This is a review of Alexander Reisenbichler’s book, published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press. It first summarizes the book’s argument and main findings, and then offers a critical appraisal of its contribution and overall argument. The review points out the limits of growth models when understood as mere institutional arrangements to understand the housing affordability crisis.
The Ghanaian economy relies heavily on the export of cocoa beans to generate foreign reserves, and many Ghanaian citizens rely directly or indirectly on cocoa beans for income generation. The cocoa bean price is highly volatile and largely determined at the international commodity exchange in London. Volatile prices translate into volatile revenues, income, and exchange rates, which pose challenges for the Ghanaian government to manage its internal and external balances. We build on John R. Commons’s institutional economics and propose an institutional theory of price to understand the pricing mechanisms along the cocoa chain. Drawing on interviews with cocoa stakeholders in and outside of Ghana between 2024 and 2025, we first map pricing points along the cocoa chain following our institutional theory of price and second, provide a political economy analysis of cocoa pricing and price uncertainty. We argue that Ghana’s price risk is managed by its counterparties to its disadvantage, with large multinational companies reaping the benefits from the institutional pricing arrangement. We conclude with tentative considerations about how this could change.
This paper investigates the unique trajectory of the Chinese REITs (C-REITs) market, which diverges from international market-led precedents by prioritizing strategic infrastructure over commercial real estate. Adopting a framework of ‘State-Led Infrastructure Financialization’, we argue that C-REITs represent a new form of ‘state entrepreneurialism’. Through policy analysis and a case study of an energy infrastructure REIT, the research reveals that the state employs ‘selective gating’ strategies to direct capital into the real economy while restricting residential real estate speculation. Findings demonstrate that the state utilizes a unique dual-layer governance structure to maintain control and mandates ‘capital recycling’ to fund the energy transition. We conclude that C-REITs function not merely as financial products but as governance tools, enabling the state to transition from ‘land finance’ to ‘asset finance’. This transition signifies an evolution of state entrepreneurialism from land-based accumulation to asset-based capital recycling.
What conditions hinder the success of business’s attempts to shape responses to economic crisis? During both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, the German government drafted growth packages. Twice the automotive industry aimed for the inclusion of a vehicle scrappage program, investing considerable effort into ensuring the measure was implemented. Yet, only one of these attempts was successful. To explain this puzzling outcome, I apply business power theory within a comparative process-tracing design, arguing that in contexts of high issue salience, business’s success depends on its ability to control the framing of an issue and win framing contests. I find that this ability was constrained in 2020. The study contributes not only to the literature on business power but also to the broader understanding of who governs in times of crisis, highlighting that taking business and its power into account is crucial to understand crisis response.
How do coalitions within financial sectors lead to reconfigurations in political regimes? We investigate this issue by looking at how the transformation of global wealth chains has led to the reconfiguration of Switzerland’s social blocs. To highlight the political effects of the restructuring of financial circuits, we combine a multiple correspondence analysis of the positions of Swiss parties and interest groups with a qualitative analysis of the dynamics of Swiss financial policies. We show how the Swiss financial sector is split into two sets of actors: (1) large banks, who seek to maintain access to international markets by complying with international regulation, and (2) smaller wealth managers and banks, who try to maintain the tax avoidance model. We contend that this split has resulted in a division within Swiss politics, between the traditional centre-right camp, and a new right-wing camp.
Numerous regulatory measures aimed at reducing the size and power of European global banks emerged after the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), yet banks remain as large as in 2008. Despite their scale, they repeatedly experience (near) crises and underperform relative to their US competitors. IPE accounts explain the persistence of 'Too Big To Fail' (TBTF) banks through their structural power, while CPE approaches emphasise regulatory politics and institutional variation. We argue that both perspectives underestimate the role of geopolitical ambitions and financial hierarchies within global markets in shaping European banking outcomes. Connecting the persistence of TBTF banks to Europe's geopolitical turn, we analyse European banks' capacity to deliver on ambitions of strategic autonomy and financial sovereignty. We develop the concept of (S)tra(te)gic banking to capture this trajectory: a state-bank nexus that seeks to project power in global markets while maintaining traditional domestic functions. However, given the structure of global finance, this dual ambition produces contradictory outcomes. European banks are neither globally competitive on par with US banks nor reliably able to support domestic economic functions. We show that their position within dollar-centred financial hierarchies renders Europe's geo-financial strategy inherently contradictory.
