Neoliberal Europeanisation, Variegated Financialisation: common but divergent economic trajectories in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany (original) (raw)
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2020
Abstract: The financialisation literature has grown over the past two decades. While there is a generally accepted definition, effectively financialisation has been used to describe very different phenomena. This paper proposes a multi-faceted notion of financialisation by distinguishing between financialisation of non-financial companies, households and the financial sector and using activity as well as vulnerability measures of financialisation. We identify seven financialisation hypotheses in the literature and empirically investigate them in a cross-country analysis for 17 OECD countries for the 1997-2007 period. We find that different financialisation measures are only weakly correlated, which suggests the existence of distinct financialisation processes. There is strong evidence across all sectors that financialisation is closely linked to asset price inflation and correlated with a debt-driven demand regime. Financial deregulation encourages financialisation, especially in th...
It is often claimed that the power of finance is pervasive and omnipres- ent, yet the delicate ways in which financialization exerts its will across space remain little explored. In fact, such claims obscure the fact that financial development constitutes a profoundly uneven process – both across and within national political economies, regions or localities. Put differently, some institutional domains appear less hospitable to the forces of financialization than others. This thesis advances four case studies, which are to varying degrees considered least likely to fall prey to financial seduction, logics and authority. The cases explore the financial activities of four European institutions in various ways tied to the state: a Dutch public university, two local governments in Germany and Ireland, and a German regional public bank. The expectations defining their least likely nature are informed by theory, including the literatures on financialization and comparative institutionalism. The cases reveal that despite expectations, the long arm of finance has managed to penetrate these domains, necessitating a number of advances in the foregrounded literatures. Despite variations in state structures, financial systems, organizational templates, functions and capacities, incessant neoliberalization of state policy has gradually lured if not ‘forced’ these governments and public institutions to adopt financial products and logics. As such, binary depictions of liberal and corporatist states or national bank- and market-based financial systems do not do justice to the ways in which these ideal type ‘containers’ have evaporated or hybridized. Although the cases indicate how financialization is pervasive, the literature is in need of more empirical detail, particularly cases outside the Anglo-American heartland. Only by generating more theoretically grounded empirical accounts on the ways in which state institutions become subject to financial power can the literature start to unmask and theorize the encroaching financialization of the state itself.