When the Partys Over: a conference on the Fiscal Squeeze
On 9 - 10 July, Professor Christopher Hood (University of Oxford) and Professor David Heald (University of Aberdeen) convened a conference at the British Academy entitled 'When the Party's Over: The Politics of Fiscal Squeeze in Perspective'. This conference explored how the politics of fiscal squeeze has played out in different times and places, looking in depth at nine cases of fiscal squeeze at different times and places, exploring what conclusions we can draw for current debates about fiscal squeeze from earlier cases in other democracies.
Lord Stern (LSE) chaired the opening session. Based on his experience at the IMF, he commented on the remarkable depth of some of the fiscal squeeze cases discussed in the conference, given the political difficulty of cutting expenditure by more than 1 per cent of GDP per year. The conference began by examining two cases from the early days of modern democracies: the United States after the financial panic of 1837 and the UKs famous Geddes Axe in the 1920s. It then moved on to looking at fiscal squeezes in more recent times: New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, Argentina and Germany. Thenine international cases of fiscal squeeze were then systematically compared using published data and techniques of qualitative comparative analyses, in a session chaired by Lord Gus ODonnell. It was clear from that analysis that there is not a single set of economic and financial conditions that precede fiscal squeeze in all cases and that fiscal squeeze is by no means always a certain route to electoral defeat for incumbent parties in government.
The presenters included: Sebastian Dellepiane, , Bob Gregory, Niamh Hardiman, David Heald, Rozana Himaz, Christopher Hood, Walter Kickert, Anders Lindblom, Martin Lodge, Alasdair Roberts and Donald Savoie. The papers from the conference will be published as a book by the British Academy, later this year.
The conference also brought in the practitioners perspective on Ending the Party in an evening session with Rachel Lomax formerly of HM Treasury, the World Bank and Bank of England in conversation with Professor Tony Travers, Visiting Professor at LSE. It also included an evening session going beyond economics and political science to look at how times of fiscal austerity were reflected in film, cartoon and gallery art, with experts exploring these issues from the perspective of social history.
You can find out more about this event by clicking here, and also by visiting Rozanas post on Politics In Spires.
