Economic development under the Coalition Government
Economic development under the Coalition Government
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联合政府下的经济发展
DOI：
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发表时间：
2013
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
G. Bentley
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
L. Pugalis;G. Bentley
2010年3月英国大选，保守党和自由民主党组成“联合”政府。取代连续 13 年的工党政府意味着联盟党将寻求实施某种形式的机构重组，以影响经济发展的形态和实践，尽管由此产生的组织行动比许多人最初预期的更加严峻。正是这种政治引发的政策改革背景为调查和批判性分析提供了肥沃的土壤。除了制定妥协政策之外，萌芽政府面临的一个直接挑战是应对 2007-2008 年信贷紧缩之后国家经济衰退的空间变化影响，部分原因是美国雷曼兄弟银行等银行的倒闭，以及国家主导的对北岩银行等英国金融机构的救助计划，这些计划在全球范围内产生了连锁反应。英国经济增长放缓，失业率上升，利率、房价和消费都在下降。商业贷款和银行贷款受到惩罚性限制，投资者信心直线下降。经济衰退以不同的方式影响了英国各地区，英国南北分歧进一步加剧。这引发了一些争论，即现有的地区政策未能解决不平等问题，这一观点得到了联合政府的支持（Overman 和 Gibbons，2011）。部长们开始引发热烈的反区域主义言论（Shaw 和 Robinson，2012），根据区域经济概念来管理政策很快就变得“不可能”，社区秘书埃里克·皮克尔斯（Eric Pickles）和其他部长们声称，区域制度架构产生了任意规模的领土组织，反映了“官僚便利”，而不是企业和其他地方参与者的利益。对于即将上任的政府而言，最令人担忧的是 2009 年国家借款水平预计为 1180 亿美元（下议院，
The general election in the UK in March 2010 resulted in the formation of a ‘Coalition’ Government between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. Replacing 13 continuous years of Labour governments signified that the Coalition would seek to implement some form of institutional restructuring that would influence the shape and practice of economic development, although the resultant organisational manoeuvrings have been starker than many originally anticipated. It is this context of politically induced policy reform that provides fertile ground for investigation and critical analysis. Beyond the act of forging policies of compromise, an immediate challenge facing the embryonic government was to respond to the spatially variable repercussions of a national economic recession following the Credit Crunch of 2007–2008, marked in part by the collapse among others of the Lehman Brothers Bank in the US and state-led rescue packages for UK financial institutions such as Northern Rock, which wielded worldwide ripple effects. Growth slowed in the UK, unemployment was rising, and interest rates, house prices and consumption were all declining. Business loans and bank lending were punitively restrictive and investor confidence was plummeting. The recession impacted the UK regions in differential ways with the English north–south divide exacerbated. This prompted arguments, which gained traction with the Coalition Government, that extant regional policies had failed to tackle the problem of disparities (Overman and Gibbons, 2011). Ministers began to evoke a zealous antiregionalist discourse (Shaw and Robinson, 2012) whereby administering policy according to the concept of regional economies was quickly rendered ‘a non-starter’, with the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, amongst other ministers, claiming that regional institutional architecture generates arbitrary scales of territorial organisation, reflecting ‘bureaucratic convenience’ rather than the interests of business and other local actors. Of fatal concern, as far as the incoming government was concerned, was the level of state borrowing which was forecast to be 118bn in 2009 (House of Commons,