Categories
economics Research

The Science of Economics? What Works, and How Much…

We do seem to be talking more about economics – what it should do and look like. But there is still a whiff of revolution about calls for the discipline to be more evidence-based and, well, scientific. This article, by Philip Aldrick in the Times yesterday, argues for more careful scientific approaches, and this is worth noting. Of course, in the natural sciences, this would be taken as read. Drugs need to be extensively trialled before they are sold and used to treat disease in humans. But for some reason, in the social sciences, theory and ideology have the ability to shape policy just as much as evidence.

Aldrick’s piece cites two studies launched by Nesta, a UK Innovation think tank, roughly seven years ago. The first was a retrospective review of the effectiveness of business clusters; do small businesses do better when they are closely located and can share location and labour advantages? The second was a randomised controlled trial on whether tax relief for small creative companies worked. The results of the studies were not their most important findings however.

For the sake of finishing a story, the first study proved relatively inconclusive, and could not find any clear correlation between clusters and growth. The second study found that tax and financial incentives were helpful in the short term for small creative businesses, but after 12 months any advantage had faded.

So, what was the main impact? The reason these two studies are remarkable are for their illustration of research methods. While retrospective reviews – generally the majority of most empirical work in the social sciences – can only look for correlation, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) can go deeper, further, and can identify causative factors. In other words, we can target specific factors and identify why things happen. This is important because it means we can be more scientific about what works, how it works, and why. And this means we can begin to base policy on evidence rather than theory. RCTs also offer a way of measuring the extent of policy impacts. By having a test group and a control group, we can gauge the extent to which a policy really makes a difference. And that means we can evaluate whether a policy is financially and economically viable. So, RCTs offer a way of seeing not only what works, but how much.

Why is this news? Similar to other recent posts on here, there is increasing discussion of economics and how the discipline can be improved in the mainstream media. Aldrick’s argument is that economics – both the research and the formulation of policy – can and should be more scientific in its approach. And to this end he calls for more RCTs and longer term studies testing causation before policy is enacted. The government has launched the Business Basics Fund with Nesta to carry out trials investigating, among other things, productivity. UK productivity lags behind that of other countries, attributed generally to poor management practices. But how can management practices be altered to improve productivity?

Questions like this lend themselves readily to RCTs where different techniques can be trialled in comparison with a control group. Nevertheless, there are questions of macroeconomics that are not suitable for trials. We cannot test interest rates or tariffs, for example, against control groups. And this remains a problem for the larger questions tackled in macroeconomics, where theory remains a significant influencer of policy.

Calls for greater use of careful empirical data in shaping economic, legal and social science policy is not new though. Economic sociology, economic sociology of law, and sociolegal approaches have long stressed the need for analysis and understanding to be based firmly in the real world, on real data, and about real people. Increasing access to big data and AI could enhance this. As Aldrick states, “Economics is a social science. Why not make it more scientific?”

Categories
economics Free market Infrastructure Research

Waiting on the market?

The UK government has finally declared a climate emergency. This is great news of course, but what does it really mean in practice? And what is this doing on a blog about law and economics?

The government in the UK has subsidised the purchase of new electric and low emission vehicles in a a bid to support and stimulate the market. But at the end of 2018, the government reduced the available subsidy rates, the makes and models of cars that were eligible, and capped the number of vehicles that could be purchased under the scheme. It’s really no surprise then that the rate at which electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles have been sweeping the market has fallen since the subsidy reduction. Indeed, sales of plug-in hybrid cars fell by one third in the period to April 2019. This is, of course, against the backdrop of a clean air crisis, a backlash against Diesel engines and emissions scandals, and the Extinction Rebellion protests calling for every tighter emissions limits.

So, it would make sense for the government to support the clean(er) transport industry, including electric and low emission vehicles. More to the point, the industry seems to be crying out for a level of oversight, investment, and general co-ordination. While some companies have started to set up charging networks across the UK, these are often not cross-compatible, resulting in up to 15 different types of charging points that drivers of electric cars have to navigate. What’s more, charging points tend to congregate in wealthier areas of the country, while residents in poorer areas struggle to find a single charging point. On top of this, most experts agree that if the electric car revolution is to take off, fast charging – or the ability to charge a car to 80% in 30 minutes – is essential for the success and sustainability of the network. The problem is that the national grid in the UK is simply unable to support the required wattage, or provide the increased levels of electricity required. We would, literally, face a melt down. The answer is a massive investment and overhaul of the underlying infrastructure.

