Cornel Ban
Biographic Data
| ID | 116950 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cornel Ban |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cornel |
| FAMILY NAME | Ban |
| SIGNATURE | BAN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3932-6097 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 533 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 39 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
State debtcraft under illiberalism
How do states practicing financial repression balance orthodox and heterodox macro-financial policies while staying solvent? The article focuses on post-2010 Hungary as a critical case of financial repression, where an illiberal government reasserted state control over financial markets and actors, challenging the literature on subordinate financialization and financial nationalism in the semi-periphery. Introducing the concept of “state debtcraf…
The political economy of advanced semi-peripherality
This article advances dependency theory by rethinking the place of East-Central Europe (ECE) within contemporary global hierarchies of development. Its contribution to the revitalized neo-dependency literature is threefold. First, it reclassifies ECE as a consolidated, developmentally mobile semi-periphery that has achieved strong sectoral upgrading across both manufacturing and high-tech services. Second, it demonstrates that this upgrading is i…
Macro-critical but market-centric
This article examines the evolving climate policy stance of the International Monetary Fund (hereafter the IMF or the Fund), highlighting an evolution towards greater acceptance of climate policy, as well as tensions between its expanded green rhetoric and the practical constraints of its fiscal mandate. Using document analysis and, for contextualisation, a handful of semi-structured interviews with IMF officials, we argue that, in the post-pande…
Green monetary transitions? Central banking and climate finance in Europe and China
This article examines the political economy of “greening” central banking as a contested project dynamically evolving on the spectrum between neoliberal and post-neoliberal modes of macro-financial governance. Drawing on interviews with European and Chinese central bankers, primary policy documents, and secondary sources, it argues that greening initiatives that shaped the global central banking agenda in the 2010s and early 2020s represent neith…
Das Auto and the Second China Shock
Why has the EU, despite strong climate regulation, advanced manufacturers, and deep industrial finance, fallen behind China in the electric vehicle (EV) transition? This article challenges explanations that attribute Europe’s predicament primarily to Chinese “unfair competition” or to an inevitable curse of incumbency. We propose instead a co-evolutionary yet ultimately state-anchored framework that integrates neo-Schumpeterian insights with deve…
Politics and Commodification
Part of a book review forum on Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from theFinancial Crisis to the Covid Emergency . By Roland Erne, Sabina Stan, Darragh Golden, Imre Szabo ́, and Vincenzo Maccarrone. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2024. 434 pp. ISBN 9781316511633
Financing technological innovation in China
This paper examines China’s distinctive approach to financing innovation, contributing to debates on the derisking state, neo-developmentalist alternatives, and economic statecraft. It focuses on the central role of government guidance funds (GGFs)—jointly owned by a wide range of state entities—and their divergence from government-owned venture capital models in the European derisking state and liberal-developmental states like South Korea. By a…
Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe, Market Civilizations
Peri-urban tides and archipelagos
Elite fidelity in Europe’s crisis management regime
How policy elites occupy positions within broader governance architectures is important in understanding how crisis management regimes are produced to respond to macroeconomic woes. We examine the crisis management regime forged to address Europe’s recent economic crisis and the policy elites holding top management positions in the supranational economic governance bodies constituting this European crisis management regime: the European Central B…
Green economic planning for rapid decarbonisation
A perfect storm
An advocacy coalition of trade unions, churches and NGOs had been trying for a long time to mobilise domestic media and politicians in order to re-regulate the German meat industry. The meat industry’s low-cost business model, using employee posting and subcontracting on a massive scale, has led to extreme forms of unsafe working and poor living conditions for large numbers of Central and Eastern European workers. But it is only in the wake of th…
Inter-imperiality
The concepts of “creolization” and “inter-imperiality” proposed in Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă’s Creolizing the Modern are superb interventions in the study of society in Europe’s semi-peripheries. These concepts usefully complicate conventional readings in orthodox, decolonial and postcolonial studies at both the conceptual and methodological level. From a historically-minded political economy approach, the book is an opportunity to ask f…
The Sputnik V moment
Why have Russia and Cuba developed and produced vaccines against COVID-19 while Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that are members of the European Union have only played a marginal role in the global supply of such vaccines? We argue that the answer is to be found in the capacity of Russia's national security state and entrepreneurs to mobilise historic Soviet advantages as part of a broader security motivated statecraft. CEE countries…
Central Banking in Pandemic Times
