The Postneoliberal State

We live in a postneoliberal age, or so we often hear. The state again has transformative ambitions, guided by national security, SDG development, or clean industrialization priorities. Yet it faces one critical question: how to pay for transformation? The public money avenue necessitates reform of the macro institutional setup that separates monetary, fiscal, and industrial policies. Absent political will for this, a private money approach promotes new public-private partnerships where the state mobilizes (local/foreign) private capital by making strategic priorities “investible.” This second approach has advocates in the OECD or the World Bank, informs the US IRA and EU green industrial strategies, Colombia, Indonesia or Brazil’s decarbonization plans. The talk first outlines the policy toolkit for the “mobilize or perish” imperative and examines the implications along three dimensions: the pace of structural transformation, the distributional tensions, and the geopolitical tensions in the context of great power competition.

Preparatory reading
Gabor, Daniela. 2023. “The (European) Derisking State.” Stato e mercato 43 (1): 53–84.

Gabor, Daniela, and Benjamin Braun. 2024. “Green Macrofinancial Regimes.” Review of International Political Economy: forthcoming.

Cooiman, Franziska. 2023. “The Limits of Derisking: (Un)Conditionality in the European Green Transformation.” Competition & Change, published online December 26, 2023, doi 10245294231224137.

Daniela Gabor is Professor of Economics at SOAS London. She studies central banks, shadow money, just transitions, and green industrial policies through a critical macrofinance lens. Daniela has served as an expert advisor for the European Parliament, the G20 under the Brazil Presidency, the United Nations 4th Financing for Development Agenda, civil society organizations, and central banks. She is currently running two projects, REDCAJU (Rethinking Developmentalism for Climate and Social Justice) with Ndongo Samba Sylla, IDEAS Network Africa, and REDEF (Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice – a Big Green State approach). She is currently working on a book on the Wall Street Consensus for Norton. She tweets @DanielaGabor.