So here we turn to economics. Once again, the problem is not technology. We have the knowledge, the tech, and the skills to make the green revolution happen. It comes down to economics.

The UK government has repeated its mantra that it is waiting for “the market” to step in and develop the charging networks for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, “the market” currently complains that there is insufficient basic infrastructure available for them to build on. This is not a new dilemma, and as Mariana Mazzucato has documented, a great deal of the tech that has driven progress over the last half century has developed out of state-funded R&D. Steve Jobs did not “invent” GPS or the touch screen; he took the technology and packaged it up in a shiny box.

It feels too obvious to state that a network of charging points for electric vehicles across the UK needs to be integrated and cross-compatible. It also feels obvious to state that this network needs to be connected to a grid that has the capacity to charge the nation’s cars, if we actually want people to move to cleaner, greener, options. It also feels like common sense to point out that this level of integration, planning, and investment needs to come from the state, as the only entity with sufficient oversight, patience, and funding. Or, at very least, it needs to come from “the market” working closely with the state to achieve clearly set targets that can establish a nationwide network that avoids duplication and achieves integration for the greatest value and usability.

The markets for broadband and mobile phone coverage are instructive here. There are still areas in rural Somerset in 2019 that have no mobile phone coverage. Understandably, where the market is left to decide where to invest, it will do so where the returns are greatest, and this is in towns and more densely populated areas. Given the basic underlying premises of business and shareholder value maximisation, this is to be expected.

The problem arises when ideology and a die hard belief in neoliberalism takes hold and denies the valuable role that state involvement can play. Writing in 1944, Karl Polanyi emphasised the utopian nature of the ideological divide between state and market, and criticised the belief that the free market was entirely self-regulating. He pointed out that both market and state relied on the other, and that some degree of state oversight and involvement was necessary if society was to avoid the worst effects of the free market. To use the example of the telecommunications failures, the government can step in at this point and regulate the operation of the market to ensure that everyone has access to broadband, whether they live in London or rural Somerset, and regardless of the cost to the company bidding for the contract.

At the same time, the market benefits from state involvement, and the examples of infrastructure such as an enhanced national grid, green power and a network of clean vehicle charging points on which the green transport industry can flourish is an archetypal example of where the close collaboration between the two spheres has never been needed more.

Categories
economics Research Visualising ESL

Visualising interactions with Procreate

I’ve been experimenting with Procreate on the iPad, which is an amazing app for drawing digitally. Seriously – check it out.

I’m using an iPad Air 3 with first generation Apple Pencil, which is great for digital calligraphy as well as designing and drawing complex interactions, networks, and social phenomena in general. The app also exports GIFs and MP4s as well as the standard visual media. I’m really excited to share my progress here with digital visualisations of economic and legal phenomena, and tackling questions like “how can we think about economics differently”?

Here’s an example: In the following diagram, each red dot is an actor – you or me. We interact with lots of different people every day, and these interactions are the black lines between each red dot. Over time, these interactions build up in complex patterns. This diagram is one way of visualising the way that patterns of interactions can develop in complexity, so that when we zoom out, we begin to see larger patterns.

What happens if we imagine that these black lines represent the economic aspects of interactions? What can we say about macroeconomics? And can this be scaled up further?

Visualising interaction patterns
Visualising complex interaction patterns
Categories
economics Gig economy

Between the Gigs and the Reels: novel approaches to understanding the gig economy

The rise and rise of companies like Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, UpWork, JustEat and Deliveroo has been termed the “gig economy”. Even the term itself can be wince-inducing to labour lawyers who are uncomfortable with the implications of the term “gig”. But there are broader issues, and a lot of ink has already been devoted to the economic and regulatory issues that arise as a result of this new form of working. At its heart, the issues tend to arise initially from the introduction of technology into the labour market that enables informal work. This has allowed the regulatory and statutory protections that workers have campaigned and fought for over the past two centuries to be summarily side-stepped. Sure, there are benefits, and it can present opportunities for people to get out of the house and supplement their income. But the problem is when this form of working begins to challenge the main, or more formal, economy.

