This introduction frames the special issue, developed in collaboration with the EuroMemorandum Group, by situating the Euro’s twenty-five-year record against the promises that accompanied its launch. The European Commission’s “One Market, One Money” projected that monetary union would deliver price stability, efficient capital allocation driving convergence and shared prosperity. Contrary to this vision, the contributions to the special issue collectively show that the Euro, paired with its fiscal straitjacket, has instead produced stagnation, amplified crises, and solidified core-periphery structures. While the ECB proved more adaptable than its mandate suggested, its crisis-driven interventions addressed symptoms rather than structural causes. The introduction concludes by identifying two challenges that urgently require further research: decarbonization and transformed geopolitical conditions, both of which demand fiscal and industrial policy capacities that current EU governance structures obstruct. The introduction builds on three streams of critical scholarship: post-Keynesian macroeconomics, core-periphery political economy, and neo-Gramscian analyses of European integration to situate the special issue’s contributions.
Recent years have seen increasing interest in socialization as a strategy for the democratization of economic processes, both in academia and among social movements. In these discussions, democratization is frequently invoked as both a means for achieving transformation as well as the end goal of socialization. However, it often remains unclear which prerequisites are necessary and which forms of participation and organization are suited to a transformative democratization of economic processes. This raises two pertinent questions: Firstly, which forms and principles of democratization are relevant when we talk about socialization? And under what conditions can democratization of economic processes through socialization contribute to a social-ecological transformation of current capitalist economies? Drawing on insights from radical democratic theory and critical realism, this article develops a framework of specific principles that can enhance the transformative potential of democratization in socialization projects. These principles are follows: (1) recognizing the biophysical embeddedness of economic processes, (2) enabling the active and equal participation of all political subjects, (3) the creation of suitable contestation procedures, (4) guaranteeing transparency and cultivating a sense of “possibility for change,” (5) establishing institutional self-questioning, and (6) guiding the institutional set-up based on the principle of subsidiarity. We argue that these principles cannot simply be “implemented” but can serve the context-specific shaping and critical probing of different socialization models. To showcase the applicability of the framework, the article discusses the principles with regards to the Deutsche Wohnen Co. enteignen campaign in Berlin.
This article reframes sustainability in the context of a polycrisis characterised by interconnected and mutually reinforcing crises—climate change, pandemics, energy instability, geopolitical conflicts, and rising inequalities—that challenge growth-centred economic approaches. This study examines classical and alternative economic models, including green growth, ecological economics, and ecosocialist perspectives, and evaluates their capacity to achieve long-term sustainability. Focusing on the European Union, it identifies a structural tension between GDP-oriented macroeconomic governance and sustainability agendas, which are mediated through indicators. This study analyses four major families of sustainability indicators—the SDG Index, the Human Development Index and its variants, the Ecological Footprint, and welfare-adjusted accounts such as GPI and ISEW—and assesses the extent to which they operationalise different model assumptions in terms of ecological embeddedness, distributional sensitivity, systemic dynamics, and adaptability to crisis-prone conditions. The analysis shows that while these indicators capture important dimensions of sustainability, none reflects the cross-domain feedback, nonlinear dynamics, and risk-propagation characteristics of the emerging polycrisis. The article argues that EU sustainability governance would benefit from a new evaluative benchmark—a “magic number” signal derived from a minimal integrated baseline that incorporates social floors and ecological ceilings. Such a metric could strengthen the evaluative link between economic models and sustainability strategies, support policy coordination, and enhance the public intelligibility of socio-ecological transitions. This article identifies the minimum conditions and structural logic of such an integrated reference point and argues that its effectiveness requires both analytical coherence and democratic legitimacy.
This paper interrogates the profound dialectic unfolding between the ascendant technological superstructure and the persistent structures of social inequality within the peripheral economies of the Global South. Moving beyond the Panglossian narratives of technological determinism, we posit that the digital revolution, far from being a panacea for development, operates as a potent amplifier of structural tensions already embedded in peripheral productive systems inherent in the heterogeneous modes of production characteristic of dependent capitalism. Through a critical resurrection and operationalization of Samir Amin’s seminal framework, specifically his concepts of unequal exchange, economic extraversion, and the development of underdevelopment, this analysis dissects the mechanisms by which technological adoption, when uncoupled from a radical reconfiguration of social production relations, systematically reinforces centre-periphery asymmetries. The methodological approach embraces this structural complexity by employing a Markov-Switching Autoregressive (MS-AR) model, an econometric formalism uniquely suited to capturing the non-linear, regime-dependent dynamics of a peripheral economy such as Morocco. The empirical architecture reveals a structural inconsistency: quantitative advances in technological export intensity coexist with a deepening qualitative dependency and negative specialization, a configuration that perfectly embodies the Aminian prophecy. The results further illuminate the structurally bifurcated effects of key variables; technological reliance and financialization exhibit profoundly differentiated impacts, oscillating between contingent advantage and developmental constraint across distinct economic regimes, thereby crystallizing a state of stable instability. In conclusion, this study argues that the contemporary trajectory of peripheral development is not one of linear convergence but of a structured oscillation between constrained developmental configurations. The superior performance of this model, which delineates a “dependent duality” between financialized extraversion and fragile autocentrism, demands a radical re-imagination of development strategy. The path forward cannot be a simplistic choice between integration and delinking but must involve a sophisticated, state-orchestrated navigation of the global economy, leveraging moments of extraversion to build the endogenous technological sovereignty required for a genuine, autocentric structural transformation.
Scrutinizing post-Keynesian theory of endogenous technical progress and Régulation Theory’s contributions to analyze institutions, this paper examines productivity growth and its variation within capitalist economies. The aim is to identify how institutions steer productivity growth. Based on the vast literature demonstrating that institutions not only have a direct impact on the innovative environment but also affect productivity growth by changing distribution and demand, an analytical framework that distinguishes between these direct and indirect effects is derived. We call this institutional background that either facilitates or hampers productivity growth the “productivity regime” of the respective economy. Applying this method to Germany and the US from 1991 to 2019, we find that the German economy can be characterized as a labor-led productivity regime, while the US economy shows features of a state-led productivity regime. This could explain the lower level of productivity growth in Germany, where the labor market was partially liberalized in the examined period, compared to the US, where public investment contributed to productivity growth.
