Measuring and Restructuring the State

Lemoine, Benjamin

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198793373.003.0016

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Developing long-range forecasts of future revenues and liabilities mimics the type of accounting practices typical of private corporations, which rely on such estimates to construct net present value. Unsurprisingly, the rising influence of GA coincides with a much broader transformation of accounting practices within the public sector that apply aspects of private-sector ‘capital accounting’, a trend also linked to competition policy and the rise of New Public Management (Barton 2001; Guthrie 1998; Lemoine 2017). Our research confirms the importance of this broader trend and the centrality of market rationality at the heart of policy thinking.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars have identified important omissions and biases (Gutman 2010), pointed to alternative measures of intergenerational transfers (Lee and Mason 2011) and often challenged the category of generations as important to distributional politics (Higgs and Gilleard 2010; Walker 1990). Others have focused on the influence of GA within public budgeting, identifying how it and other private-sector accounting techniques have been central to changing policy orientations in favour of private-sector actors and finance markets over direct public provision (Barton 2001; Lemoine 2017). We draw on these literatures to explore how GA has become subject to political contestation within public budgetary processes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mobilising alternative futures: generational accounting and the fiscal politics of ageing in Australia

Spies-Butcher

Stebbing

2018

Ageing and Society

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Economists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of ‘enduring austerity’ that limits governments’ fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future deficits, create demands for policy action today to address projected intergenerational inequalities. Taking Australia as a case study, this paper explores the politics of GA in public budgetary processes. While existing critiques reject GA by arguing it relies on ‘apocalyptic’ or unreliable demography, we focus on a different kind of contestation, which applies the techniques and even the categories of GA to frame different problems and promote different solutions. We identify three sites of partisan contest that refocus fiscal modelling: including the tax side of the budget equation; comparing the cost of public provision to public subsidies for private programmes; and including the costs of environmental damage. At each site, the future-orientated logic of GA is mobilised to contest the policy implications of austerity. This complicates analysis that financialisation and neoliberalism necessarily ‘de-politicise’ policy by removing state discretion. Instead, we identify an increasingly important, if technocratic, form of political contestation that offers the possibility to promote more egalitarian responses to population ageing.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobilising alternative futures: generational accounting and the fiscal politics of ageing in Australia

Spies-Butcher

Stebbing

2018

Ageing and Society

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“…As expressed in remarks by the CFO of Plainfield: “to the extent that the guidelines that the credit rating agencies are looking for [represent] financial responsibility … it informs policy within a lot of municipalities” (CFO, Plainfield, NJ, 2016). This illustrates how senior financial professionals insert the criteria of credit rating into the daily workings of government administrations, effectively melding the monitoring practices and performance standards of the rating agencies with the internal procedures and priorities of municipalities, so that “the criteria and modes of evaluation promoted and shared by private investors and financial actors transform the [local] state’s routine representations and practices as they adapt to these modes of calculation” (Lemoine, 2017: 5).…”

Section: It’s All In the Methodology: Rating Municipal Bondsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading risk: The practices, limits and politics of municipal bond rating

Omstedt

2019

Environ Plan A

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This article contributes to the growing literature on the relationship between local governments and financial markets by demystifying the municipal bond rating process. Since the Great Recession, the dynamics of municipal debt have moved to the forefront of American urban politics and the pursuit of high bond ratings has become a key mechanism constraining local policy autonomy. However, we know little about the actual practices of the rating agencies. Drawing on interviews conducted within these organizations, the article examines the criteria, processes and organizational practices that produce ratings. In conversation with calls for bridging the divide between political economy and techno-cultural approaches to markets, the paper shows how bond rating is structured by an ever-present tension between the need to understand localized investment risk in all its place-specific complexity while striving to fit that risk within the standardized grid of the rating scale. Further, the analysis highlights the imperative of budget flexibility through which indebted local governments are pushed into self-disciplining of their finances. As such, the article unpacks a particularly opaque area of local politics and furthers ongoing conversations between financial geography and urban political economy.

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How Scientific Ignorance and Social Invisibility Shape the Issue of Occupational Health in France as a Nonproblem

Henry,

Counil

2024

Arch. eur. sociol.

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Rather than leading to the emergence of a problem, some processes contribute to limiting their scope and impeding agenda-setting. These “nonproblems” are situations that could have led to social mobilizations or public intervention but end up neither being publicized nor subject to strong policy. We use occupational health in France to illustrate these mechanisms. The social invisibility of work-related ill-health is linked to the joint contribution of two processes. Firstly, from the perspective of research on ignorance and undone science, scientific knowledge is under-developed compared to other public health issues. And even available knowledge is rarely used by policy-makers. Secondly, policies use underestimated numbers from the occupational diseases compensation system. This specific configuration of knowledge/ignorance and official counting plays a central role in the production of occupational health issues as a nonproblem. Their invisibility contributes to the production of inertia and public inaction that characterize public policy in this field.

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Measuring and Restructuring the State

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Mobilising alternative futures: generational accounting and the fiscal politics of ageing in Australia

Mobilising alternative futures: generational accounting and the fiscal politics of ageing in Australia

Reading risk: The practices, limits and politics of municipal bond rating

How Scientific Ignorance and Social Invisibility Shape the Issue of Occupational Health in France as a Nonproblem

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