The European economic crisis has been ongoing since 2008 and while austerity has spread over the continent, it has failed to revive economies. The media have played an important ideological role in presenting the policies of economic and political elites in a favourable light, even if the latter’s aim has been to shift the burden of adjustment onto citizens. This book explains how and why, using a critical political economic perspective and focusing on the case of Ireland. Throughout, Ireland is compared with contemporary and historical examples to contextualise the arguments made. The book covers the housing bubble that led to the crash, the rescue of financial institutions by the state, the role of the European institutions and the International Monetary Fund, austerity, and the possibility of leaving the eurozone for Europe’s peripheral countries. Through a systematic analysis of Ireland’s main newspapers, it is argued that the media reflect elite views and interests and downplay alternative policies that could lead to more progressive responses to the crisis.

An analysis of the repeated existential crises affecting the resilience of the European Union in the twenty-first century.

The "Greek Crisis" in Europe: Race, Class and Politics, analyses the publicity of the so-called "Greek crisis" by deploying critical theory and cultural studies perspectives. The study discloses racial and class media biases, and their associations with austerity.

The financial crisis – originated in 2008 in the United States – had a dramatic impact on the world economy. The European Union was immediately involved, but its reaction to the crisis was clearly inadequate. The misgovernment of the European economy not only put at risk the European Monetary Union, but it also caused further hindrances to the recovery of the global economy. The global financial turmoil shook deep-rooted beliefs. The doctrine of international neo-liberalism is more and more criticized. Nevertheless, the critics of neo-liberalism focus their attention on the relationship between the state and the market, as if the nation states, with their international organisations, have enough power for an effective global governance of the world economy. The model of European supranational integration, though seriously imperfect, can suggest some new way out from the crisis – even at the world level – based on a new relationship between the supranational government of the Union and the market. In this book, several academic disciplines are involved: international economics, international political economy, international law, international relations, political theory and democratic theory. Adopting such a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective, the volume tries to answer the following question: Is a more supranational Europe able to provide a better government of the EMU? Does this reform involve more European democracy?

Spiralling inequality since the 1970s and the global financial crisis of 2008 have been the two most important challenges to democratic capitalism since the Great Depression. To understand the political economy of contemporary Europe and America we must, therefore, put inequality and crisis at the heart of the picture. In this innovative new textbook Mattias Vermeiren does just this, demonstrating that both the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis resulted from a mutually reinforcing but ultimately unsustainable relationship between countries with debt-led and export-led growth models, models fundamentally shaped by soaring income and wealth inequality. He traces the emergence of these two growth models by giving a comprehensive overview, deeply informed by the comparative and international political economy literature, of recent developments in the four key domains that have shaped the dynamics of crisis and inequality: macroeconomic policy, social policy, corporate governance and financial policy. He goes on to assess the prospects for the emergence of a more egalitarian and sustainable form of democratic capitalism. This fresh and insightful overview of contemporary Western capitalism will be essential reading for all students and scholars of international and comparative political economy.

The financialization, globalization and industrialization of our food systems make it increasingly difficult to access quality fresh food. In fact, the industrialized global food system is creating products that are less food-like, engendering growing questions about the health and safety of our food supply. In addition, the bio-engineering of food commodities is another factor influencing the growth of industrial farming for an increasingly homogenized, globalized market. This book describes the financialization process in commodity futures markets which transformed commodities into an asset class. Incorporated into the portfolio decisions of investors, commodity prices now behave like all asset prices, becoming more volatile and subject to periodic bubbles. As commodity prices were driven higher in the 2000s, farmland became more valuable, setting off a global land grab by investors, nations, and corporations. More recently, under the financialization food regime, slow growth and low returns encouraged merger activity driven by private equity firms, with food industry corporations as prime targets, leading to increased industry concentration. With government policy focused on supporting corporate interests, there has been a global reaction to the current food system. The food sovereignty movement is taking on the interests behind the global land grab, and the regional food movement in cities across the U.S. is hitting corporations at the bottom line. Food corporations are listening. Is the food movement winning? This book is of interest to those who study political economy, financialization and agriculture and related studies, as well as food systems and commodity future markets.

John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s. This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours. Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability.