https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Thu, 30 Apr 2020 15:12:54 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/another-lost-decade-crisis-and-structural-adjustment-in-europe-and-latin-america/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:49 +0000 http://arc.local/items/another-lost-decade-crisis-and-structural-adjustment-in-europe-and-latin-america/ Continued]]> With the recent economic crisis, conditional lending and mandatory structural reforms arrived in the European Union. Greece and a number of other crisis countries were subjected to a rigorous process of economic adjustment in exchange for emergency credits from the troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund). Conditionality and structural adjustment were first tested in Latin America. This article compares the European adjustment programmes with the structural reforms introduced in Latin American countries several decades earlier. By doing so, the article reveals strong parallels in spite of the fact that the initial adjustment programmes are rarely considered a success story and that the neoliberal ideology which inspired the related reforms is widely made responsible for the recent crisis. The fact that there are differences in the adjustment programmes is not the result of a re-think of the neoliberal agenda, but of the specific dynamics of European integration and of pragmatic responses to financial threats. However, the article also shows parallels in the outcome of structural adjustment. Some European crisis countries face a ‘lost decade’ quite similar to the one experienced in Latin America in the 1980s.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-distributional-impact-of-austerity-and-the-recession-in-southern-europe/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:28 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-distributional-impact-of-austerity-and-the-recession-in-southern-europe/ Continued]]> Southern European welfare states are under stress. On the one hand, the recession has been causing unemployment to rise and incomes to fall. On the other hand, austerity has affected the capacity of welfare states to protect those affected. This paper assesses the distributional implications of the crisis in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal from 2009 to 2013. Using a microsimulation model, we disentangle the first-order effects of tax–benefit policies from the broader effects of the crisis, and estimate how its burden has been shared across income groups. We conclude by discussing the methodological pitfalls and policy implications of our research.

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