Following policy changes associated with privatization and financialization, characteristics of funded occupational pension schemes have changed, shifting financial risk to beneficiaries. Scholarship of pension policy, however, has yet to take into the account the implications of these risk shifts for pension governance. Existing research on pension governance has focused almost exclusively on representation within pension funds along the lines of employers and employees (often via unions or works councils). Our paper asks: Does financialization give rise to new claims for representation by those experiencing new financial risks? We examine how pensioners demanded representation on occupational pension fund boards in Austria and the Netherlands, with varying levels of success. Based on our contextualized comparison of the two cases, we show that increasing financial risk for pensioners was a major driver behind pensioner demands for representation on pension fund boards in both countries. To explain Austrian pensioners' limited success in gaining de facto decision-making power vis-& agrave;-vis more consequential forms of representation in the Netherlands, we turn to the political context of democratic corporatism in both countries. In particular, we argue that shifting insider-outsider dynamics within national corporatist structures explain the two different historical trajectories. Our paper shows that stakeholder representation in pension governance should be considered a dynamic feature of contemporary pension politics.
The paper discusses the historical development of the debate on financialization supported by bibliometric analysis. There are several origins of the concept of financialisation in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s, this consolidates in a transdisciplinary project: an attempt to create a critical conversation across academic disciplines about the impact of finance on the economy and society. This was driven by the team of CRESC by organising workshops and special issues, involving critical business studies, constructivist approaches to the household and heterodox macroeconomics. This created the basis for the success of the concept and, since the global financial crisis, enabled an explosive rise in studies on financialisation. But with success also came a fragmentation of the debate and its disintegration along disciplinary lines. Thus, research on financialization today is published in more prestigious journals, but it has decoupled from the core financialisation debate of the 2000s.
Global value chains (GVCs) are vital to global trade, transforming natural capital into products through complex transborder production systems coordinated by lead firms. While GVCs facilitate economic integration and development opportunities, they are often associated with social and environmental harms particularly in ecologically sensitive regions. Efforts to mitigate these harms usually involve fragmented governance mechanisms that treat the environment as an externality, rather than as a dynamic system shaping and shaped by value chain activities. The GVC approach is effective at analyzing governance structures, lead firm strategies, and power asymmetries in global production, but tends to overlook ecological feedback. In contrast, the Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) framework conceptualizes the environment as endogenous, emphasizing feedback loops between ecosystems and governance. However, the SES framework is typically applied at local scales, and its application to globalized production remains limited. This article bridges these literatures by developing a GVC-SES analytical framework, systematically linking governance, power, and ecological feedback across scales. We apply this framework to the Brazilian Amazon's beef cattle value chain using primary and secondary data. Findings reveal how global demand, land governance, and infrastructure drive deforestation through land valuation, credit regimes, and development incentives, while misaligned governance and power asymmetries hinder sustainability. The GVC-SES framework offers a novel tool to holistically assess sustainability outcomes across GVCs and the SESs in which they are embedded. The GVC-SES framework contributes to both literatures by embedding GVC governance in its socio-ecological context and extending SES analysis to globalized production systems.
This paper investigates the drivers of Spanish deindustrialization between 1995 and 2018 within a context of increasing international productive fragmentation. Building on the subsystem approach, we extend the analysis to a global Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) framework in order to capture both domestic and international inputs embodied in manufacturing production. We combine this perspective with a structural decomposition analysis (SDA) to disentangle the relative contribution of internal factors (productivity, income, and investment) and external factors (outsourcing and international trade) with particular emphasis on Spain's integration into global value chains (GVCs) and the European Union. Findings show that the period before the Great Financial Crisis saw marked deindustrialization, while the post-2010 phase showed a relative reversal, mainly due to outsourcing and export dynamics. While internal factors were largely responsible for these trends, external drivers (especially substitution of domestic inputs by imports and the reconfiguration of regional production) also played an increasing role. Heterogeneity among sectors also proved significant, with traditional and GVC-integrated sectors found to have been differently affected. By integrating internal and external drivers within a unified global subsystem framework, the paper contributes to current debates on industrial policy and productive autonomy in advanced economies exposed to GVC dynamics.