The sense of extreme disruption brought by Covid-19 led to the fast adoption of unprecedented containment policies. Central banks played a key role in this regard by adopting bold and unprecedented forms of financial stabilization as well as support for government debt in the bond markets. The overall effect has been the blurring of the boundary between monetary and fiscal policy, a key pillar of the “neoliberal” era. Furthermore, the Fed acted a…
Managing Macroeconomic Neoliberalism
There is little systematic work on how much the core of mainstream macroeconomics has changed since the crisis of 2008 and even less on what explains patterns of stability and change. This paper addresses this gap by first, mapping out debates over the core assumption of rational expectations in high-prestige academic publications and the research of central banks of systemic importance and second, deploying a sociological perspective to assess t…
The political economy of national-neoliberalism
Has a post-neoliberal policy regime emerged from the challenges to neoliberalism that have accompanied the rise of nationalism and populism in some Eastern and Central European countries? Why has the political organization of these challenges to neoliberalism endured in some countries but not in others? By drawing on a mix of primary and secondary sources culled from the institutional, political and economic realities of Hungary and Romania, this…
The Human Cost of Fresh Food
Fresh food supply chains in Europe’s transnational agribusinesses depend on cheap, non-unionised, and privately managed labour from low-wage eastern European countries. The costs versus benefits of this phenomenon are under-studied. By examining seasonal farm migration from Romania to Germany, we argue that the Covid-19 pandemic is, for farmworkers, a Janus-faced event. On the one hand, it has worsened the precarity of migrant farmworkers. Change…
Definancialization, financial repression and policy continuity in East-Central Europe
The Great Financial Crisis ushered unorthodox financial policies that would have been unfathomable before 2008. Perhaps unexpectedly, some of the boldest measures on this unorthodox spectrum were adopted in semi-peripheral and therefore theoretically vulnerable countries such as some of the European Union’s new member states from East-Central Europe. Why did policy makers in some of these countries (Hungary, Romania) embark on rolling back financ…
Dependent development at a crossroads? Romanian capitalism and its contradictions
How has the Great Recession changed what we know about dependent market economies (DME) in Eastern Europe? To answer that question this paper looks at the case of Romania’s version of the DME and captures both understudied forms of dependence and emerging interdependence dynamics that the existing literature on dependence has hitherto neglected. Specifically, the literature does not analyse the role of transnational banks in forging a politicised…
Beyond Social Science Naturalism
The epistemological and methodological wars that bedevil social science often pit those who follow in the footsteps of natural science and those who favor a more holistic, interpretive approach. Into this war-torn landscape, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakley have dropped a plea for interpretive social science that will surely serve as a touchstone for years to come. However, their anti-naturalism is of the methodologically ecumenical kind, with the qu…
Response to Stephen C. Nelson’s review of Ruling Ideas
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Ben Clift’s The IMF and the Politics of Austerity
The professional politics of the austerity debate
How do different professional structures shape the economic ideas that international economic organizations use to prescribe policy recommendations or derive legitimacy and authority for them? The comparative professional field analysis proposed herein deploys a novel combination of content, network and regression analysis to uncover the precise role of different qualifications, experiences and hierarchies in shaping the economic expertise invoke…
Ruling Ideas
Neoliberal economic theories are powerful because their domestic translators make them go local, hybridizing global scripts with local ideas. This does not mean that all local translations shape policy, however. External constraints and translators' access to cohesive policy institutions filter what kind of neoliberal hybrids become policy reality. By comparing the moderate neoliberalism that prevails in Spain with the more radical one that shape…
Banking on Bonds
This article examines a neglected structural transformation in European finance: the growing importance of government debt as collateral for Europe's repo markets, where banks borrow cash against collateral. Seduced by the promises of repo market‐driven financial integration, the EU institutions and Member States encouraged private finance to generate its own architecture for the European repo market in the early years of the euro, sidelining kno…
Austerity versus Stimulus? Understanding Fiscal Policy Change at the International Monetary Fund Since the Great Recession
Since 2008, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become more open to the use of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages to deal with recessions, while changing its doctrine on the timing and content of fiscal consolidation. The article traces this evolution of the Fund's doctrine to staff politics, more diverse thinking in mainstream economics, and a careful framing of the message through the use of mainstream macroeconomic models. To map the…
Brazil's liberal neo-developmentalism
Is Brazil's economic policy regime a mere tinkering of the Washington Consensus? The evidence suggests that Brazilian governments institutionalized a hybrid policy regime that layers economically liberal priorities originating in the Washington Consensus and more interventionist ones associated with neo-developmentalist thinking. To capture this hybridity, the study calls this regime ‘liberal neo-developmentalism’. While defending the goal of mac…
