and is unlikely to ensure that the desired goals will be achieved. What we value and how we value are central considerations for sustainability. A more inclusive regulatory framework that embraces the priorities is required as is the participation of other stakeholders whose relationships with the environment and nature are more profound than measuring only for the sake of financial returns."

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

"This report is an initial exploratory study of global trends in just transition policies and laws. It empirically reviews 159 policies and laws across 61 countries and the European Union that are available from the Climate Change Laws of the World database, and seeks to map which countries are integrating ideas associated with the just transition into domestic climate policy, and how. The report focuses on economy-wide and energy policies and provides recommendations to national policymakers and finance actors."

"Decarbonization forces societies to cope with the restructuring and outright unwinding of assets, firms, workers, industries, and regions. We argue that this problem has created legitimacy for industrial policies managing the reallocation of resources. We illustrate this dynamic by documenting incremental state-building in the European Union, an administration institutionally tilted toward regulatory statehood and the making of the Single Market in energy since the 1990s. European greening policies, we argue, have incrementally lessened the primacy of regulatory tools and have introduced a plethora of instruments to accelerate green restructuring and carbon unwinding. Best understood as a process of multi-sited institutional layering, the European Union increasingly appears to complement financial and regulatory instruments to effect green energy transitions with the management of decline in targeted regions and sectors, based on targeted funds and targeted transition planning."

"Certain growth-promoting policies can have negative side-effects by increasing the vulnerability of economies to financial crises. Typical examples are greater openness to financial flows or more liberalised financial markets. This paper investigates whether the growth benefits of policy reforms in these growth-enhancing areas, and others such as trade openness, exceed the possible costs of occasional, albeit potentially severe, crises for a sample of 100 developed and emerging economies from 1970 to 2010. The results suggest that the pro-growth effects of greater capital account openness outweigh the negative effects of a higher propensity to twin crises. Greater domestic financial liberalisation is associated with faster growth, but also with a higher propensity to systemic banking and twin crises. A free floating exchange rate and greater openness to trade, by reducing the likelihood of currency crises, are associated with higher growth. While pro-competitive product market regulations and lower corporate taxes are associated with higher growth, they do not seem to influence financial fragility via higher probability of crises."

"Businesses increasingly engage in the promotion of labour standards through initiatives of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR was traditionally regarded as voluntary and private, however it has become increasingly “legalized” where CSR is shaped by governmental policies and integrates nonvoluntary elements. Even though the effectiveness of such CSR initiatives is not undisputed, it is increasingly regarded as an important element of global labour governance. This paper assesses the reference to CSR commitments in trade and investment agreements and finds that CSR language is relatively weak in terms of obligation, precision and delegation. We then discuss and emphasise the potential to use the mechanisms that are provided in these agreements to activate and follow-up CSR commitments, and what the implications could be for states, business and workers. The paper concludes by addressing the potential role of the ILO in the interplay between soft and hard labour regulations, and its experience in the follow up of CSR."

"This paper's goal is to analyse economic development in Latvia using the concept of a macroeconomic policy regime (MPR). An MPR consists of foreign economic policy, industrial policy, the financial system, wage policy, monetary policy and fiscal policy. This paper, furthermore, aims to explore the functionality of the development of these elements in Latvia based on one normative model of an MPR using a post-Keynesian approach. This paper suggests that to achieve a growth consistent with an external balance, foreign economic policy and industrial policy should be given high priority in restructuring the economy towards production and exports of high value-added products. The financial system needs to provide sufficient finance for the business sector and maintain the stability of the financial sector, while monetary policy will be in charge of providing low-cost finance to the financial system, secure its stability and maintain the stability of the exchange rate. Wage policy would be in charge of stabilising the inflation rate. Fiscal policy's main tasks would be to reduce the shocks to aggregate demand and reduce income inequality. It will be argued that the institutional changes in Latvia paved the way for a dysfunctional policy mix, of the sort that led to unstable economic development, high current account deficits, capital flow volatility, financial system instability, inflation rate volatility, and increasing income inequality."

"This is the first book to provide a full and dispassionate account of the politics and economics of the Eurozone crisis, focusing on the interlinked origins and impacts of the Euro-Zone crisis and the policy responses to it. The book is distinguished from existing research by its avoidance (and rejection) of the too-often simplistic analysis that has characterized political, media and regrettably some academic coverage, and by its attempt to escape from the tyranny of day-to-day events and short-term developments. Each of the contributors identifies an important question and undertakes a careful empirical, theoretically-informed analysis that produces novel perspectives. Together they seek to balance many of the existing accounts that have rushed to sometimes unwarranted conclusions, concerning, for example, the locus of institutional power in European crisis-management; the power and centrality of particular member states, notably Germany which has been attributed with 'hegemonic' status; the supposed entrapment of EU policy makers by an 'austerity ideology'; and the deep flaws that apparently afflict the solutions to the crisis put painstakingly in place, such as Banking Union. While it will be some time before the EU can put the crisis behind it, and the dust finally settles on the revised institutional system that emerges, The Political and Economic Dynamics of the Eurozone Crisis marks an important step towards a considered, reflective analysis of the tumultuous events and developments of the crisis period."

"The Euro Plus Pact was approved by the European Union countries in March 2011. The pact stipulates various measures to strengthen competitiveness with the ultimate aim of preventing accumulation of unsustainable external imbalances. This article uses Granger causality tests to assess the short-term linkages between changes in relative unit labour costs and changes in the current account balance for the period 1995–2011. The main finding is that changes in the current account balance precede changes in relative unit labour costs, while there is no discernible effect in the opposite direction. This suggests that capital flows from the European core to the periphery contributed to the divergence in unit labour costs across Europe prior to the global financial crisis. The results also suggest that the measures to restrain unit labour costs may have only limited effect on the current account balance in the short term."