Large, domestically owned and headquartered firms have been catalysts of structural transformation in several East Asian late-industrialisers. This article investigates why Nigeria's largest domestically owned industrial conglomerates, most notably the Dangote Group, have failed to catalyse similar broad-based industrial transformation, despite their scale and entrepreneurial success. We show that such firms in Nigeria have produced limited spillovers and substantial negative effects on the wider industrial ecosystem. Theoretically, the article mobilises Myrdal's concept of backwash and spread effects to reframe diversified business groups (DBGs) as ecosystem coordinators whose developmental role must be assessed through these effects. It shows that in Nigeria, backwash effects, stemming from market concentration, predatory behaviour, and regulatory capture, have systematically outweighed spread effects such as capability development and supplier upgrading. The findings advance the study of African capitalism by conceptualising how large firms can simultaneously stimulate and stifle industrial ecosystems, depending on the political and institutional mediation of scale. The article concludes that effective industrial policy must address not only capability failures in firms, but also the structural power of dominant conglomerates and the ecosystem-wide tensions produced by scale.
This article examines the innovative financial connectivity schemes in Hong Kong and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) in southern China to understand China's regionalized financial statecraft and their implications for the global financial order. While the existing literature tends to depict a coherent "state-capitalist" China exercising offensive financial statecraft to contest the neoliberal global financial order, we highlight the domestic institutional hybridity and spatial dynamics of China's financial statecraft. Bridging the subnational, national, and global levels of analyses, we argue that these financial connectivity schemes serve as a form of institutional bridging and defensive financial statecraft for China to co-opt and hedge against the US-led global financial order, and to reconfigure its financial sovereignty in cross-border governance. Embedded in China's domestic institutional hybridity and territorial dynamics, such financial statecraft plays out as a process of cross-border/boundary market-making that aligns Hong Kong closer to China's national strategies, while maintaining its international role.
How does digitalization change corporate governance in German industry? Does it lead to further atomization of inter-corporate relations in the race for the development and deployment of technologies and skills, or can we discern new forms of cooperation and coordination against the backdrop of institutional legacies and the pressure to adjust industrial business models? The present paper engages with these questions with a focus on industrial firms' own digital agency, a less understood aspect. We identify the development and deployment digital technologies and the proliferation and integration of the corresponding skills portfolios as a dual challenge. With a focus on the German political economy and on mergers and acquisitions as one of the principal tools to overcome this dual challenge, we analyze more than two decades of M&A deals to explore shifts in acquisition activity and to map corporate linkages and overlapping investments. One of the consequences of this activity is the emergence of interconnections that have given rise to a new structure, which we term Industry 4.0 Inc. and which is likely to induce further collaboration among participating incumbents.
As Europe continues to rely on private venture capital (VC) to finance innovation, policymakers are increasingly seeking to steer investment toward political and societal goals. This article examines how the governance infrastructures built around financial intermediaries complicate these attempts to direct innovation finance. Bridging scholarship on the infrastructural power of finance with industrial policy research, it analyzes how bureaucratic actors exert influence through institutional authority, sectoral coalitions, and discursive framing. Empirically, the article examines the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund (2018-2024), the European Union's first attempt to use direct equity to influence VC markets. Drawing on interviews and secondary sources, the paper traces the Fund's attempt to influence capital allocation and demonstrates how financial and budgetary officials leveraged their expertise and pre-existing professional links with the VC sector against the mandate of innovation-oriented bureaucrats. The article therefore shows how financial power operates not only through market-based governance infrastructures but through bureaucratic autonomy and contestation within the state, revealing the politically constructed nature of the subordination of innovation objectives to financial logics.
Global value chain (GVC) analysis examines the distribution of value between lead firms and suppliers but overlooks profit leakage to actors outside GVCs, especially financial markets. We address this gap by integrating GVC analysis with the corporate financialization literature, examining value capture between shareholders, lead firms, and suppliers. Using S&P Capital IQ data, we analyze lead firms' financialization of objectives, investments, operations, and value capture across four GVCs (apparel, automotive, copper, and coffee/cocoa) from 1993 to 2022. We show that GVCs serve lead firms as a "source of value" by lowering sourcing costs to increase profit margins and shareholder returns, and as a "source of liquidity," extending supplier payment terms that enhance working capital. Overall, shareholders emerge as the main beneficiaries of GVCs. While issuing equity plays a minor role in financing lead firms, these firms sustain stock markets through large shareholder payouts, funded through the profits generated in GVCs.
