SPERI Conference debates global challenges that will shape the next decade

On Friday 8th November SPERI held its conference Beyond the Crisis? Global Capitalism in the 2020s at the British Academy in London.

SPERI - Andrew Gamble

On the eve of a new decade the SPERI conference explored how global capitalism is changing, and the implications of this for economic policy and for politics. It brought together leading UK and international academics to present and discuss the latest in political economy research with an audience of people in politics, public policy, research, business, trade unions, civil society and the media.

The keynote speech was delivered by Professor Andrew Gamble, Professor Fellow at SPERI. His speech, entitled ‘Beyond Brexit: The past and future of the UK political economy’ set out four broad possible futures for the UK political economy beyond Brexit. A video of Andrew’s speech will be available soon.

Across the day a series of panel debates explored some of the big questions that will shape the 2020s. Have corporations become too powerful? Are new technologies fundamentally changing work? Has financialisation gone too far? And amidst political turmoil, environmental crisis and a possible slowdown, can capitalism be reformed?

Expert speakers who presented and discussed their research included Helen Thompson, Stephanie Barrientos, Maha Rafi Atal, Manoj Dias-Abey, Adrienne Roberts, Heather Boushey, Valerio de Stefano, as well as SPERI’s Genevieve LeBaron, Michael Jacobs and Andrew Baker. Panels were moderated by leading economics journalists, Ben Chu (BBC Newsnight), Jill Ward (Bloomberg) and Phillip Inman (The Observer).

Andrew Gamble and Michael Jacobs had newspaper op-ed columns published that were connected to the conference:

You can watch the SPERI 2019 conference here.

Thank you to everyone that attended the conference, presented their work, asked questions, tweeted and contributed to a fantastic set of discussions.

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