The BRICs and the Washington Consensus
The professional politics of the austerity debate
How do different professional structures shape the economic ideas that international economic organizations use to prescribe policy recommendations or derive legitimacy and authority for them? The comparative professional field analysis proposed herein deploys a novel combination of content, network and regression analysis to uncover the precise role of different qualifications, experiences and hierarchies in shaping the economic expertise invoke…
Definancialization, financial repression and policy continuity in East-Central Europe
The Great Financial Crisis ushered unorthodox financial policies that would have been unfathomable before 2008. Perhaps unexpectedly, some of the boldest measures on this unorthodox spectrum were adopted in semi-peripheral and therefore theoretically vulnerable countries such as some of the European Union’s new member states from East-Central Europe. Why did policy makers in some of these countries (Hungary, Romania) embark on rolling back financ…
Grey matter in shadow banking
Who controls global policy debates on shadow banking regulation? We show how experts secured control over how issues in shadow banking regulation are treated by examining the policy recommendations of the Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board. The evidence suggests that IO experts embedded a bland reformism opposed to both strong and ‘light touch’ regulation at the core of the emergin…
The political economy of national-neoliberalism
Has a post-neoliberal policy regime emerged from the challenges to neoliberalism that have accompanied the rise of nationalism and populism in some Eastern and Central European countries? Why has the political organization of these challenges to neoliberalism endured in some countries but not in others? By drawing on a mix of primary and secondary sources culled from the institutional, political and economic realities of Hungary and Romania, this…
Dependent development at a crossroads? Romanian capitalism and its contradictions
How has the Great Recession changed what we know about dependent market economies (DME) in Eastern Europe? To answer that question this paper looks at the case of Romania’s version of the DME and captures both understudied forms of dependence and emerging interdependence dynamics that the existing literature on dependence has hitherto neglected. Specifically, the literature does not analyse the role of transnational banks in forging a politicised…
Recalibrating Policy Orthodoxy
This special issue reviews patterns of policy stability and change at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the Great Recession and attempts to explain their causes. The contributors show that the crisis ignited a reassessment regarding how the IMF would position itself as a pivotal player in global economic governance. Some new ideas and evidence definitely found their way into IMF decision making, but this process was often tempered by th…
Economic Transnationalism and its Ambiguities
Taking the case of migratory flows between Romania and Italy as a case study, this article investigates the ways in which spaces of economic transnationalism emerge and are reproduced over time. While the article finds that the role of the state in regulating the flow of money, people and goods across borders remains significant, it nevertheless provides evidence that state authority is systematically challenged by private actors even in the case…
Green economic planning for rapid decarbonisation
Ruling Ideas
Neoliberal economic theories are powerful because their domestic translators make them go local, hybridizing global scripts with local ideas. This does not mean that all local translations shape policy, however. External constraints and translators' access to cohesive policy institutions filter what kind of neoliberal hybrids become policy reality. By comparing the moderate neoliberalism that prevails in Spain with the more radical one that shape…
The political economy of shadow banking
When most political economists talk about finance they mean the conventional banking sector that is subject to reserve requirements and other regulations but enjoying the safety nets offered by cen
Sovereign Debt, Austerity, and Regime Change
Historically, high sovereign debt and austerity policies have coincided with regime-changing popular uprisings. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania was no exception. Why, when faced with a sovereign debt crisis in the 1980s, did his regime choose to pay its foreign debt as early as possible, at the cost of economic recession and dramatically compressed consumption? How did these choices relate to the regime’s failure to survive the end of the decade? The…
Managing Macroeconomic Neoliberalism
There is little systematic work on how much the core of mainstream macroeconomics has changed since the crisis of 2008 and even less on what explains patterns of stability and change. This paper addresses this gap by first, mapping out debates over the core assumption of rational expectations in high-prestige academic publications and the research of central banks of systemic importance and second, deploying a sociological perspective to assess t…
Beyond Anticommunism
The debate about socio-economic inequalities and class has become increasingly important in mainstream academic and political debates. This article shows that during the late 2000s class analysis was rediscovered in Romania both as an analytical category and as a category of practice. The evidence suggests that this was the result of two converging processes: the deepening crisis of Western capitalism after 2008 and the country’s increasingly tra…