Recent advances in automation have raised concerns about potential job displacement. Specifically, robot adoption in developed countries has the potential to lower employment in offshoring destinations by affecting trade patterns. This study explores the relationship between increased robot use in Europe and the U.S. on domestic employment and on one of the most dominant offshoring destinations, China. Using cross-country sector-level data on robot adoption, we find that the widespread use of robots increases total employment in Europe and the U.S. but has varied effects across sectors within these economies. Specifically, robots act as labour substitutes in agriculture, which is more than made up for in services. Moreover, industrial employment is largely unaffected by robot adoption in the United States but is negative in Europe. This suggests that much of the aggregate positive effects are driven by service employment. Furthermore, the estimates suggest that robot adoption in developed countries does not affect Chinese employment across sectors.
The article provides new conceptual and analytical tools to explore the relationship between platform work and the welfare state at the global level. Firstly, the article discusses how the welfare state can profoundly shape the presence and availability of platform work, as well as moderate the effects of the 'de-responsibilisation' of platforms/employers and the 'responsibilisation' of workers, thereby exacerbating or reducing workers' insecurities. The article discusses how platform work relates to global welfare security regimes, proposing a nuanced application of the dualisation theory which considers the relative position of platform workers vis-& agrave;-vis other vulnerable workers within the country. Secondly, the article indicates that the micro-level barriers faced by platform workers in accessing the welfare state depend on social policy mechanisms but also on the level of informality of platform work within a certain labour market. We illustrate the three possible strategies to develop social policy instruments for platform workers: absorption into employment status, absorption into self-employment social protection mechanisms and the development of ad hoc social policy instruments. Finally, the article discusses how the emergence of platform work unionism is generating new social policy demands, as well as a third wave of collecting bargaining that differs from traditional bargaining strategies in countries of the Global South.
In the context of the recent resurgence of the state in response to a series of global crises, the paper aims to contribute to the debate on state capitalism and political capitalism by integrating perspectives from institutional economics and public finance. How do constraints on the state influence the structure of public expenditure? The paper adapts the Red Queen Effect theory and the Leviathan typology to analyze the parallel political and budgetary transformation in East Central Europe (ECE) between 2004 and 2023. It shows that the developmental goals of increased state intervention are achieved only in countries where limits on government discretion grow in tandem with its power. The Hungarian case illustrates the various mechanisms through which the lack of constraints facilitates predatory objectives and the dominance of private over public interests. The analysis of regional convergence performance highlights the limitations of unconstrained state intervention for economic prosperity.
This article examines how the rise of FinTech companies has affected the power of commercial banks. Specifically, we employ comparative case studies of Kenya and Nigeria to explore how the rise of FinTechs has affected banks' ability to exercise control over the emerging digital financial infrastructure. We find that cross-national variation in the relationship between the state and private sector in the allocation of economic resources has led to cross-national differences in the regulatory framework for digital financial services, which in turn explain differences in banks' ability to control the emerging digital financial infrastructure. Our article makes an empirical contribution by studying how banks' power is affected by digitalisation in under-researched middle-income country contexts and contributes to broader theoretical discussions about the changing power and purpose of banks in the digital era.
Accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss have spurred demands for the "greening" of Global Value Chains (GVCs). This article analyzes how Zero-Deforestation Commitments (ZDCs) are conveyed through soy supply chains to producers in Brazil. Informed by the GVC perspective and drawing on corporate reports and interview data, we study how intra-chain power relations shape the transmission of ZDCs with particular attention to how power is distributed and exercised across different nodes. Identifying a pushback from Brazilian soy producers, we challenge the assumption of cascading compliance underpinning academic perspectives and corporate strategies of sustainability management. Our contribution also stresses the pivotal role of state actors in mediating power dynamics within supply chains, as demonstrated by Brazilian authorities' contestation of European deforestation regulations, such as the European Union Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (EUDR). Broadly, our findings reveal the rising market power of Southern agri-food corporations, which have emerged as significant veto-players in the environmental regulation of GVCs.
