Download or read book Debt and Austerity written by Jodi Gardner and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the complex interactions between debt and austerity, analysing the social, economic, and legal implications of governments' responses to the 2008 financial crisis. Demonstrating how the nature of debt for those on low incomes has changed radically over the last decade, the chapters provide insight into how structural inequality was exacerbated by changes in the redistributive state, the legal system, and the welfare system. The examination occurs on a number of levels and these issues are explored through the lens of power, place, and class. The authors utilize both international case studies and 'on the ground' experiences, reviewing the role of high cost credit, bailiffs, local governments, bankruptcy, and debt advice. Through the analysis of the nature and structure of debt in specific countries, it highlights important lessons for a global audience. This unique book offers a broad, multi-faceted insight into the issue of low-income debt which will greatly benefit academics in law, social policy, geography, and economics. Its focus on practical steps and potential reforms, as well as contributions from third sector organizations, will also interest practitioners, policymakers, and NGOs.

Download or read book Austerity written by Mark Blyth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.

Download or read book Austerity written by Alberto Alesina and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at austerity measures that succeed—and those that don't Fiscal austerity is hugely controversial. Opponents argue that it can trigger downward growth spirals and become self-defeating. Supporters argue that budget deficits have to be tackled aggressively at all times and at all costs. Bringing needed clarity to one of today's most challenging economic issues, three leading policy experts cut through the political noise to demonstrate that there is not one type of austerity but many. Austerity assesses the relative effectiveness of tax increases and spending cuts at reducing debt, shows that austerity is not necessarily the kiss of death for political careers as is often believed, and charts a sensible approach based on data analysis rather than ideology.

Download or read book Navigating Austerity written by Laura Bear and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Navigating Austerity addresses a key policy question of our era: what happens to society and the environment when austerity dominates political and economic life? To get to the heart of this issue, Laura Bear tells the stories of boatmen, shipyard workers, hydrographers, port bureaucrats and river pilots on the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges that flows into the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Through their accounts, Bear traces the hidden currents of state debt crises and their often devastating effects. Taking the reader on a voyage along the river, Bear reveals how bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and workers navigate austerity policies. Their attempts to reverse the decline of ruined public infrastructures, environments and urban spaces lead Bear to argue for a radical rethinking of economics according to a social calculus. This is a critical measure derived from the ethical concerns of people affected by national policies. It places issues of redistribution and inequality at the fore of public and environmental plans. Concluding with proposals for restoring more just long term social obligations, Bear suggests new practices of state financing and ways to democratize fiscal policy. Her aim is to transform sovereign debt from a financial problem into a widely debated ethical and political issue. Navigating Austerity contributes to policy studies as well as to the understanding of today's global injustices. It also develops new theories about the significance of state debt, speculation and time for contemporary capitalism. Sited on a single body of water flowing with rhythms of circulation, renewal and transformation, this ambitious and accessible book will be of interest to specialists and general readers.

Download or read book Debt and Austerity written by Jodi Gardner and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-27 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the complex interactions between debt and austerity, analysing the social, economic, and legal implications of governments’ responses to the 2008 financial crisis.

Download or read book The Classical Debt written by Johanna Hanink and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Greek debt” means one thing to the country’s creditors. But for millions who prize culture over capital, it means the symbolic debt we owe Greece for democracy, philosophy, mathematics, and fine art. Johanna Hanink shows that our idealized image of ancient Greece dangerously shapes our view of the country’s economic hardship and refugee crisis.

Download or read book The Austerity State written by Stephen McBride and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume focuses on the state's role in managing the fall-out from the global economic and financial crisis since 2008. For a brief moment, roughly from 2008-2010, governments and central banks appeared to borrow from Keynes to save the global economy. The contributors, however, take the view that to see those stimulus measures as "Keynesian" is a misinterpretation. Rather, neoliberalism demonstrated considerable resiliency despite its responsibility for the deep and prolonged crisis. The "austerian" analysis of the crisis is--historical, ignores its deeper roots, and rests upon a triumph of discourse involving blame-shifting from the under-regulated private sector to public or sovereign debt--for which the public authorities are responsible."--

Download or read book Debtors Prison written by Robert Kuttner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the financial crisis of 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive, and how to cut the deficit. But what if we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along? In Debtors’ Prison, leading economic thinker Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that with austerity as a solution all we’re doing is jailing ourselves. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from resuming a productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth. This is the simple truth belied by the sound bites of presidential elections and fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union. Blending current affairs with economics and history, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that corrects the economic conversation and encourages a search for new solutions.

