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The Politics of Public Debt: Neoliberalism, Capitalist Development and the Restructuring of the State

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  • Wolfgang Streeck

Abstract

type="main" xml:id="geer12032-abs-0001"> Rising public debt has been widespread in democratic-capitalist political economies since the 1970s, generally accompanied among other things by weak economic growth, rising unemployment, increasing inequality, growing tax resistance, and declining political participation. Following an initial period of fiscal consolidation in the 1990s, public debt took an unprecedented leap in reponse to the Great Recession. Renewed consolidation efforts, under the pressure of ‘financial markets’, point to a general decline in state expenditure, particularly discretionary and investment expenditure, and of extensive retrenchment and privatization of state functions.

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  • Wolfgang Streeck, 2014. "The Politics of Public Debt: Neoliberalism, Capitalist Development and the Restructuring of the State," German Economic Review, Verein für Socialpolitik, vol. 15(1), pages 143-165, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:germec:v:15:y:2014:i:1:p:143-165
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    Cited by:

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    2. Agnieszka Kozera & Aldona Standar & Łukasz Satoła, 2020. "Managing Rural Areas in the Context of the Growing Debt of Polish Local Government Units," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 10(9), pages 1-25, August.
    3. Carolina Alves, 2023. "Fictitious capital, the credit system, and the particular case of government bonds in Marx," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(3), pages 398-415, May.
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    5. Beatriz Cuadrado-Ballesteros & Noemí Peña-Miguel, 2018. "The Socioeconomic Consequences of Privatization: An Empirical Analysis for Europe," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 139(1), pages 163-183, August.
    6. Massoc, Elsa Clara, 2022. "Fifty shades of hatred and discontent: Varieties of anti-finance discourses on the European Twitter (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK)," SAFE Working Paper Series 338, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    7. Félix Adisson & Francesca Artioli, 2020. "Four types of urban austerity: Public land privatisations in French and Italian cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(1), pages 75-92, January.
    8. Daniela Gabor & Cornel Ban, 2016. "Banking on Bonds: The New Links Between States and Markets," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 54(3), pages 617-635, May.
    9. Daniele, Vittorio, 2015. "Una stagnazione secolare? Italia, Giappone, Stati Uniti, 1950-2015 [Towards a secular stagnation? Italy, Japan, United States, 1950-2015]," MPRA Paper 69997, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2016. "Public Debt, Inequality and Power. The Making of a Modern Debt State," EconStor Books, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 157976, July.
    11. Guter-Sandu, Andrei & Murau, Steffen, 2022. "The Eurozone’s evolving fiscal ecosystem: mitigating fiscal discipline by governing through off-balance-sheet fiscal agencies," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 109790, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

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