British Political Economy
SPERI researchers are exploring British capitalism and its place in the global system.
British capitalism is at an historical crossroads. After 14 years of austerity, economic stagnation, and escalating inequality, the UK economic model is widely viewed as broken. Post-Brexit Britain faces growing pressure to re-align its political economy with the much larger economic powers of the USA and EU. Amidst an increasingly volatile electoral landscape, a new Labour Government has been elected promising to use the power of the state to enact significant change while nonetheless adhering to old orthodoxies of fiscal discipline and supporting the role of the City within Britain’s developmental model.
These political and economic challenges all take place against the backdrop of intensifying geopolitical and macroeconomic instabilities and escalating pressures to decarbonise amidst deepening ecological crisis.
To make sense of this pivotal historical moment in the British political economy, the British Political Economy Research Network will seek to bring together leading scholars to examine:
- Britain’s evolving growth model amidst growing fragmentation in the global political economy
- New dynamics of state interventionism and industrial policy
- Emerging tensions within the UK’s macroeconomic regime
- The political economy of the green transition.
The British Political Economy research theme is led by Dr Dillon Wamsley.