The Sputnik V moment
Why have Russia and Cuba developed and produced vaccines against COVID-19 while Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that are members of the European Union have only played a marginal role in the global supply of such vaccines? We argue that the answer is to be found in the capacity of Russia's national security state and entrepreneurs to mobilise historic Soviet advantages as part of a broader security motivated statecraft. CEE countries…
Beyond Social Science Naturalism
The epistemological and methodological wars that bedevil social science often pit those who follow in the footsteps of natural science and those who favor a more holistic, interpretive approach. Into this war-torn landscape, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakley have dropped a plea for interpretive social science that will surely serve as a touchstone for years to come. However, their anti-naturalism is of the methodologically ecumenical kind, with the qu…
Inter-imperiality
The concepts of “creolization” and “inter-imperiality” proposed in Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă’s Creolizing the Modern are superb interventions in the study of society in Europe’s semi-peripheries. These concepts usefully complicate conventional readings in orthodox, decolonial and postcolonial studies at both the conceptual and methodological level. From a historically-minded political economy approach, the book is an opportunity to ask f…
Towards the Completion of Europe
Economic Transnationalism and its Ambiguities
Taking the case of migratory flows between Romania and Italy as a case study, this article investigates the ways in which spaces of economic transnationalism emerge and are reproduced over time. While the article finds that the role of the state in regulating the flow of money, people and goods across borders remains significant, it nevertheless provides evidence that state authority is systematically challenged by private actors even in the case…
Brazil's liberal neo-developmentalism
Is Brazil's economic policy regime a mere tinkering of the Washington Consensus? The evidence suggests that Brazilian governments institutionalized a hybrid policy regime that layers economically liberal priorities originating in the Washington Consensus and more interventionist ones associated with neo-developmentalist thinking. To capture this hybridity, the study calls this regime ‘liberal neo-developmentalism’. While defending the goal of mac…
Sovereign Debt, Austerity, and Regime Change
Historically, high sovereign debt and austerity policies have coincided with regime-changing popular uprisings. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania was no exception. Why, when faced with a sovereign debt crisis in the 1980s, did his regime choose to pay its foreign debt as early as possible, at the cost of economic recession and dramatically compressed consumption? How did these choices relate to the regime’s failure to survive the end of the decade? The…
From Cocktail to Dependence
The BRICs and the Washington Consensus
Suzanne J. Konzelmann, The Economics of Austerity
Mark Blyth’s new book on austerity (Blyth, 2015) suggests that this dangerous idea has been at the very core of economic liberalism’s turbulent relationship with society. It is also an idea that reaches back in the dawn of “classical liberalism” and stretches into the various recalibrations that this idea has experienced in the post-Lehman era. This is a potent argument that cries out for a book that has in one place all the original key texts th…
Political economy and the ghosts of the past
Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s opus on democratic transition and consolidation put Spain and Romania at the extreme ends of these processes and paid little attention to the domestic and external economic constraints on the transition process. This paper interrogates these claims. It shows that in retrospect Spain looks a lot less exemplary and Romania a lot less hopeless than this iconic contribution suggested at the time. Moreover, while external…
Beyond Anticommunism
The debate about socio-economic inequalities and class has become increasingly important in mainstream academic and political debates. This article shows that during the late 2000s class analysis was rediscovered in Romania both as an analytical category and as a category of practice. The evidence suggests that this was the result of two converging processes: the deepening crisis of Western capitalism after 2008 and the country’s increasingly tra…
Austerity versus Stimulus? Understanding Fiscal Policy Change at the International Monetary Fund Since the Great Recession
Since 2008, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become more open to the use of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages to deal with recessions, while changing its doctrine on the timing and content of fiscal consolidation. The article traces this evolution of the Fund's doctrine to staff politics, more diverse thinking in mainstream economics, and a careful framing of the message through the use of mainstream macroeconomic models. To map the…
Recalibrating Policy Orthodoxy
This special issue reviews patterns of policy stability and change at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the Great Recession and attempts to explain their causes. The contributors show that the crisis ignited a reassessment regarding how the IMF would position itself as a pivotal player in global economic governance. Some new ideas and evidence definitely found their way into IMF decision making, but this process was often tempered by th…
Ruling Ideas
