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2 Fiscal policies, social spending and economic performance in France, Germany and the UK since 1970 Norman Flynn Introduction This chapter looks at the post-1970 development of social policy, its fiscal implications and economic consequences in three European countries. Its purpose is to test a stereotypical ‘left’ proposition, formulated in defence of European social democracy against neo-liberalism, such as: There is a ‘European Social Model’, incorporating a high level of social protection for unemployment and retirement, which, since 1973, has been
initially hit high-income contexts hardest, in Europe and North America, COVID-19 later spread indiscriminately around the world, including to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and fragile contexts. As well as the devastating consequences for people’s health, the governments in LMICs were often unable to produce the fiscal policy responses delivered by governments in high-income countries to support people during the lockdowns, travel bans and restrictions of movement
This book considers the underlying causes of the end of social democracy's golden age. It argues that the cross-national trend in social democratic parties since the 1970s has been towards an accommodation with neo-liberalism and a corresponding dilution of traditional social democratic commitments. The book looks at the impact of the change in economic conditions on social democracy in general, before examining the specific cases of Germany, Sweden and Australia. It examines the ideological crisis that engulfed social democracy. The book also looks at the post-1970 development of social policy, its fiscal implications and economic consequences in three European countries. It considers the evolution of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) from its re-emergence as a significant political force during the 1970s until the present day under José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero. The book also examines the evolution of the Swedish model in conjunction with social democratic reformism and the party's relations to the union movement. It explores the latest debate about what the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) stands for. The SPD became the role model for programmatic modernisation for the European centre-left. The book considers how British socialist and social democratic thought from the late nineteenth century to the present has treated the objective of helping people to fulfil their potential, talents and ambitions. It aims to contribute to a broader conversation about the future of social democracy by considering ways in which the political thought of 'third way' social democracy might be radicalised for the twenty-first century.
public investment reserved for fiscal policy M1738 - CALLAGHAN TEXT.indd 75 3/8/09 12:13:34 76 Responses to the crisis within Keynesianism is not ‘ruled out’ by the new global economy. Rather, globalisation requires new institutions and prerequisites in order to secure credibility with financial markets, thence to exploit the policy space available to pursue the politics of social democracy. Securing credibility through stability-centric macro policy stances is compatible with a wide range of different priorities in other areas of economic policy. Arguably, the
core of this discussion is how the magnitude of economic and fiscal repercussions of low oil prices has ushered in a series of fiscal actions that go against the classical understanding of rentier state theory (RST). Moreover, this discussion prompted questions about the extent to which these changes are core fiscal reforms signalling the ‘demise of rentier governance’ or are merely a ‘coordinated course of corrections’ (Krane, 2018 : 24) in rentier fiscal policy. A significant amount of literature has long argued that Bahrain, along with other
macroeconomic environment through restrictive fiscal policy, stable exchange rates and so on.3 On this basis, economists cite the Irish case to support the orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the OECD and other international bodies that favour macroeconomic stability over all other social and economic policy variables. The new orthodoxy as the EU enters into a phase of enlargement is to convince the accession countries that they will converge if they maximise the openness of their trade, get the macroeconomics right and encourage labour flexibility. Mainstream
policy, there remains a benefit to new economic policy formulation, experimentation, and competition between emirates. Breaking down the policy agenda post-2014 in the UAE, we can identify three core economic response policy areas: fiscal policy, social development policy, and diversification policies. Each of these areas is a response to the demands of a lower oil price environment and the mounting challenges of forty years of rentier policy. This chapter dissects these policy shifts in detail and analyses how these policy choices fit together in a reform and
evocative reflection on the times in which it was written. These were the 1980s, and the decade was marked by a number of dramatic and unprecedented events: Margaret Thatcher was at the helm of the British government with her monetarist fiscal policies, austerity measures, and the call for a return to core values; sexual equality had gained considerable ground from the tentative gains made in the
in the effectiveness of fiscal policy. That basically, if unemployment's going to be too high you increase public spending … Keynes had been there during the war of course, and some of them had worked with him in Cambridge before the war, so Keynes had solved it. These were people who had lived through the Great Depression and seen the dole queues, and that was never to happen again, and this was the way to stop it … It was an aberration in some ways from the traditional Treasury view … If you take the long-term history, so to speak, the Treasury had been captured
majority who continued to pay a range of indirect taxes as they had in the colonial period. The emergence of tax havens, or offshore finance centres, in locations such as Vanuatu have their origins in imperial inequalities that were fostered in environments of diverse colonial experiences, encounters, and policies. Fiscal policy has been characterised by continuity and rupture between colonial and post-colonial orders, leading to further international inequalities in taxation which have been evident in the