The gig economy really took off in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the unemployment wave that followed, and is rooted in the informal sector which lacks government oversight, creating dilemmas about regulation and worker protections. Not that this is a completely new issue. The matter of informal sector work with a lack of recognition and worker protections and rights is a problem that women have been facing since labour rights came onto the scene. Women’s work – work generally done in the home – has yet to receive the same recognition as work done in the formal sector. Informal sector work includes not only a lack of pay, but also rights, holidays, sickness, insurance and so on. This analogy tends to be underplayed in the public debate about gig economy pros and cons. As Catherine Powell notes, the gig economy is business as usual for women. What’s new here is that the advent of technology and the self-employment or contractor-status of (usually) men has been sold to us as the epitome of the free market “in which app-driven services are seen as an example of unfettered market activity that is free of the intrusive, cumbersome hand of government regulation”.

At the same time, drivers working for Uber are contractors rather than employees, and therefore do not have access to the regulatory protections that employees do, like holiday pay, sick pay, pensions, national insurance contributions, and so on, although there are legal and regulatory challenges underway. In her recent book, “Hustle and Gig”, Alexandrea Ravenelle also argues that society is the poorer for this labour market model, as reduced tax incomes and reduced provision of social security nets by employers as well as the state have wider detriments throughout society.

In a different approach to most of the literature on the gig economy, economist and Stanford Professor Paul Oyer signed up with Uber and worked as a driver for them to understand the gig economy from the inside. This article links to an interview with him about his research and findings.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll be expecting a comment here about economic methodology and how exciting it is to have an economist taking a sociological, quasi-ethnographic approach to understanding how a market works. Oyer notes that he took care not to tell his Uber customers that he was an undercover economist, and as he was employed by Stanford, his Uber wages were donated to charity. Nevertheless, his observations are valuable for their insight into the inner workings of companies leading and shaping the gig economy, like Uber. One observation that stands out here is the lack of social interaction among gig economy workers. If you work in an office, you see the same people every day, and a sense of community can develop. But working as a contractor in a car or on a bike can mean that you are isolated and solitary, and the loneliness of this was highlighted by Oyer’s undercover work; a sociological commentary on an economic phenomenon.

There are few insider accounts in general, and little literature on the importance of algorithms that form the backbone of the company like Uber. These are being developed by economists brought in by the firms, and have unpleasant, although perhaps unsurprising, side effects. The algorithms tend to channel higher paying work to men who are prepared to work at short notice, during “surges” in demand where prices are higher, and at periods of scarcity. Thus, male Uber drivers earn on average 7% more than female drivers. Male drivers are also more likely to “game” the system, learning how to be strategic in their pick ups and how to cancel less profitable journeys without incurring a penalty, provoking angry discussions like this online. Women are less likely to engage is this less-than-honest behaviour, putting their wages further behind.

Categories
Uncategorized

A call to arms? Or just another wave of frustration with the status quo?

In the years following the 1929 crash, economists responded with a flurry of new and innovative ideas to better understand the bigger questions of how the economy works. Keynesianism, over the decades, came to be shaped more by the political mores of the time than any true adherence to what Keynes actually wrote, while Hayek’s free market theories present questions that we are still grappling with.

There have been other flurries of activity calling for “better economics” over the decades, and the 2008 financial crisis sparked another wave of calls for a deeper and more accurate understanding of what is actually going on. Clearly, while microeconomics might have given us the answers to some questions, macroeconomics has a way to go in understanding how the world works. But really, since 2008, what has actually changed?

“Very little” appears to be the general answer to this. There are several reasons here. In academia, the way your research is assessed and the way that promotions are awarded tends to come down to publications that support, rather than challenge, the mainstream (more on this later). In business, monopolies are unlikely to campaign for better antitrust regulation and enforcement. And we have a generation of politicians who have been taught (indoctrinated in) orthodox, mainstream economics and have been told that this is the only way to do economics and that it works. But there are calls for diversity, plurality and different approaches appearing.

I thought it might be helpful to set out some of the institutes and organisations that have appeared since the financial crisis calling for a rethink of economics. In the UK, Promoting Economic Pluralism (PEP) aims to change the way economics is taught in universities, and sets out an ambitious accreditation for pluralist economics teaching that it aims to have up and running by 2020. The blog for the group can be accessed here, and charts some interesting developments, seminars, and movements that have the common purpose of changing the way we do economics.

Other research programmes include “Rethinking Macroeconomics” at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) in London, which has secured ESRC funding for a project looking at how we could do macroeconomics better.