Neoliberal economic theories are powerful because their domestic translators make them go local, hybridizing global scripts with local ideas. This does not mean that all local translations shape policy, however. External constraints and translators' access to cohesive policy institutions filter what kind of neoliberal hybrids become policy reality. By comparing the moderate neoliberalism that prevails in Spain with the more radical one that shape…
Grey matter in shadow banking
Who controls global policy debates on shadow banking regulation? We show how experts secured control over how issues in shadow banking regulation are treated by examining the policy recommendations of the Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board. The evidence suggests that IO experts embedded a bland reformism opposed to both strong and ‘light touch’ regulation at the core of the emergin…
The political economy of shadow banking
When most political economists talk about finance they mean the conventional banking sector that is subject to reserve requirements and other regulations but enjoying the safety nets offered by cen
Banking on Bonds
This article examines a neglected structural transformation in European finance: the growing importance of government debt as collateral for Europe's repo markets, where banks borrow cash against collateral. Seduced by the promises of repo market‐driven financial integration, the EU institutions and Member States encouraged private finance to generate its own architecture for the European repo market in the early years of the euro, sidelining kno…
Response to Stephen C. Nelson’s review of Ruling Ideas
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Ben Clift’s The IMF and the Politics of Austerity
The professional politics of the austerity debate
How do different professional structures shape the economic ideas that international economic organizations use to prescribe policy recommendations or derive legitimacy and authority for them? The comparative professional field analysis proposed herein deploys a novel combination of content, network and regression analysis to uncover the precise role of different qualifications, experiences and hierarchies in shaping the economic expertise invoke…
Dependent development at a crossroads? Romanian capitalism and its contradictions
How has the Great Recession changed what we know about dependent market economies (DME) in Eastern Europe? To answer that question this paper looks at the case of Romania’s version of the DME and captures both understudied forms of dependence and emerging interdependence dynamics that the existing literature on dependence has hitherto neglected. Specifically, the literature does not analyse the role of transnational banks in forging a politicised…
Beyond Social Science Naturalism
The epistemological and methodological wars that bedevil social science often pit those who follow in the footsteps of natural science and those who favor a more holistic, interpretive approach. Into this war-torn landscape, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakley have dropped a plea for interpretive social science that will surely serve as a touchstone for years to come. However, their anti-naturalism is of the methodologically ecumenical kind, with the qu…
The Human Cost of Fresh Food
Fresh food supply chains in Europe’s transnational agribusinesses depend on cheap, non-unionised, and privately managed labour from low-wage eastern European countries. The costs versus benefits of this phenomenon are under-studied. By examining seasonal farm migration from Romania to Germany, we argue that the Covid-19 pandemic is, for farmworkers, a Janus-faced event. On the one hand, it has worsened the precarity of migrant farmworkers. Change…
Definancialization, financial repression and policy continuity in East-Central Europe
The Great Financial Crisis ushered unorthodox financial policies that would have been unfathomable before 2008. Perhaps unexpectedly, some of the boldest measures on this unorthodox spectrum were adopted in semi-peripheral and therefore theoretically vulnerable countries such as some of the European Union’s new member states from East-Central Europe. Why did policy makers in some of these countries (Hungary, Romania) embark on rolling back financ…
Central Banking in Pandemic Times
The sense of extreme disruption brought by Covid-19 led to the fast adoption of unprecedented containment policies. Central banks played a key role in this regard by adopting bold and unprecedented forms of financial stabilization as well as support for government debt in the bond markets. The overall effect has been the blurring of the boundary between monetary and fiscal policy, a key pillar of the “neoliberal” era. Furthermore, the Fed acted a…
Managing Macroeconomic Neoliberalism
There is little systematic work on how much the core of mainstream macroeconomics has changed since the crisis of 2008 and even less on what explains patterns of stability and change. This paper addresses this gap by first, mapping out debates over the core assumption of rational expectations in high-prestige academic publications and the research of central banks of systemic importance and second, deploying a sociological perspective to assess t…
The political economy of national-neoliberalism
Has a post-neoliberal policy regime emerged from the challenges to neoliberalism that have accompanied the rise of nationalism and populism in some Eastern and Central European countries? Why has the political organization of these challenges to neoliberalism endured in some countries but not in others? By drawing on a mix of primary and secondary sources culled from the institutional, political and economic realities of Hungary and Romania, this…
Political science (30 works) · Economics (27 works) · Politics (23 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Political economy (16 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Global Financial Regulation and Crises (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Economic system (8 works)