Neoliberalism As A State Project: Changing The Political Economy Of Israel

This book explores the politics and institutional dynamics of neoliberal restructuring in Israel. It puts forward a bold theoretical proposition: that the very creation of a neoliberal political economy may be largely a state project. Correspondingly, neoliberal restructuring and the institutionalization of permanent austerity are dependent on reconfigured power relations between state actors, manifested in a new institutional architecture of the state. This architecture, in turn, is the context in which efforts to change social and employment policies play themselves out. The volume frames the coming of neoliberalism in Israel as a set of concrete and far-reaching changes in the power and modes of operation of the key players in the political economy--organized labor, big business, and the state. These changes undermined and neutralized veto players and enabled the ascendance of macroeconomic state agencies, which gained greatly augmented authority and autonomy. The key agents of innovation were politicians and economists in state agencies, and their initiatives combined processes of both punctuated and incremental change. Within the overarching transformation of the state, the book explores case studies of specific social and labor market policies. These reveal a close elective affinity between programmatic neoliberal reforms and the proactive drive of the Ministry of Finance to enhance its control over public spending and policy design. The case studies also document instances in which neoliberal reforms were blocked, undermined, or overturned by opposition from inside ot outside the state.--

• | Author: Asa Maron, Michael Shalev
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: Jun 20, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 256 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Political Science
• | ISBN-10: 0198793022
• | ISBN-13: 9780198793021