In the US, the Institute for New Economic Thought sets out to challenge the dominance of mainstream economics by funding research, engaging in public dialogue and driving forwards a new way of thinking about economics. Their goals are listed on this page.

Both institutes are engaged in highlighting and tackling the crisis of conformity in economics – in the way it is taught, the way it is practiced, and the way it is thought about in academia. The conformity within academic thought is more of an institutional problem, as this touches on publication, promotion, and professionalism within academia.

The problem here is that to progress as an academic you have to publish, preferably in the “top” or most prestigious journals. Obviously, if you’re trying to do something innovative or outside of the mainstream box, or even worse trying to tear down the existing box and build a new one, it is unlikely the more prestigious mainstream journals will accept your paper for publication. They have strict criteria for what they accept, and usually this means conforming to mainstream standards and not challenging or undermining the entire field. The publication industry actually reinforces the mainstream way of doing things, and in economics, that means reinforcing methodologies and frames that led us to the financial crisis.

As I mentioned in the previous post, there is a lot to be said here for greater education. Not just in universities on macroeconomics 101 courses, but more generally and broadly. We need a much higher level of economic literacy across the board, so that society is able to engage with – and more importantly challenge – economic ideas, plans, models and conclusions. This needs to happen hand in hand with an expansion of economics methodologies and approaches, and an appreciation of economics as a social science that is about perfectly imperfect and irrational people.

We all need to hope that the voices currently calling for diversity and plurality are more successful this time than previous waves of soul searching have been.

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Uncategorized

Simon Evans Goes to Market

Yesterday evening saw the first episode in a new series of Simon Evans Goes to Market on BBC Radio 4. You can listen (again) to it here.

The programme was about the life and work of Adam Smith. Actually, it was more about his life than his work, and the vox pops asking what people actually knew about his work were somewhat disappointing in their lack of awareness (this was a radio 4 audience attending a broadcast on economics, remember). Similarly, the programme itself was light on content about his actual economics, although it was in the 6.30pm comedy slot, so maybe this was understandable.

Regardless though, having a programme about economics in prime time radio is to be applauded, and I can only wish that there were more opportunities like this to engage a wider audience about the huge role that economics theories have in shaping their lives, relationships, aspirations, and achievements. The next programme looks at the life and work of Karl Marx, and the following week is John Maynard Keynes, before a final programme wraps up what we have learned. Disappointingly, although perhaps unsurprisingly, Karl Polanyi doesn’t appear scheduled for discussion, although I suspect there are many listeners whose favourite economists will fail to make an appearance. Obviously, while the series is to be praised for existing at all, its scope and ambition do seem lacking, given the focus on only three economists.

Nevertheless, if the series succeeds in anything, it will be in making people realise that the free market is not inevitable, and that economic arguments are at their heart political. A choice, in other words. There has been a great drive recently to get people learning to code and acquire digital skills to be able to partake in the digital economy. But there remains a staggering level of both illiteracy and disinterest in economics and the economy, and I would suggest that economic illiteracy is perhaps a greater issue. Without some basic knowledge of economics, society is unable to challenge the claims that the free market is inevitable or self-regulating, neither of which are true, but both of which have become “received wisdom”. The result is the widespread belief that privatisation and the creation of markets is the ideal solution for the provision of goods and services, and anything else going.

Economic illiteracy is disastrous for any democratic society, as it places us in a position where we are unable to question the myths being propagated about the market, the economy, employment practices, economic relations, and the very foundations of society itself. Without knowledge of the basic theories (and their flaws), we are unable to see that economic arguments are just that – arguments based on political choice and preferences. In other words, opinions that can, and should be, challenged. So, more programmes like this please!

Categories
Research Uncategorized

Is “economics” society’s operating system?

Is economics society’s operating system?

Is economics now society’s default, or de facto, operating system? And what does this mean? I heard this mentioned in passing on the radio the other day in another context. But it struck me as a really useful and interesting analogy to the role of economics in society, and the values and goals that we subconsciously prioritise.

An operating system is system-wide software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and which provides common services for computer programmes. It operates as a base on which all other functions rely for resources and access – it sets the rules of the game. Similarly, we can see economics, in particular neoclassical economics, as performing a similar function within society, although widely unrecognised and largely subconsciously. It does this, as I suggest below, through setting the rules of the game as well as providing the vocabulary and grammar that we use to talk about the game.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s piece in the Times Higher Ed this morning, on the impact of competition and marketization in higher education, perfectly summed up some of the issues of economics-as-operating-system, but in the specific context of higher education.

