Resumo

Neoliberalism has not given rise to a sustained profit-led growth process, but to a finance-dominated accumulation regime in which growth relies either on financial bubbles and rising household debt (‘debt-driven growth’) or on net exports (‘export-driven growth’). The financial crisis that began in the market for derivatives on the US subprime mortgage market has translated into the worst recession since the 1930s. In Europe the crisis has been amplified by an economic policy architecture (the Stability and Growth Pact) that aimed at restricting the role of fiscal policy and insulating monetary policy and central banks from national governments. The crisis has thus led to a sharp economic divergence between core and peripheral countries. Contrary to the situation in the (export-driven) Germanic core of Europe, the crisis is escalating in the (debt-driven) southern countries of Europe. The paper interprets the policy regime as the outcome of national elites’ attempt to use European integration as a means to constrain nation states. The result is a policy regime that has fatally weakened nation states as regards their fiscal and monetary capacities without creating a European state.


Nota biográfica

Engelbert Stockhammer obtained his PhD at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2000. He joined Kingston in 2010. He is presently research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and member of the coordination committee of the Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policy.

His research areas include macroeconomics, applied econometrics, financial systems and heterodox economics. He has worked extensively on the determinants of European unemployment, the demand effects of changes in income distribution and the macroeconomics effects of financialization. He has published numerous articles in international peer-refereed journals including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Structural Change and Economic Dyamics, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, the International Review of Applied Ecnomics and the the European Journal of Industrial Relations. In 2004 he published the book “The rise of unemployment in Europe” (Edward Elgar). Recently he has edited a book on Macroeconomic policy on shaky foundations. Whither mainstream economics? (with E. Hein and T. Niechoj; Metropolis).