This paper is concerned with the distributional effects of the deregulation and privatization of essential services in Britain since the 1980s, based on a cross-sector study of water, energy and local bus transport. Our approach locates end users within the structures and processes, and prevailing narratives that underpin both production and consumption. This framework highlights the ways that the provisioning of these vital services is contested, contradictory and underpinned by power relations. We show that, at one end, investors in these sectors have made generous returns on their investments but their methods of profit maximization are often not in the public interest. Meanwhile these profits are financed by end users' payments of bills and fares. Many lower-income households face challenges in terms of affording, and even accessing, these essential services. Regulation has failed to provide adequate social protection. We argue that adverse social outcomes emerge from systemic factors embedded in these modes of provision. A narrative of politically-neutral, technocratic solutions belies the underlying contested nature of privatized monopolistic shared essential services. Moreover, a policy preoccupation with markets and competition obscures the inequality embedded in the underlying structures and processes and undermines more collective and equitable forms of provisioning.
Vista nella Parte I la gravità della crisi ambientale, soprattutto l'instabilità climatica che caratterizzerà le prossime decadi, nella parte II si esplicitano le ragioni profonde della necessità di cambiare, e come, il modello di sviluppo. Negli ultimi quarant'anni la crisi ecologica non è mai diventata una variabile importante nelle politiche economiche. Colpa del neo-liberismo imperante, dall' "unilateralismo" dell'amministrazione USA al "fiscal compact" della UE? Sì, ma anche le altre scuole economiche commettono lo stesso errore. L'attuale crisi del capitalismo è una crisi di sovrapproduzione, il cui carattere quantitativo, dovuto all'innovazione tecnologica nel mercato globalizzato, rende insuperabile la contraddizione tra l'aumento dell'offerta e la capacità del mercato di assorbire la domanda: quale colossale redistribuzione del reddito sarebbe necessaria per adeguare la "spendibilità" all'offerta? Né la deterrenza nucleare consente, come nelle due analoghe grandi crisi precedenti, il "ricorso" alla guerra mondiale. Che fare? La sostanziale sordità dell'Economia alla questione ambientale stimola gli autori, da un lato a proporre gli elementi teorici per un "ciclo" economico che coniughi variabili economiche ed ecologiche in un modello di "stato stazionario"; dall'altro a vedere la stessa crisi ecologica come una straordinaria opportunità per cambiare da subito il modello verso un'economia sostenibile, attraverso la rivoluzione energetica, la green economy e il terzo mercato. ; In Part I the ecological crisis has been highlighted, mainly the climate instability that will last for next decades; in Part II are given the reasons why to modify, and in which manner, the current development model. In the last forty years the crisis of environment has never become a variable to be considered in programming economic policies. Sin of the dominant neo-liberalism, from the "unilateralism" of the US administration up to the "fiscal compact" by EU? Sure, but also the other economic schools meet the same error. The present crisis of capitalism is an overproduction crisis, whose peculiar quantitative character, due to the technological innovation in the globalized market, makes insuperable the contradiction between the increment of the offer and the capability of the market of absorbing the demand: which gigantic redistribution of income should be done in order that the "spendability" can match the offer? Neither is possible, like in the two previous great crises, the "recourse" to a world war as a solution of the problem; the nuclear deterrence denies it. What to do? The essential deafness of Economy to the environmental issue pushes the authors, on one hand, to propose some theoretical elements for an economic cycle that conjugate ecological variables to economic ones in a "stationary state" model; on the other hand, to look at the ecological crisis as an extraordinary chance for changing, from now, the model of development towards a sustainable economy, by means of the "energy revolution", the green economy and the "third market".
The present global situation recalls us the two walls in which the Red Sea had split to allow that Pharaoh follow the people beloved by God. On one wall stays the economic crisis, that is tout court the capitalist crisis, on the other wall there is the predicament of environment. Then, it is reasonable to wonder if the walls will tumble down with severe damages to all the characters, this time, of this representation; unless a "modest proposal", of the kind that we will try to formulate in this paper, be intensively pursued. Several of the themes here gathered have already been object of reflection in some previous works. In this paper we collect and enrich those ideas, and put a special attention to the so called economic "cycle" and a stationary ecological-economic model in a sustainability scenario. Some years ago, the financial "bubble", burst with its destructive and lasting economic and social consequences, the bloody geopolitics of oil of the last decades, one sixth of the humankind under the threshold of surviving, the plunder of the resources of the Earth – from the rare ores up to the great pluvial forests –, the general environment crisis, dramatic for the climate change, exemplified in an also too much persuasive way that capitalist democracies as well as totalitarian States, those which have chosen the free market economy, were not able to face the two crises of our title.INGLESE
