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- Convenors:
-
Jingyu Mao
(Bielefeld University)
Minh Nguyen (Bielefeld University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
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Minh Nguyen
(Bielefeld University)
- Discussants:
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Sohini Kar
(London School of Economics)
Horacio Ortiz (CNRS - Fudan University)
Short Abstract:
Finance is increasingly intruding into the realm of social protection in the Global South. This panel scrutinizes this fraught marriage between profit-making and the protection of people against the failings of the market, and its broader implications for ordinary people and societies.
Long Abstract:
Across the Global South, social protection, in the form of social cash transfers or universal health or pension insurance, has been on the rise. This development has been celebrated as an antidote to the increasing precaritization of labor, mass unemployment and privatization of public goods. Some even see it as an indication of a countermovement of social protection in the Polanyian sense, whereby socially embedding forces are at work to reverse the negative impacts of marketization and privatization. Concurrently, others have noted a parallel development, namely the increasing intrusion of finance into the realm of social protection and the everyday lives of ordinary people in the global South. As states have shifted to cash transfers and insurance mechanisms as means of social protection, financial systems and institutions have thrived on these schemes being offered to the poor and working people.
This panel further scrutinizes the relationship between finance and social protection, broadly understood as all formal and informal social arrangements aimed at guarding ordinary people against market-induced risks and vulnerabilities. We explore the following questions: how is finance changing the ways in which Global South people and societies seek to ensure social protection for current and future generations? What institutional, political economic and social mechanisms and actors are implicated in the relationship between finance and social protection? And finally, how can we conceptually understand this potentially fraught marriage between profit-making and the protection of ordinary people against the failings of the market in ensuring a broad base of well-being?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 14 April, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper contrasts the expected outcomes of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) in Colombia, with the experiences of the people who have participated in the labour market insertion projects financed through them, while analyzing their rhetoric of "impact", "responsible capitalism" and "sustainability".
Paper long abstract:
Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are financial investment products that link the ideals of financial returns to the production of a positive social impact. Through SIBs the Colombian government pays private investors to fund training and job placement projects for people considered “vulnerable”. If outcomes are achieved and demonstrated, i.e., a certain amount of job placements, the investors are paid their initial investment plus interest. Based on 9-months of ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia, in this paper I contrast the expected outcomes of these financial products with the lived experiences of people who have participated in the job placement projects. For them, formal employment is seen as a way out of uncertainty, as it brings a steady income; access to health insurance; benefits that can guarantee well-being in old age; the possibility of obtaining credit to buy housing, household appliances, furniture, among others. However, the jobs they end up getting cannot escape the realities of the precarious and exploitative labor market in Colombia, which is characterized by low wages, short-term contracts, long and exhausting working hours, and difficulties in getting promoted or finding better opportunities. Analyzing the rhetoric of “impact”, "responsible capitalism" and “sustainability", I explain how through SIBs the privatization of social services and the expansion of the financial markets has been enabled in Colombia. Furthermore, I argue that the uncertainty with which participants arrive at the job placement projects and formal jobs becomes inescapable when these, since their onset, SIBs reproduce the inequalities that they have set out to resolve.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the role of the financialization of homeownership and its effects on the urban working-class in China. Looking at the mechanisms of social protection in terms of housing shows that mortgages and debt are affecting workers differently according to their employment conditions.
Paper long abstract:
The Reform and Opening policies since the late 1970s have in major ways changed social protection and welfare in China. While urban workers used to enjoy ‘cradle-to-grave’ welfare, with the end of the urban work unit system workers’ privileged position to social protection has been marketized and privatized. Nevertheless, the reform of the welfare system, such as housing and pensions, continues to support the urban working-class, while rural migrants coming to the cities to work have faced marginalization and a lack of rights. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Chinese steel town, in this paper, I look at how increasing financialization of social protection has deepened working-class fragmentations, not only along the urban-rural divide, but also within the urban working-class.
The establishment of the housing market and its financial insurance mechanisms such as the Housing Provident Fund on the one hand the marketisation has made a large part of the working-class homeowners. Thus, alongside rising housing prices their assets have gained significant value. On the other hand, incomplete access to these Housing Provident Funds available through formal employment contracts, as well as families’ differing abilities for intergenerational wealth transfer, affect younger workers’ chances to buy an apartment. Workers employed in the informal economy take on mortgages under precarious conditions. Mortgages of 25-30 years put them under enormous pressures for a significant part of their lives, including marriage and having a family. Financialization of housing therefore affects the working-class in uneven ways, leading to emerging class fragmentations.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I argue that financializing welfare harms Chinese migrant factory workers and their families because the state and the financial market co-create a system that extracts value from people speculating with their future income while they demand protection against uncertainties.
Paper long abstract:
For the past three decades, the Chinese government has been promoting welfare policies with which financial products and services can integrate. People are encouraged to participate in social protection schemes such as the pension insurance in combination with commercial choices and utilizing the Housing Provident Fund together with reduced-interest mortgages. The state claims that broadening access to financial instruments helps people meet their diverse needs and incorporate those who are marginalized into the market provision of care. Although this logic dominates China's social policy design and implementation, a growing body of literature critiques the practices of financializing welfare. Yet how the precarious, who are most in need of labor protection, become involved in this process remains under researched. My paper therefore contributes to the current debate by detailing how migrant factory workers and their families engage with life insurance policies and home loans vis-à-vis the existing social safety nets. Based on ten-month extensive participant observation in Central China where a prominent electronic factory locates as well as semi-structured interviews with migrant households, I demonstrate that the state-led process of financialization supported by welfare policies re-embeds the vulnerable into the risky market. I argue that this is because of 1) the alignment of the state and the market's interests of keeping workers in a system that extracts value from people speculating with their future income; and 2) the underlying contradiction where the financial market gains from future uncertainties while workers and their families demand protection against them.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I interrogate impact bonds as a financing mechanism for healthcare in India and ask what forms of health interventions they bring forth.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1980s, multilateral agencies and governments in many parts of the world have curtailed public spending for the health sector. Simultaneously, they have started to experiment with “innovative” forms of financing healthcare. In this paper, I discuss impact bonds as one recent form that attempts to interconnect social service provision and financial return in India.
After described how impact bonds are designed, I examine the indicators used to measure social impact and reflect on the consequences that the introduction of performance-based funding and calculative techniques have for the health sector. What happens when “the language of finance [is] gradually being incorporated into public policies” (Chiapello 2015: 13) and when processes of financialization meet “indicator culture” (Merry 2016) in the realm of social service delivery? What forms of health interventions do impact bonds bring forth? And in what ways is the provision of healthcare re-imagined through this financing mechanism?
Paper short abstract:
Following the Kenyan governments attempts to expand access to healthcare through health insurance, this paper examines critique voiced by citizens and activists about healthcare futures amidst privatization, financialization and digital debt, class inequality, and growing healthcare needs.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, many African governments have embraced the Universal Health Coverage agenda, which seeks to ensure access to healthcare for everyone “without financial hardship”. Promoted by the WHO and World Bank, such health reforms seem to offer progressive visions of healthcare futures and citizenship, as they seek to expand state responsibility for health insurance and social protection, through free or subsidized healthcare programmes or by experimenting with health insurance. While promoting access to public goods, these interventions are also closely tied to the ongoing privatization of healthcare, the financialization of society through mobile money and digital credit infrastructures, and increasing class differences. Such reforms thus sit firmly within neoliberal forms of governance and development, offering, critics argue, minimal forms of financial protection and healthcare for targeted beneficiaries such as ‘the poor’, and even deepening forms of insecurity and precarity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of social media conducted as part of the ERC-funded project, "Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa", this paper follows critiques voiced by Kenyan citizens, as well as commentators, bloggers and activists, as they discuss the politics of health insurance and universal health coverage, and the futures of public healthcare and public goods in Kenya.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the rise of the entrepreneurial self in Vietnam by analyzing the practices of private life insurance sellers, who turn the self and social relations into business opportunities while presenting themselves as moral agents in service of collective wellbeing and the nation's future.
Paper long abstract:
Casting the self as the primary unit of profit making and value creation, the entrepreneurial self evolves from neoliberal ideas of self-entrepreneurship and self-responsibility to find ramifications in varying contexts. This article characterizes the entrepreneurial self of market socialism through the case of life insurance sale agents in Vietnam, where socialist genealogies remain salient alongside deepening marketization. To turn social relationships into business opportunities, the sales agents do not just present themselves as attentive to others’ wellbeing and the future of the nation; they are real believers in life insurance as a modern form of care. This morally activated market actor is born of the new economy, where the mandate to be self-entrepreneurial and self-responsible sits alongside with that to be a collectively spirited person. Remoralized through care, mutuality and national belonging, the entrepreneurial self of market socialism still betrays the illusory power of the individual and the clash between coexisting value frameworks.