Download or read book The Greek Debt Crisis written by Christos Floros and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on the Greek economic challenges and helps readers understand the current debt crisis. Chapters from leading experts in the field identify and outline potential solutions to the on-going decline of the Greek economy by considering both Eurozone-adopted current policy framework explanations and potential alternative explanations. In contrast to the standard chronological approach toward the Greek debt crisis typically adopted by other texts, this book draws on the experience and views of specialized economists and offers divergent opinions that could potentially form alternative solutions. It will be of interest to researchers and academics interested in the Greek economy, modern financial modelling, and risk management.

Download or read book The Global Financial Crisis and Austerity written by David Clark and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the far-reaching impact of both the 2008 financial crash and postcrash austerity policies on so many people's lives, there exists a need for a succinct, straightforward guide to the situation's causes and its long-term significance. The Global Financial Crisis and Austerity fulfills that need. Written by an expert in political science, this book spans the fields of finance, economics, and politics to demystify the sometimes arcane world of global finance, such as the shadow banking system, and put the recent financial crisis in its historical context. Addressing a number of themes that economists writing on the crisis tend to neglect, David Clark not only outlines the policy responses of Western governments to the crash, the ensuing recession, and in their turn to austerity, but also reviews the crash's larger legacy and asks if the crisis is really over. Supplementing his discussion with a glossary of key terms, processes, and institutions, Clark provides an invaluable overview for all of us affected by the crash, offering a range of possible scenarios for the future.

Download or read book Resisting Austerity written by Cristina Flesher Fominaya and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the popular resistances to austerity politics in Europe following the global financial crisis of 2008-9. It places anti-austerity mobilisations in perspective, comparing the wave of strikes and occupations by citizens and movements to the global justice movement. It was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

Download or read book The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis written by Ben Clift and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the IMF's role within the politics of austerity by providing a path-breaking comprehensive analysis of how the IMF approach to fiscal policy has evolved since 2008, and how the IMF worked to alter advanced economy policy responses to the global financial crisis (GFC) and the Eurozone crisis. It updates and refines our understanding of how the IMF seeks to wield ideational power by analysing the Fund's post-crash their ability to influence what constitutes legitimate knowledge, and their ability fix meanings attached to economic policies within the social process of constructing economic orthodoxy.This book is interested in the politics of economic ideas, focused on the assumptive foundations of different approaches to economic policy, and how the interpretive framework through which authoritative voices evaluate economic policy is an important site of power in world politics. After establishing the internal conditions of possibility for new fiscal policy thinking to emerge and prevail, detailed case studies of IMF interactions with the UK and French governments during the Great Recession drill down into how Fund seeks to shape the policy possibilities of advanced economy policy-makers and account for the scope and limits of Fund influence. The Fund's reputation as a technocratic, scientific source of economic policy wisdom is important to for its intellectual authority. Yet, as this book demonstrates, the Fund makes normatively driven interventions in ideologically charged economic policy debates. The analysis reveals the malleability of conventional wisdoms about economic policy, and the processes of their social construction.

Download or read book The Body Economic written by David Stuckler and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politicians have talked endlessly about the seismic economic and social impacts of the recent financial crisis, but many continue to ignore its disastrous effects on human health—and have even exacerbated them, by adopting harsh austerity measures and cutting key social programs at a time when constituents need them most. The result, as pioneering public health experts David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu reveal in this provocative book, is that many countries have turned their recessions into veritable epidemics, ruining or extinguishing thousands of lives in a misguided attempt to balance budgets and shore up financial markets. Yet sound alternative policies could instead help improve economies and protect public health at the same time. In The Body Economic, Stuckler and Basu mine data from around the globe and throughout history to show how government policy becomes a matter of life and death during financial crises. In a series of historical case studies stretching from 1930s America, to Russia and Indonesia in the 1990s, to present-day Greece, Britain, Spain, and the U.S., Stuckler and Basu reveal that governmental mismanagement of financial strife has resulted in a grim array of human tragedies, from suicides to HIV infections. Yet people can and do stay healthy, and even get healthier, during downturns. During the Great Depression, U.S. deaths actually plummeted, and today Iceland, Norway, and Japan are happier and healthier than ever, proof that public wellbeing need not be sacrificed for fiscal health. Full of shocking and counterintuitive revelations and bold policy recommendations, The Body Economic offers an alternative to austerity—one that will prevent widespread suffering, both now and in the future.

