1. No Strings Attached: Corporate Welfare, State Intervention, and the Issue of Conditionality
- Author:
- Fabio Bulfone, Timur Ergen, and Manolis Kalaitzake
- Publication Date:
- 04-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
- Abstract:
- This paper contributes to Comparative Political Economy (CPE), developing an analytical concept of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare — the transfer of public funds and benefits to corporate actors with weak or no conditionality — is a prominent form of state-business relations that CPE scholarship regularly overlooks and misinterprets. Such transfers should be understood as a structural privilege of business in a globalized post-Fordist capitalism, and an increasingly common strategy through which states attempt to steward national economic dynamism within a highly constrained range of policy options. However, with- out a well-developed concept of corporate welfare – premised upon the key criterion of conditionality – studies that identify a “return” of the state in industrial planning misrepre- sent these transfers to business as a reassertion of state influence and control, rather than a reflection of state weakness and subordination. The paper provides the analytical building blocks to properly conceptualize transfers to business, works out the core challenges for em- pirical research, and provides empirical illustrations of this burgeoning phenomenon from the fields of unconventional monetary policy, privatization, and urban political economy.
- Topic:
- Industrial Policy, Political Economy, Privatization, Monetary Policy, Welfare, and Public-Private Partnership
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus