Publications | SPERI

Publications

As well as the political economy blog SPERI Comment,  SPERI publishes its research in a number of forms:

Listed below are our three latest publications:

SPERI British Political Economy Brief No. 34

The rationale for local authority pension fund investment decisions by Craig Berry and Adam Barber

This Brief assesses the rationale behind the strategic asset allocation of the UK’s largest local authority pension funds since the 2007/2008 financial crisis. The analysis builds directly upon that of SPERI Brief 29, Local Authority Pension Fund Investment Since the Financial Crisis, which charted changes in the investment patterns of pension funds between 2005 and 2016. This Brief explores the basis of these changes, such as the move away from equity investment, and the partial move towards ‘alternative’ investments such as infrastructure.

SPERI Global Political Economy Brief No. 11

The rise and rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation by Rick Rowden

The Brief charts the development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and assesses how Russia and China have come together to cooperate on common geostrategic and geoeconomic goals for the long-term economic integration of Asia. The Brief discusses the origins of the SCO, including its military and economic goals; the China-Russia relationship, which served as the fulcrum for the establishment of the SCO; the recent expansion of the SCO to include both India and Pakistan and considers the likelihood of Iran and Turkey joining in the future.

SPERI Paper No. 44

Universality, market justice, wasteful government: the legitimacy of tax cuts on higher incomes in the United States 1981-2001 by Inga Rademacher

This paper aims to explain the impact of legitimation practices on the acceptance of heightened inequality in the US tax system. Through content analysis the paper shows that the two largest tax cuts in American history, the Reagan tax cut in 1981 and the George W. Bush tax cut in 2001, only persisted when the Republican Party developed strong normative narratives of universality, market justice and wasteful government which pushed Democratic arguments in the cognitive realm. It argues that this normative imbalance is the source of growing acceptance of neoliberalism and that the power of normative arguments is greater than the power of economic theory in legitimating inequality.