Download or read book The Age of Austerity written by Thomas J. Schoenbaum and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative look at the global financial crisis argues that the United States, the European Union and Japan have intentionally and unwittingly adopted wrong-headed economic policies in a futile attempt to deal with sovereign debt resulting from the global financial crisis. It offers persuasive evidence of how the politics of austerity fail to encourage economic recovery, and proposes instead a number of alternative ideas and solutions. The book begins with a detailed breakdown of the financial crisis and the government response in the United States, with particular focus on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The author then puts forth a basic three-part plan calling for (1) fundamental tax and entitlement reform; (2) massive economic stimulus in the form of public and private investment to modernize the countryÍs aging infrastructures; and (3) mortgage relief to revitalize the nationÍs housing markets. The book concludes with specific policy proposals designed to achieve these goals and return the US economy to a state of full employment and robust economic growth. This timely and insightful volume will appeal to students and scholars of economics, public policy and finance, as well as anyone with an interest in the recent economic history of the United States.

Download or read book Austerity written by Bryan M. Evans and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bryan M. Evans, Stephen McBride, and their contributors delve further into the more practical, ground-level side of the austerity equation in Austerity: The Lived Experience. Economically, austerity policies cannot be seen to work in the way elite interests claim that they do. Rather than soften the blow of the economic and financial crisis of 2008 for ordinary citizens, policies of austerity slow growth and lead to increased inequality. While political consent for such policies may have been achieved, it was reached amidst significant levels of disaffection and strong opposition to the extremes of austerity. The authors build their analysis in three sections, looking alternatively at theoretical and ideological dimensions of the lived experience of austerity; how austerity plays out in various public sector occupations and policy domains; and the class dimensions of austerity. The result is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of austerity politics and policies.

Download or read book Austerity Measures written by Karen Van Dyck and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable collection of poetic voices from contemporary Greece, Austerity Measures is a one-of-a-kind window into the creative energy that has arisen from the country's decade of crisis and a glimpse into what it is like to be Greek today. The 2008 debt crisis shook Greece to the core and went on to shake the world. More recently, Greece has become one of the main channels into Europe for refugees from poverty and war. Greece stands at the center of today’s most intractable conflicts, and this situation has led to a truly extraordinary efflorescence of innovative and powerfully moving Greek poetry. Karen Van Dyck’s wide-ranging bilingual anthology—which covers the whole contemporary Greek poetry scene, from literary poets to poets of the spoken word to poets online, and more—offers an unequaled sampling of some of the richest and most exciting poetry of our time.

Download or read book Lost Promises written by William L. Canak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of the debt crisis, the principal institutional actors involved, and the structure of related policies are well documented. Less studied and less understood is the impact of austerity on the people of Latin America. In this collection of original essays, leading Latin American and U.S. researchers map the political economy of austerity in Latin America. Each essay focuses on a specific aspect of social relations-urban, rural, demographic, or economic. Exploring the theoretical and substantive implications of austerity in Latin America, the contributors show that the study of the region's debt crisis can contribute to an understanding of the impact of internationalization on national social structure and development. The book begins with a historical analysis of global economic and institutional changes that presaged the rapid growth of debt in Latin America and determined the implementation of austerity policies. In Part 2, several essays focus on the structure of national economic stabilization policies and their impact on income distribution. Part 3 examines the effects of austerity on various dimensions of social structure including demography, urbanization, organized labor, and regional development. Popular responses to austerity policies are explored in Part 4.