| Abstract: |
The present REPE issue 2-2020 is the second part of our inaugural "double
pack". We were lucky to receive more papers for the inaugural issue than we
could accommodate in one issue. So please enjoy another set of challenging
original research papers gauging the field of evolutionary political economy.
In Financialisation and the periodisation of capitalism: appearances and
processes, Jan Toporowski argues that the analysis of financial processes is
essential for understanding changes in the financial system. Only these
processes give rise to appearances such as the statistical data that are the
basis of most studies of financialization. Those processes are fundamentally
determined by the structure of the financial system. Following Minsky,
Toporowski focuses on corporate finance which, through its effect on business
investment, influences the dynamics of the capitalist system. As financial
structures change, this gives rise to particular phases of capitalist
development. The paper thus builds on Minsky's historical institutional
analysis, but offers a more systematic analysis. It offers a periodization of
capitalism through mercantile capitalism, classic, bank-based capitalism,
finance capital, state finance capitalism, to pension fund capitalism and
capital market inflation. It shows how each period ends with financial
difficulties that are overcome with financial innovation leading to a new
financial structure with corresponding changes in financial processes.
Specifically, the paper argues that the phase of capital market inflation,
inaugurated by funded pension schemes in the last decades of the twentieth
century, has come to an end in the illiquidity of capital markets that lies
behind the 2008 financial crisis. The paper suggests that the measures of
"unconventional monetary policy", or "Quantitative Easing", mark a new period
of state finance capital with a return to the state support of a structurally
illiquid capital market that already had prevailed in Europe and North America
from the 1930s to the 1960s. The discipline of International Political
Economy-IPE has been flirting with evolutionary approaches for the past decade
or so. So far, attempts to develop a take on evolutionary theory have
proceeded in a rather unstructured way: They range from potential applications
of Darwinian theory of selection to more recent efforts to draw on ecological
approaches and complexity theory when analysing crises and transformations.
There has also been a renewed interest in institutionalist approaches and
heterodox tradition, but this too, has been a fragmented process. Ronen
Palan's article An Evolutionary Approach to International Political Economy:
The Case of Corporate Tax Avoidance aims to offer a pathway to a more systemic
framework of evolutionary political economy, in order to rethink the changes
in the regulation on the contemporary system of states. Palan develops his
approach by distinguishing between a tradition of political economy based on
action of discreet entities (this reflects the roots of IPE in neoclassical
economics) and a tradition of thought centred around a concept of transaction
(taking root in original institutional economics). This framework |