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1. The Sunshine Problem: Climate Change and Managed Decline in the European Union

Author:
Timur Ergen and Luuk Schmitz
Publication Date:
12-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo)
Abstract:
Decarbonization requires the winding down of – economically – fully viable, if not highly prosperous, lines of economic activity. Different from past episodes of industrial restructuring revolving around the managed decline of sunset industries, accelerating climate change requires reallocation away from economic activities where the metaphorical sun is still shining. Firms, owners, workers, regions, and polities structurally rely on these sources of prosperity and have interwoven their past and future lives with them. We argue that this problem has created a space for state actors to experiment with vertical industrial policies to manage the reallocation of resources from polluting to non-polluting activities. We illustrate this dynamic by investigating the least-likely case of the European Union, a polity heavily tilted towards market governance. European climate policymakers, we argue, have incrementally moved away from the primacy of regulatory, market-making tools and have introduced a plethora of vertical instruments to shift resources away from climate-harming fields. This experimentation with vertical policies unfolds against the backdrop of a thirtyyear institutional legacy of single market-oriented policy in the energy field.
Topic:
Climate Change, Industrial Policy, European Union, Social Cohesion, and Green Transition
Political Geography:
Europe

2. The Sunshine Problem: Climate Change and Managed Decline in the European Union

Author:
Timur Ergen and Luuk Schmitz
Publication Date:
06-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
Decarbonization requires the winding down of – economically – fully viable, if not highly prosperous, lines of economic activity. Different from past episodes of industrial restructuring revolving around the managed decline of sunset industries, accelerating climate change requires reallocation away from economic activities where the metaphorical sun is still shining. Firms, owners, workers, regions, and polities structurally rely on these sources of prosperity and have interwoven their past and future lives with them. We argue that this problem has created a space for state actors to experiment with vertical industrial policies to manage the reallocation of resources from polluting to non-polluting activities. We illustrate this dynamic by investigating the least-likely case of the European Union, a polity heavily tilted towards market governance. European climate policymakers, we argue, have incrementally moved away from the primacy of regulatory, market-making tools and have introduced a plethora of vertical instruments to shift resources away from climate-harming fields. This experimentation with vertical policies unfolds against the backdrop of a thirty-year institutional legacy of single market-oriented policy in the energy field.
Topic:
Climate Change, Industrial Policy, European Union, Decarbonization, Green Transition, and Cohesion
Political Geography:
Europe

3. No Strings Attached: Corporate Welfare, State Intervention, and the Issue of Conditionality

Author:
Fabio Bulfone, Timur Ergen, and Manolis Kalaitzake
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
This paper contributes to Comparative Political Economy (CPE), developing an analytical concept of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare — the transfer of public funds and benefits to corporate actors with weak or no conditionality — is a prominent form of state-business relations that CPE scholarship regularly overlooks and misinterprets. Such transfers should be understood as a structural privilege of business in a globalized post-Fordist capitalism, and an increasingly common strategy through which states attempt to steward national economic dynamism within a highly constrained range of policy options. However, with- out a well-developed concept of corporate welfare – premised upon the key criterion of conditionality – studies that identify a “return” of the state in industrial planning misrepre- sent these transfers to business as a reassertion of state influence and control, rather than a reflection of state weakness and subordination. The paper provides the analytical building blocks to properly conceptualize transfers to business, works out the core challenges for em- pirical research, and provides empirical illustrations of this burgeoning phenomenon from the fields of unconventional monetary policy, privatization, and urban political economy.
Topic:
Industrial Policy, Political Economy, Privatization, Monetary Policy, Welfare, and Public-Private Partnership
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. No Strings Attached: Corporate Welfare, State Intervention, and the Issue of Conditionality

Author:
Fabio Bulfone, Timur Ergen, and Manolis Kalaitzake
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo)
Abstract:
This paper contributes to Comparative Political Economy (CPE), developing an analytical concept of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare — the transfer of public funds and benefits to corporate actors with weak or no conditionality — is a prominent form of state-business relations that CPE scholarship regularly overlooks and misinterprets. Such transfers should be understood as a structural privilege of business in a globalized post-Fordist capitalism, and an increasingly common strategy through which states attempt to steward national economic dynamism within a highly constrained range of policy options. However, without a well-developed concept of corporate welfare – premised upon the key criterion of conditionality – studies that identify a “return” of the state in industrial planning misrepresent these transfers to business as a reassertion of state influence and control, rather than a reflection of state weakness and subordination. The paper provides the analytical building blocks to properly conceptualize transfers to business, works out the core challenges for empirical research, and provides empirical illustrations of this burgeoning phenomenon from the fields of unconventional monetary policy, privatization, and urban political economy.
Topic:
Industrial Policy, Political Economy, Privatization, Monetary Policy, and Subsidies
Political Geography:
Global Focus