The Euro: only for the agile

Alan Ahearne and Jean Pisani-Ferry explore the implications of economic divergence in the euro area for policy makers, as well as the discipline required to be part of the single currency. From this analysis they derive policy recommendations, both for the policies and monitoring of existing euro area members and for the selection of those of the new Member States that may adopt the euro in the next years.

Zombie Firms and Economic Stagnation in Japan

It is often claimed that one contributing factor to Japan's weak economic performance over the past decade is that Japanese banks have continued to provide financial support for highly inefficient, debt-ridden companies, commonly referred to as "zombie" firms. Such poor banking practices in turn prevent more productive companies from gaining market share, strangling a potentially important source of productivity gains for the overall economy. To explore further the zombie-firm hypothesis, we use industry- and firm-level Japanese data and find evidence that productivity growth is low in industries reputed to have heavy concentrations of zombie firms. We also find that the reallocation of market share is going in the wrong direction in these industries, adding to already weak productivity performance. In addition, we find evidence that financial support from Japanese banks may have played a role in sustaining this perverse reallocation of market share.Productivity, banking system, creative destruction

European perspectives on global imbalances

Alan Ahearne and Jürgen von Hagen explore the options European policy makers have in the context of global current account imbalances. Some Europeans are concerned that a disproportionately large burden of adjustment will fall on Europe when the European economy is not flexible enough to cope with a substantial appreciation of the euro. This paper was prepared for the Asia Europe Economic Forum conference.

Paying the Price: Sex Workers in Prison and the Reality of Stigma

Sex workers are a hidden demographic of the female prison estate. The Corston Report2 called for a new Reducing Reoffending Pathway 9 for women who have engaged in prostitution. Yet this involves having to locate the women who sell sex and having the support in place inside prison. Those engaging in sex work have specific needs relating to health care, securing housing, engaging with charities who assist with safer worker practices and exiting support, and coping with the additional stigma of being a prisoner who also works in the sex industry, particularly in a street-based setting. This paper derives from my Ph.D research at HMP New Hall. There are no official records kept for the number of sex workers in custody. And despite the plethora of research on various elements of the sex industry,3 there is little on the specific group of sex workers in prison.4 My study seeks to be a small part of remedying that shortfall

Cultural policy through the prism of fiction (Michel Houellebecq)

Cultural policy studies tends to talk about fiction without actually using it. A typical move is to place it in an aesthetic realm to be protected, situated and/or critiqued. This is an eminently worthwhile activity. However, this paper explores some ways in which works of fiction may, following their own dynamic, yield significant perspectives upon the world of cultural policy itself. In what ways do fictional works offer us prisms through which to reappraise the worlds of cultural policy? What are the effects of the reconfigurative imaginative play to which they subject the institutions of that world? How are the discourses of cultural policy reframed when redeployed by novelists within free indirect style or internal monologue? The article begins by distinguishing four broad modes in which fictional works refract the world of cultural policy, and then analyses in more fine-grained detail two novels by the leading French writer Michel Houellebecq

‘National Resources’? The Fragmented Citizenship of Gas Extraction in Tanzania

Recent discoveries of oil and natural gas across East Africa have provoked a wave of political optimism fuelled by imaginaries of future development. Tanzania is a paragon of this trend; its government having asserted its potential to become a globally significant natural gas producer within a decade. Yet, this rhetorical promise has been countered by a series of violent confrontations that have taken place between state forces and residents of southern Tanzania. Although these struggles are about various articulations of resource sovereignty, this paper argues that they should be located less in questions of resource control, than in a historical marginalisation of the south, or what has been called a ‘hidden agenda’, that privileges urban centres to the north. Drawing on original qualitative data generated over three years in Mtwara and Lindi regions, it shows how gas discoveries reveal the fault lines in the construction of an inclusive ‘Tanzanian’ citizenship. Protesters counter-narrate their sense of citizenship with insurgent strategies ranging from strike action to calls for secession. In short, natural gas discoveries actually extend the fragmentation of an already ‘differentiated citizenship’. Studies of resource conflict and sovereignty, we conclude, should pay more attention to the contested nature of citizenship

Global current account imbalances: how to manage the risk for Europe

Alan Ahearne and Jürgen von Hagen examine one of the most alarming global economic developments in recent years- the evolution of global current account imbalances and its implications for European policy.

International recognition regimes and the projection of France

The recent turn to substantial theories of ‘recognition’ in international relations is of considerable interest for the study of international cultural relations. France provides a revealing case study due to the historical importance of culture as such in its foreign policies. Its ‘diplomacies of influence’ can be understood as forms of recognition-seeking across shifting international ‘regimes of recognition’ (Ringmar). France once played a leading role in shaping the global templates for cultural recognition between states. In recent decades, it has had to adapt to the terms of new recognition templates established elsewhere, either via forms of institutional imitation, or by seeking to inflect these new templates (notably in a self-ascribed role as global champion of cultural diversity). These dynamics can be traced in a series of official reports on France’s external cultural policies, notably across the sectors of language policy, arts diplomacy, higher education mobility and global news projection. The reports’ deliberation on these processes opens a space for critical discussion concerning the contemporary operation of international regimes of recognition

Cultural insecurity and its discursive crystallisation in contemporary France

This article analyses the emergence in French public discourse since 2010 of the term ‘insécurité culturelle’ (‘cultural insecurity’). It traces firstly the take-up of the term outside France since the 1980s in anglophone written news media. It establishes four received meanings for the term: a ‘pure’ cultural insecurity expressing simply a relation to the arts world; a nationally refracted cultural insecurity that expresses that relation through the prism of relations between nations; an anthropologico-political conception; and a conception related to the human development paradigm. The take-up in France of the term has conformed to the anthropologico-political conception. Developments after 2002 in France created propitious conditions for coupling the semantic fields of ‘culture’ and ‘insecurity’. The term itself was launched from 2010 through the work of two quite different ‘discursive entrepreneurs’ associated with the erstwhile ‘popular left’ current close to the French Socialist Party (Christophe Guilluy and Laurent Bouvet). The article analyses in both linguistic and political perspectives how the expression has been taken up since 2012 in the national press in France. In particular, it explores the debate concerning the purchase of the term on reality, and its current discursive fit with the agendas of the mainstream and far right