Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry

Using Lancashire textile industry company case studies and financial records, mainly from the period just before the First World War, the processes of growth and decline are re-examined. These are considered by reference to the nature of Lancashire entrepreneurship and the impact on technological choice. Capital accumulation, associated wealth distributions and the character of Lancashire business organisation were sybiotically linked to the success of the industry before 1914. However, the legacy of that accumulation in later decades, chronic overcapacity, formed a barrier to reconstruction and enhanced the preciptious decline of a once great industry

The financialisation of global health

Global health is increasingly reliant on financial markets. The ongoing financialisation of global health raises new questions of governance, which we expect to affect policy makers as much as doctors, nurses and patients in the years to come. In this editorial, we will first explain what is meant by financialisation, then illustrate its nature in the field of global healthviathree examples, and end by highlighting some of the governance issues that the financialisation of global health raises.</p

Piketty's Calibration Economics: Inequality and the Dissolution of Solutions?

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. Abstract: By popularising interest in inequality, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a significant contribution. It has helped to change the basic terms of debate regarding wealth and income. However, Capital exhibits several weaknesses. The overall statement of Piketty's 3 laws tends to confuse the reader by conflating capital with all forms of wealth, and capital with the current market valuation of wealth assets. The whole creates a form of empiricism by metrics or calibration. The aggregation also lends itself to data as history rather than as historically grounded explanation of evidence. Concomitantly, it lacks a theorisation of capitalism, of power, of the state, of social movements, and of social transformations. This affects the way in which possible solutions to inequality are conceived. However, it does provoke further grounds for ethical counterargument productive of more progressive solutions to the problems it highlights

Partnership, ownership and control: the impact of corporate governance on employment relations

Prevailing patterns of dispersed share ownership and rules of corporate governance for UK listed companies appear to constrain the ability of managers to make credible, long-term commitments to employees of the kind needed to foster effective labour-management partnerships. We present case study evidence which suggests that such partnerships can nevertheless emerge where product market conditions and the regulatory environment favour a stakeholder orientation. Proactive and mature partnerships may also be sustained where the board takes a strategic approach to mediating between the claims of different stakeholder groups, institutional investors are prepared to take a long-term view of their holdings, and strong and independent trade unions are in a position to facilitate organisational change

Light smoking at base-line predicts a higher mortality risk to women than to men; evidence from a cohort with long follow-up

BACKGROUND: There is conflicting evidence as to whether smoking is more harmful to women than to men. The UK Cotton Workers’ Cohort was recruited in the 1960s and contained a high proportion of men and women smokers who were well matched in terms of age, job and length of time in job. The cohort has been followed up for 42 years. METHODS: Mortality in the cohort was analysed using an individual relative survival method and Cox regression. Whether smoking, ascertained at baseline in the 1960s, was more hazardous to women than to men was examined by estimating the relative risk ratio women to men, smokers to never smoked, for light (1–14), medium (15–24), heavy (25+ cigarettes per day) and former smoking. RESULTS: For all-cause mortality relative risk ratios were 1.35 for light smoking at baseline (95% CI 1.07-1.70), 1.15 for medium smoking (95% CI 0.89-1.49) and 1.00 for heavy smoking (95% CI 0.63-1.61). Relative risk ratios for light smoking at baseline for circulatory system disease was 1.42 (95% CI 1.01 to 1.98) and for respiratory disease was 1.89 (95% CI 0.99 to 3.63). Heights of participants provided no explanation for the gender difference. CONCLUSIONS: Light smoking at baseline was shown to be significantly more hazardous to women than to men but the effect decreased as consumption increased indicating a dose response relationship. Heavy smoking was equally hazardous to both genders. This result may help explain the conflicting evidence seen elsewhere. However gender differences in smoking cessation may provide an alternative explanation

The effects of financialisation and financial development on investment: Evidence from firm-level data in Europe

In this paper we estimate the effects of financialization on physical investment in selected western European countries using panel data based on the balance-sheets of publicly listed non-financial companies (NFCs) supplied by Worldscope for the period 1995-2015. We find robust evidence of an adverse effect of both financial payments (interests and dividends) and financial incomes on investment in fixed assets by the NFCs. This finding is robust for both the pool of all Western European firms and single country estimations. The negative impacts of financial incomes are non-linear with respect to the companies’ size: financial incomes crowd-out investment in large companies, and have a positive effect on the investment of only small, relatively more credit-constrained companies. Moreover, we find that a higher degree of financial development is associated with a stronger negative effect of financial incomes on companies’ investment. This finding challenges the common wisdom on ‘finance-growth nexus’. Our findings support the ‘financialization thesis’ that the increasing orientation of the non-financial sector towards financial activities is ultimately leading to lower physical investment, hence to stagnant or fragile growth, as well as long term stagnation in productivity

General Motors: A financialized account of corporate behaviour 1909–1940

This paper constructs an alternative account of resource stewardship at General Motors (GM) during the period 1909–1940. Alfred Chandler employed GM in his text ‘Strategy and Structure’ to explain the development of the modern corporation. This understanding can be employed to contrast an ‘old-economy’ with a ‘new-economy’ financialized corporate business model. In this paper we find that many elements of the financialized firm were present in the early history of GM’s development. Our analysis reveals the financialization of a non-financial corporation and how this influenced corporate behaviour and impacted on financial performance at GM during the period 1909–1940

Disarticulation and the Crisis of Neoliberalism in the United States

Neoliberal policies instituted since the 1980s have transformed the United States economy in ways that have produced serious structural distortions in the basic operation of capitalism. Using Samir Amin’s concept of disarticulation, previously applied exclusively to the periphery of the world economy, this article argues that the twin and mutually reinforcing features of neoliberalism – global corporate restructuring and financialization – have now generated disarticulation in the core nations. This disarticulated structure is responsible for the economic stagnation and sharply unequal income/wealth distributional outcomes that characterize contemporary U.S. capitalism

Governance, regulation and financial market instability: the implications for policy

Just as the 1929 Stock Market Crash discredited Classical economic theory and policy and opened the way for Keynesianism, a consequence of the collapse of confidence in financial markets and the banking system—and the effect that this has had on the global macro economy—is currently discrediting the ‘conventional wisdom’ of neo-liberalism. This paper argues that at the heart of the crisis is a breakdown in governance that has its roots in the co-evolution of political and economic developments and of economic theory and policy since the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression that followed. However, while many are looking back to the Great Depression and to the theories and policies that seemed to contribute to recovery during the first part of the twentieth century, we argue that the current context is different from the earlier one; and there are more recent events that may provide better insight into the causes and contributing factors giving rise to the present crisis and to the implications for theory and policy that follow