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ABSTRACT
This special issue has two main aims: to examine the contribution of political economy analyses of the sovereign debt crisis and to relate these findings to longstanding debates in the sub-disciplines of comparative political economy, international political economy and European economic governance. This introduction begins by reviewing the comparative political economy literature on national financial systems in order to account for the playing out of the crisis. It then examines the international political economy literature on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and financial (sovereign debt) markets that played such a key role in the unfolding of the sovereign debt crisis. Finally, it outlines longstanding academic debates on the main 'asymmetries’; in European economic governance, and provides a critical overview of the three main policy and institutional reforms adopted by European Union governments in response to the crisis.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the University of Luxembourg for hosting a workshop in the spring of 2013 at which earlier drafts of the papers were presented. We also wish to thank the editors of RIPE for their support and guidance throughout the project. We would like to thank Patrick Leblond and Michele Chang for commenting on an earlier draft of the Introductory article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The theme of ‘economic patriotism’ was examined in a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy (2012); see also Helleiner and Pickel (Citation2005). Clift and Woll (Citation2012: 308) define ‘economic patriotism as economic choices which seek to discriminate in favour of particular social groups, firms or sectors understood by the decision-makers as insiders because of their territorial status. Economic patriotism entails a form of economic partiality: a desire to shape market outcomes to privilege the position of certain actors'.
2. For a study of the functioning of the combined IMF--euro area lending programmes, see Pisani-Ferry, Sapir and Wolf (Citation2013).
3. This refers to a famous sentence used by ECB president Mario Draghi on 26 July 2012 to describe the ECB's new programme of ‘Outright Monetary Transactions’ – amounting to the potentially unlimited purchase of sovereign debt on secondary markets – designed to bring down euro periphery government bond yields.
4. A survey of the literature suggests that US academic economists were generally very sceptical of EMU, basing their arguments on OCA theory: see http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/publication16345_en.pdf. The US economist Martin Feldstein (Citation1997) went as far as to argue that EMU would increase ‘conflicts within Europe and between Europe and the United States’.
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Notes on contributors
David Howarth
David Howarth is professor of European political economy at the University of Luxembourg. He is the author or co-author of three monographs, a textbook, over seventy journal articles and book chapters on European political economy topics. He has also co-edited six journal special editions and two books on these topics including, most recently (with Iain Hardie), Market-Based Banking and the International Financial Crisis, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Lucia Quaglia
Lucia Quaglia is professor of political science at the University of York. Her most recent research monographs are: The European Union and Global Financial Regulation (OUP); Governing Financial Services in the European Union (2010) and Central Banking Governance in the EU: A Comparative Analysis (2008), both published by Routledge. Together with Kenneth Dyson, she published two volumes: European Economic Governance and Policies (2010), OUP. Together with Dermot Hodson, she was the guest co-editor of the 2009 special issue of the Journal of Common Market Studies on ‘The Global Financial Turmoil: European Perspectives and Lessons’.
