The Irish political economy is notable for the sustained and central role of foreign investment in driving economic growth, notably via the commercial activities of multinational corporations, and more recently financial services. Beginning in the 1950s, the Irish state began to move away from its protectionist policies of import-substituting industrialization, and transitioned towards a liberalized, export-led industrialization model of economic growth in order to achieve its developmental catch-up. This has resulted ...

The European Union prides itself for being a legal order and a supranational organisation created through, and organised around, a specific institutional framework and an ordoliberal-inspired “rules against discretion” approach. Theories of ‘integration through law’ abound and the European Monetary Union (EMU) remains a unique common currency area structured within a constitutional framework. Officially, the formal priority of treaties, mandates and the European legal framework are presented as the sine qua non of ...

This is the second part of a two-part post. The first part, available here, considered the historical background of the concept of constitutional order and its relation to the ordoliberal project. Judicial independence was examined in parallel with central bank independence, with each understood as a means of insulating policy from social and democratic pressures and also as a means of enacting and maintaining fiscal discipline and market-conforming order. It also included some preliminary observations on the relation ...

The architecture of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has often been understood to be built on a fundamentally ordoliberal framework. [1] The precise characteristics of what constitutes an ordoliberal framework are often not clarified, and they have been widely debated in contemporary scholarship. But a crucial characteristic of ordoliberalism, and one that has received comparatively little attention, concerns the importance of grounding economic policy in a “constitutional order”: ordoliberal political economy insists ...

The aim of my research is to explore the political economy of ordoliberalism in its historical trajectory. Beginning from the years of its inception during the interwar period, the dissertation focuses on the specific conditions and political economy of the Weimar Republic as the framework within which the ordoliberal framework was developed. Moving on to the postwar period, the dissertation examines the attempts of operationalization of the ordoliberal framework within the context of West Germany and the social ...

Starting from the relations of production, this paper examines the role of mafia for the preservation of social power and class relations in Sicily. To this end, the concept of the informal state apparatus is introduced. Following the approach of Critical Grounded Theory, this paper proposes to fill explanatory gaps in conventional mafia research by means of Nicos Poulantzas’ historical materialist state theory. In-depth field research confirms the systematic generation of irregularity through conditions in which it ...

While the link between trade liberalisation and labour rights has been mostly studied at a national level, this book analyses this relation at a sectoral level. It draws on case studies of oil palm plantations and the automobile sector in Indonesia. Two main research questions guide the book: 1. How do labour- and capital-intensive sectors in Indonesia respond to competitive pressures brought about by trade liberalisation? 2. What are the implications of such responses on labour rights in the two sectors? Employing ...

Achieving self-reliance among refugees is favoured by many international organisations, though hardly achieved for refugee camps. In many cases, deprived of their human rights, located in remote areas and without access to the local labour market, encamped refugees have no other opportunity than turning to negative coping mechanisms to survive, including sex work, child labour, crime and dangerous work in the informal sector. This book concentrates on measuring self-reliance and identifying factors influencing it in ...

The re-emergence of massive strikes in the public education sector, predominantly in the more conservative, union-weak American South, has brought seismic change to the industry and its workers. Solving the puzzle as to why these strikes were so successful against massive obstacles could beget better methods for organizing strikes in a period when neo-liberal reforms threaten public services around the world. Furthermore, an understanding of why these strikes were successful can contribute to the contemporary discourse ...