Political Parties, Growth and Equality

Conservative and Social Democratic Economic Strategies in the World Economy

Carles Boix author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:13th Jun '98

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Political Parties, Growth and Equality cover

This book shows that partisanship and electoral politics play a role in the selection of policies to generate growth and competitiveness.

This book describes the contrasting economic strategies pursued by conservative and social democratic governments. Examining all advanced countries since the 1960s, Professor Boix shows that partisanship and electoral politics play a fundamental role in the selection of policies to generate long-term growth and economic competitiveness.Given the increased openness of countries to international trade and financial flows, the general public and the scholarly literature have grown skeptical about the capacity of policy-makers to affect economic performance. Challenging this view, Political Parties, Growth, and Equality shows that the increasingly interdependent world economy and recent technological shocks have actually exacerbated the dilemmas faced by governments in choosing among various policy objectives, such as generating jobs and reducing income inequality, thereby granting political parties and electoral politics a fundamental and growing role in the economy. To make growth and equality compatible, social democrats employ the public sector to raise the productivity of capital and labor. By contrast, conservatives rely on the private provision of investment. Based on analysis of the economic policies of all OECD countries since the 1960s and in-depth examination of Britain and Spain in the 1980s, this book offers a new understanding of how contemporary democracies work.

"Overall, this is an important contribution to the study of electoral competition and political parties and to the significant role still played by politics in economic management in the context of globalization." Canadian Journal of Political Science

ISBN: 9780521584463

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm

Weight: 610g

296 pages