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| Stream | Description |
| Applied Political Economy | For political economy to be a persuasive alternative to mainstream economics, it needs to be shown that it can provide a better framework for analysing concrete phenomena and developments in specific fields, and a useful guide for alterntive policies. This session on "applied political economy" does just that with papers on the international media system, exchange networks and parallel currencies, progressive public policies in the post-crisis era in Quebec, and a social network analysis of Greek cooperative banking ethics in Crete. |
| Crisis | Four panels are prepared for discussing the causes, interpretations, and prospects of the (current) crisis. Since it is Marxist political economy that has from its inception explored various aspects of the crisis most intensively and extensively, it is inevitable to some extent that Marxist perspectives prevail over the whole panel stream, but ideas from other heterodox traditions do have a strong presence. For instance, whilst various Marxist perspectives are seen to be competing one another in the second panel, the possibilities of how they can be nourished, or corrected, by the insights derived from the classical approaches are to be examined in the third panel. It is also true of the first panel. In the last panel, on the other hand, various prospects on the post-crisis world are to be dealt with in terms of how capital is organised, how profit is made, how economic policies put forward, and how the role of the state is conceived and deployed vis-à-vis capital. |
| Critique of Mainstream Economics | Because ot its dominance within the profession, critique of maintrean economics is an essential first step for providing alternative analyses. This panels includes papers which offer critiques of several aspects of mainsteam economics including ideological, methodological and substantive. |
| Development | |
| Environment | Ecological problems are interwoven with the workings of capitalism and have been exacerbated by the dominance of neo-liberalism. The current economic crisis has to some extent weakened the political prominence of ongoing environmental crises. Possible concerted “green Keynesian” responses to the twin challenges of environment and economy appear set to remain in the political wilderness. At the same time, alternative views on how to develop and maintain sustainable economies and societies continue to abound, ranging from specific local protagonism to sectoral proposals to systemic critiques. Papers presented in the Environment panels present a selection of these views, investigating various aspects of the current interface of environment and political economy in the areas of forests, agriculture, water, energy and climate change. They offer a variety of non-mainstream perspectives on the development of a progressive social transformation and ecological sustainability. |
| Finance | This finance stream combines contributions from different strands of heterodox thought which focus on the international financial crisis and its implications for economic theory, methodology and accumulation. It opens with two theoretical panels which discuss the limitations of mainstream economic theory in accounting for the crisis and discusses alternative theoretical approaches which may offer more useful insights. Panel three concludes the theoretical part of the finance stream with an interesting collection of papers from the research network ’Research on Money and Finance’. A more empirical take on the international financial crisis is taken up in panel four, which examines the role of global imbalances and the US dollar in the international financial system. The significance of emerging markets in the crisis is discussed in panel five. Contributions include both discussion of the broad effects of the crisis for emerging markets as a whole, and more specific discussions on the role of multinationals and outsourcing in the crisis. Finally, panel six presents several important case studies of the ways in which capitalist accumulation has been affected by the crisis and by financialisation in general. |
| Greek Crisis | The economic crisis of Greece reflects the world economic crisis that erupted in 2008 but it has been also shaped by the neo-liberal architecture of the Eurozone. The crisis also has revealed the structural problems of the Greek economy (competitiveness and debt). The goal of the papers included in these panels is to analyze the current crisis of the Greek economy by addressing the nature of the EMU which makes almost impossible for the weaker European economies to compete with the more advanced EU economies. They also analyze the development model that Greece has followed in recent decades which has resulted in its serious structural problems. The crucial elements of a sustainable development are also explored to guide the exit from the current crisis. |
| Greek Poverty | Papers presented in this panel deal with political economy approaches to issues related with inequality, poverty and social deprivation in the EU. More specifically, attention will be paid to the impact of economic growth on inequality and poverty, to the links between macroeconomic environment and poverty as well as to the role of welfare regimes and social policy. Furthermore, the panel covers issues that deal with the intergenerational transmission of inequality and poverty in the EU countries and the potential role of social economy in poverty reduction. |
| Political Economy | These panels explore the nature of the world economy today, including the dimensions of governance and the changing role of the nation-state; the use of concepts drawn from Gramsci in understanding the establishment and maintenance of hegemony alongside domination; the nature of regional integration within the world economy, including the prospects for South-South co-operation. Papers draw specifically on experiences from Europe, Africa (and China-Africa relations) and the Caribbean. |
| Latin America | |
| Migration | The dynamics of the global migration system and of the multiple sub-systems comprised in it are inextricably linked with the dynamics of capitalism in various causal and functional ways. Arguably, then, the study of migration therefore has much more to gain from theoretical and empirical endeavours that afford a central role to such categories as class, accumulation and dispossession than from spurious cross-country empirical estimations or trans-historical deductive exercises. This stream, which is the first activity organised by the newly-formed IIPPE Working Group on Migration, will seek to contribute to a renewal of migration studies rooted in political economy by bringing together both empirical and theoretical papers that share these perspectives. |
| Privatisation and Alternatives | It is now widely recognized that privatisation has failed to deliver on its promise to provide adequate and effective basic services to low-income households in countries in the South. There is, however, a danger that the subsequent policy response will serve to strengthen support for the private sector as well as commercialization of the public sector and alternative approaches will be neglected. This panel presents four preliminary papers from Phase III of the Municipal Services Project (MSP). This is a five-year (2008-13) study that systematically explores alternatives to privatization and commercialisation in service delivery, with a focus on health, electricity and water/sanitation. The MSP aims to develop conceptual and methodological tools that allow researchers and practitioners to better examine and understand historical, contemporary and proposed alternatives to service commercialization, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia. |
| Political Economy of Work | The sessions to be included in this panel reflect the broad research areas covered by the PEW working group. The individual papers tackle key research issues and questions from both theoretical and empirical perspectives and also combine different methods. A common focus of the papers is to develop alternatives to mainstream approaches to work and labour issues that in various ways are rooted in political economy. To this extent, they tie in with the broader aims of IIPPE. |
| Public Finance and Welfare | This stream presents three papers on different aspects of public finance and welfare: political economy of public debt and tax cuts, effect of the financial crisis in countries like Hungary and Latvia, the effect of crisis on gender relations through the welfare system in Italy. |
| Socialism | The two panels in the Socialism stream address two central issues discussed and debated among socialists: 1) how can concrete struggles against existing capitalism promote transcending it, and 2) what are some important aspects of a post-capitalist socialist society? THE RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE TURKISH LABOR MOVEMENT: THE CASE STUDY OF THE TEKEL RESISTANCE is a panel discussion. It will first discuss the political economic situation of Turkey today and the government’s policies, and then in that frame the nature of the TEKEL resistance. In particular the panelists will discuss its contribution to a transformation of working class consciousness: the TEKEL resistance was born in an atmosphere of political polarization in which the working class movement had almost no distinct role, and out of it has come a revival of the “class” notion within the different identities of the working class such as Islamist workers, women workers, liberal workers, nationalist workers, Kurdish workers etc. ENVISIONING (ASPECTS OF) SOCIALISM consists of five contributions to the now flourishing debate on the nature of aspects of soclasim that has steadily grown over the last two decades under the combined influence of the failures of the Sino and Soviet models on the one hand and Neoliberal Capitalism and ecological sustainability on the other. |
| Social Capital | The panel on social capital features both theoretical and empirical contributions that appeal to concepts and contexts of norms and networks of social relationships, and discuss their capacities and deficiencies in promoting local development and social reform. Contributions address the conditions under which social norms and networks support social mobilisation for the promotion of public welfare or the prevalence of particularistic groups and patron-client relations that serve narrow interests. The aim is to participate in the on-going debate on social capital and turn skepticism into a productive research project that places social relationships at the core of the proliferation, as well as the transformation, of economic systems and development programmes. |
| Systems of Accumulation | A key challenge for scholars working within critical and Marxist traditions of political economy is making the transition from an understanding of abstract categories such as class and value to an understanding of the more concrete historical forms of class relations and capital accumulation in particular time and place. The idea that particular Systems of Accumulation evolve over time has been developed in order to understand specific forms of capital accumulation, the role played by the state and finance, and how this impacts more widely on economy and society. The papers broadly cover the following themes:
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| Turkey | The aim of the panel is to discuss recent dynamics of Turkey’s capital accumulation process through Marxist categories and in shed light of these, to reveal dynamics of crisis of Turkey. The panel comprises papers which deal issues in the following topics:
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| Urban | Systems of accumulation have been considered mainly at the national scale, though with some attempts to widen to the international (hegemonic imperialisms, etc.). But the concept has not to date been applied, at least explicitly, to the local and regional scale. A Marxist approach to a local/regional system of accumulation would specify relatively durable patterns of class relations within a locality, in both production and the reproduction of people, relations which can be different in different localities even of the same country. This session aims to make a modest contribution towards such a theorisation. It considers three contemporary changes or transitions in local/regional systems of accumulation. These are analysed as major restructurings of the forms of capital accumulation and of reproduction of labour power, powered by class struggles. |
| Value | Although it is almost unanimously ignored even by many branches of heterodoxy as well as by contemporary mainstream economics, value was once at the centre of economics and, later, has been persistently developed by Marxist political economy until today. Since value as such represents the material reproduction of the capitalist economy, the point of value theory is not to discuss if it is right or wrong as has often been the case, but to develop value to explain the evolving reality of the capitalist economy, and to extend it beyond its traditional terrains over to many aspects of the social as well as economic reproduction of capitalist relations. The five panels organised here are devoted to such tasks. The first two panels are concerned with one of the traditional themes of value theory: that of measuring the economy. The first features different Marxist approaches to analysing the U.S. economy in the context of the current crisis, and the second touches upon a few important issues regarding such empirical studies from a methodological standpoint. The remaining three panels are more theoretical. Panels III and IV highlight the dynamics of capital accumulation and of capitalist competition, respectively. These are familiar themes of value theory, but the issues individual papers develop are least developed ones in each area. Lastly, in the fifth panel, such familiar but central categories of value theory as labour, ground rent, money and finance, and the production and realisation of value are to be revisited in a contemporary context. |