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.

This paper explores the existence of monetary subordination in the Eurozone as an extension of the Core-Periphery approaches developed during the Eurocrisis. The analysis establishes the existence of monetary subordination in the EMU as the foundation for subordination at large. European monetary subordination is found to be supported by three pillars: the hierarchy of euro money-like balances, the nature of the euro as hybrid money and the fragmentation of the monetary jurisdictions coupled with their selective integration. To begin exploring the effects of monetary subordination, the paper introduces the analysis of the Eurozone crisis as a result of subordination coupled with deleveraging, highlighting the asymmetric impact of the latter on subordinate and non-subordinate members.

This article highlights a central paradox of the current conjuncture: while capitalism is the root-cause of the current polycrisis, promoting social-ecological goals within this system possibly requires to reinforce some of its key features – and especially economization (i.e. the extension of profit-making logics to non-economic domains). In contemporary dominant strategies (policies for inclusive-green growth; ethical-political consumption; and Corporate Social Responsibility), solutions to social-ecological problems become investment objects that deliver growth and profits. While these strategies, if fully implemented, may potentially improve social-ecological outcomes, they would make the ideal of social-ecological justice more difficult to achieve. This problem of ‘non-linearity’ in social change generates an ‘unrealistic-pragmatism’ versus ‘necessary-utopianism’ dilemma for progressive forces: seemingly realistic strategies are actually unable to address the polycrisis whereas approaches discarded as utopian offer the only rational solution to it, namely abandoning the myth of endless growth and subordinating the economy to social-ecological needs.

Singapore’s developmental state has undergone significant transformations over the decades. Initially focused on national survival under a developmental state model, it later embraced neoliberal principles, applying market mechanisms to society. This shift was accompanied by a transition to a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy, characterised by the rise of the financial sector and a focus on research and innovation. However, these changes resulted in a growing crisis of inequality, driving repoliticisation as rising public discontent translated into increased electoral competition and calls for reform. Using Flinders and Buller’s framework of “arena-shifting”, we conceptualise these shifts as sequential phases: depoliticisation for reasons of national survival, depoliticisation via market mechanisms, and repoliticisation spurred by inequality. These transformations illustrate “policy stretch”, wherein the state faces the challenge of simultaneously pursuing diverse and often conflicting goals – in the case of Singapore, economic growth, global competitiveness, and the provision of social welfare. Stretch strains the state’s capacity and coherence, as it attempts to expand its interventions across multiple domains within a highly compressed timeframe. This paper contributes to the discourse on developmental states by framing these transitions as an ongoing process of arena-shifting, where repoliticisation necessitates the state to foster citizen engagement and create robust social safety nets to address inequality and adapt.

This article examines the implications and potential responses to financialization in peripheral regions, aiming to impact and boost the economic development of financial activity linked to the territory’s needs. It uses a case analysis based on an action research process in the Basque Country. The results show that collaboration within peripheral regions can strengthen their local financial centres. We find learnings related to (i) the process of creating a new policy instrument; (ii) identifying specific challenges and opportunities for collaboration linked to the main consequences of financialization; and (iii) the role of the public sector in creating the conditions for a successful cluster-type policy that targets public-private partnership. The originality of the study lies in its focus on an understudied area, namely, the regional and peripheral financial centres. The experience analysed may be of interest to the academy as it is an innovative policy process in a peripheral and highly industrialised region.

The European Green Transition requires massive financing efforts, with estimates of EUR 620bn EUR annually, and the headwinds are substantial. Central banks seem overstretched and busy tightening to combat inflation; treasuries are subject to austerity-inducing fiscal rules; and banking systems are afflicted by non-performing loans, fragmentation, and risk aversion. We employ the Monetary Architecture framework to analyze the EU’s monetary and financial system as a constantly evolving hierarchical web of interlocking balance sheets and study its capacity to find “elasticity space” to meet the financing challenge. To this end, we draw on a four-step scheme for Green macro-financial governance along the financial cycle of balance sheet expansion, funding, and final contraction. We find that, first, Europe’s monetary architecture still has ample elasticity space to provide a green initial expansion due to its developed ecosystem of national, subnational, and supranational off-balance-sheet fiscal agencies. Second, as mechanisms to consciously organize the distribution of long-term debt instruments across different segments are absent, its capacity to provide long-term funding is limited. Third, institutional transformation in the last two decades has greatly improved the capacity of the European monetary architecture to counteract financial instability by providing emergency elasticity. Fourth, the capacity of the European monetary architecture to manage a final contraction of balance sheets is limited, which is a general quandary in modern credit money systems. Our analysis points to the need for further investigations into techniques for monetary architectures to manage long-term funding and balance sheet contractions.

While inclusive growth has been considered a major characteristic of post-war Japan, this is no more the case since the early 1990s as the country transitioned to a post-industrial economy. This paper seeks to explain that digitalization is a primary drive of growing inequalities in post-industrial Japan and argues for incorporating the digital divide into the investigation of changing economic structures and growth patterns. We mobilize the Régulation theoretical framework, which posits that the impact of technology on growth and inequality regimes is not homogenous across countries and over time. Our empirical investigation combines macro-level data and institutional perspective with case study of the hospitality sector, in line with the Régulationist concept of the ‘anthropogenic’ mode of development. Our major conclusion is that digitalization, in the specific Japanese context, is leading to non-inclusive growth patterns through its effects on the wage-labour nexus, in an idiosyncratic way.

The existing literature on finance, debt, and inequality depicts economic elites as a creditor class. According to a popular thesis, over the past four decades, the rich and ultra-rich households have experienced a saving glut (excess income), which they have invested in the debts of the poor and their governments. While it is undeniable that the rich have expanded their income share at the expenses of the poor, to refer to them as ‘creditors’ or ‘lenders’ is a misrepresentation of how they actually expand their wealth and income shares by financial means. For it conceals the fact that a great deal of their investments is leveraged, that is, carried out with borrowed money. This article shows that the debts generated for the sake of affluent households easily surpass those of all other households. However, these debts are not accounted for in statistics on household debt. This is because affluent households, particularly multi-millionaires and billionaires inside the top 1%, do not simply borrow from banks, like normal households do, but they are instead absentee debtors who borrow through corporate structures of which they are dominant shareholders and ultimate beneficiaries. To gain an insight into their invisible leverage, the article looks at how much hedge funds borrow and why their leverage matters.