Coordinatori: Donato Di Carlo (Max Plank Institute); Anna Mori (Università di Milano La Statale).
Political economy has thrived as a discipline centred on the study of the dialectical relationship between states and markets, with scholars advancing different views on the why and how the one should prevail over the other in the organization of socioeconomic relationships within capitalist societies. The states-markets nexus has evolved through different stages in Europe’s post-war history. During Europe’s “golden age” the active Keynesian state took on an unprecedented role in the promotion, regulation and governance of domestic markets, through active fiscal and industrial policy and the expansion of welfare programs as well as state bureaucracies. With the deepening of the European regulatory state, the spread of the New Public Management paradigm, and increasing globalization of product and financial markets, nation states’ authority has been increasingly challenged since the 1980s. As a result, over the last thirty years of the XX century, the capacity of the state to govern markets has gradually eroded under the blows inflicted by permanent austerity, privatizations and market-enhancing structural reforms. Yet, from crisis to crisis, the state is back – demonstrating once again its centrality for society and markets as the provider of public goods and essential service, as the single largest employer in the economy, as a regulatory authority and provider of last-resort capital to ailing firms. In particular, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ever-urgent need for a greener economy have ushered in an era of renewed state activism in policy realms as various as healthcare management, labour market regulation, provision of public services, the support and recovery of the national economy and the citizenship. In this vein, the session calls for contributions examining the role of the state and of the public sector in its multifaceted and multilevel function not only in the current transition phase – in midst of a global pandemic – but from a broader, diachronic, perspective by considering the main dynamics taking place in the following realms:
- the state intervention to pilot and coordinate the post-pandemic recovery;
- the state intervention in the economy and in the labour market in the aftermath of the crisis; ▪ the political economy of the public sector;
- the reform of the public administration, including the digitalization of the public services, new forms of work organization;
- the regulation of labour and employment relations in the public sector, including the role of the trade unions;
- the structure and provision of public and essential services and the valorisation of public work.
The session welcomes contributions in Italian and English.
Contatti dei coordinatori: Donato Di Carlo (ddc@mpifg.de); Anna Mori (anna.mori@unimi.it)