Introduction

Abstract

The ambition of this book is to explore the various dimensions of the transition from a state-led to a market-led financial system from the 1970s onwards. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the phrase ‘deregulation’ became a particularly popular term in regulatory spheres, but what kind of change exactly deregulation was? The nine chapters of the book show that if some rules were indeed revoked, particularly in certain countries, other regulations were introduced, particularly in the field of prudential supervision. The combination of an increased surveillance and of more liberal rules marked the end of the twentieth century and differentiated this period from the late- nineteenth-century laissez-faire approach. Rising public debt, new monetary policies, globalization, and weak economic growth were often the main factors underlying the deregulatory moves in the financial sector.

RETRACTED: The Commodification Dilemma: Tourism Pressure and Heritage Conservation in Barcelona

“…In this process of the monetarisation of heritage, the adoption of the World Heritage Convention by UNESCO in 1972 played an indirect but essential role, marking the conceptual frame of the universal value of heritage. This economic universality was also somehow aligned with the progressive deregulation of capital movements that concretised the idea of a transnational economy [21].…”