Planning laissez-faire

Supranational central banking and structural reforms

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6412923
AutoresBonnie Braun (0000-0002-5186-5923, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), Donato Di Carlo (0000-0002-4406-7739, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies), Sebastian Diessner (0000-0002-9458-980X, Hague Institute for Global Justice)
Año2022
Volumen32
Número3
Páginas707-716
Fecha de publicación2022-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaZeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1430-6387 • E-ISSN: 2366-2638
EditorialSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s41358-022-00322-6
OpenAlexW4281630171
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas36

The mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) does not extend to labor market and social policies at the national level. Why, despite the reputational costs, did the ECB act as a staunch advocate of structural labor market reforms from 1999 through 2015? We discuss this question through the theoretical lens of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Although Polanyi has been a key reference point for the debate on the social consequences of European economic and monetary integration, one of his key insights has received surprisingly little attention—that central banks have the power to mitigate the impact of international economic integration on domestic social protection. Polanyi regarded central banks—much like trade unions—as national-level institutions of non-market coordination, acting as a protective buffer against the functional pressures of the fixed-exchange-rate monetary regime that was the international gold standard. By contrast, the ECB, as a supranational central bank, embodies these functional pressures. This helps explain why, rather than protecting existing social structures against the logic of the fixed-exchange-rate monetary regime, the ECB has sought to protect the monetary regime by going out of its way to re-shape labor market institutions at the national level

Economic and monetary union · Economic policy · Economic system · Economics · European union · Exchange rate · Exchange-rate regime · International economics · Mandate · Monetary economics · Monetary policy · Monetary system · Political science · European Union Policy and Governance · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Social Policy and Reform Studies