Neo Liberalism And Austerity

This book explores the ways in which communities are responding today's society as government policies are increasingly promoting privatisation, deregulation and individualisation of responsibilities, providing insights into the efficacy of these approaches through key policy issues including access to food, education and health.

This collection examines the relationships between a globalising neoliberal capitalism, a post-GFC environment of recession and austerity, and the moral economies of young people’s health and well-being. Contributors explore how in the second decade of the 21st century, many young people in the OECD/EU economies and in the developing economies of Asia, Africa and Central and South America continue to be carrying a particularly heavy burden for many of the downstream effects of the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis. The authors explore the ways in which increasing local and global inequalities often have profound consequences for large populations of young people. These consequences are not just related to marginalisation from education, training and work. They also include obstacles to their active participation in the civic life of their communities, to their transitions, to their sense of belonging. The book examines the choices that are made, or not made by governments, businesses and individuals in relation to young people’s education, training, work, health and well-being, sexualities, diets and bodies, in the context of a crisis of neoliberalism and of austerity.

This book offers a critical, sociological analysis of the domino effect of neoliberalism and austerity politics on the role of social work and wider welfare provision. It argues that social work should move away from the resultant emphasis on risk management and bureaucracy, and return to a focus on relational and community approaches as the cornerstone of practice. Applying theoretical frameworks to practice, including those of Bourdieu and the recent work of Wacquant, the book examines the development of neoliberal ideas and their impact on social welfare. It explores the implications of this across a range of areas of social work practice, including work with children and families, working with asylum seekers and refugees and mental health social work.

From bank bailouts to austerity, Europe's and Ireland's response to the economic crisis has been engineered specifically to shift the burden of paying for the crisis onto ordinary citizens while investors, financiers, bankers and the privileged are protected. The authors expose the class-based nature of Ireland's crisis resolution.

"This volume focuses on the state's role in managing the fall-out from the global economic and financial crisis since 2008. For a brief moment, roughly from 2008-2010, governments and central banks appeared to borrow from Keynes to save the global economy. The contributors, however, take the view that to see those stimulus measures as "Keynesian" is a misinterpretation. Rather, neoliberalism demonstrated considerable resiliency despite its responsibility for the deep and prolonged crisis. The "austerian" analysis of the crisis is--historical, ignores its deeper roots, and rests upon a triumph of discourse involving blame-shifting from the under-regulated private sector to public or sovereign debt--for which the public authorities are responsible."--

In November 1999 the first protests associated with the 'anti-globalisation movement' took place in Seattle, and came to be seen as the starting point for globalised resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Despite initial optimism, the following years have seen little progress in formulating a coherent alternative to neoliberalism, a failure that has become particularly poignant in the aftermath of the recent credit crisis. Now, the neoliberal mandate that appeared to be in 'crisis' in just 2008 has reinvented itself through the guise of a new 'era of austerity'. In this timely book, Worth assesses the growing diversity of resistance to neoliberalism - progressive, nationalist and religious - and argues that, troublingly, the more reactionary alternatives to globalisation currently provide just as coherent a base for building opposition as those associated with the traditional 'left-wing' anti-globalisation movements. From the shortcomings of the Occupy movement to the rise of Radical Islam, the re-emergence of the far-right in Western Europe to the startling impact of the Tea Party in the US - Worth shows that while a progressive alternative is possible, it cannot be taken for granted.

Offers some foundational insights into ordoliberalism, these essays give insight into a field that is much misunderstood outside Germany.

This book examines “the great contraction” of 2007–2010 within the context of the neoliberal globalization that began in the early 1980s. This new phase of capitalism greatly enriched the top 5 percent of Americans, including capitalists and financial managers, but at a significant cost to the country as a whole. Declining domestic investment in manufacturing, unsustainable household debt, rising dependence on imports and financing, and the growth of a fragile and unwieldy global financial structure threaten the strength of the dollar. Unless these trends are reversed, the authors predict, the U.S. economy will face sharp decline.Summarizing a large amount of troubling data, the authors show that manufacturing has declined from 40 percent of GDP to under 10 percent in thirty years. Since consumption drives the American economy and since manufactured goods comprise the largest share of consumer purchases, clearly we will not be able to sustain the accumulating trade deficits.Rather than blame individuals, such as Greenspan or Bernanke, the authors focus on larger forces. Repairing the breach in our economy will require limits on free trade and the free international movement of capital; policies aimed at improving education, research, and infrastructure; reindustrialization; and the taxation of higher incomes.