Fitzpatrick writes that while friendly competition can be helpful, “when the competitiveness that fuels excellence and prestige becomes based in the logic of the market, universities lose sight of their true purpose”. In a detailed and thoughtful piece, she argues that excellence in academia and higher education has embodied the norms of the market, and competition between academics, between faculties, between institutions and between fields of research has become the main means of determining achievement, excellence, and promotion. The metrics that are used to determine success – publication in the right place, impact, and so on – are based on orthodox, or neoclassical economics and the assumptions, biases and norms contained therein.

Fitzpatrick asks what we could achieve instead if we moved from competition to collaboration within faculties and within higher education more generally. What could we achieve by articulating our goals and values and determining excellence in relation to the achievement of those goals and values rather than against one another?

Fitzpatrick’s argument relates to higher education, which is in a state of flux at the moment given the questions surrounding its funding and the role of higher education in society more broadly. The answer is, of course, not quite so simple, as to challenge or step outside of the mainstream competitive framework inherently makes oneself “uncompetitive”. Funding and prestige are therefore potentially sacrificed – a leap into the unknown that so far, only the University of Ghent has been prepared to take.

In other words, the system perpetuates and reproduces itself, while being almost impossible to step outside of. However, within the sphere of higher education, there is some level of awareness of the metrics, competition, and implications of this on career progression, wellbeing and industry more broadly, even if there is no clear or simple solution.

But the article raises broader issues that relate to my research, and the comment about economics – particularly neoclassical economics – functioning as a de facto operating system throughout society. The difference here is the general lack of awareness about the way that neoclassical economics shapes the way that society functions. Even within economics as a field of study and research, there is a generalised monoculture.

We can point to economics notions like competition and a belief in the free market, ways of measuring (GDP, for example), profit maximization, and so on, as having pervaded social consciousness and public discourse to such an extent that they guide and influence policy making even tacitly. By effectively fixing the rules of the game, and even the way we talk about the game before playing it by supplying the vocabulary and grammar, economics functions as a social operating system. And the sooner we are more aware of the impact of this, the sooner we can begin to challenge its effects.

Categories
Uncategorized

Group think, and the state of sociology

Five eminent sociologists recently reviewed the state of sociology for the Times Higher Ed. You can (and should) read the post here. It makes for interesting, if slightly depressing, reading. For those fond of the tl;dr approach, each of the five sociologists review their experiences of sociology teaching and research today, and recount the somewhat inferior position to which sociology has been resigned within the social sciences. This is for a variety of factors, but I want to dwell on two in this post; the diversity (or fragmentation) of the subject, and the unavoidable political accusations that are inevitably hurled at it (just see the comments on THE).

Fragmented sociology

Much in the same way as the social sciences have fragmented, drifted apart and become silos of endeavour over the past century, sociology has more recently succumbed to a similar fate. We have a sociology of sport, a sociology of arts and music, a sociology of x, y, and z that talk at, rather than to, each other. At the same time, we have economic sociology, legal sociology (or as it tends to be referred to in the UK, sociolegal studies), and then the discipline struggles to distance itself from anthropology and offer something different (apart from research into the present day and the present society).

But what does it really do? Why do we need it? And why is it fair to level the same accusations at sociology as we would at, say, a badly conducted physics experiment?

The political connection

There is always a political connection – politics is about social rules and beliefs, and sociology is about understanding these. They are two sides of the same coin. Look at the impact of Anthony Giddens’ “third way” in forging New Labour’s direction in the years after Blair’s election to power.

And this tends to be one of the main accusations thrown at sociology for why it should not be publicly funded in the same way that STEM subjects are – that we would be funding “socialists”, “Marxists”, and look where that experiment ended… (I paraphrase here). The comments in response to articles banging the drum for public funding of the social sciences generally have at least one reference to socialism.

But wasn’t the notion of the free market also derived from the social sciences (economics)? Hayek and Polanyi published in the same year (1944) but Hayek’s Road to Serfdom received much greater acclaim at the time than Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Arguably, 99% of us are the poorer for this, and still feeling the impact of this twist of fate. But the politically motivated accusations against public funding of the social sciences recur consistently, and in a way that does not seem to apply to capitalism, neoliberalism or the rise and rise of neoclassical economics. These seem to be treated as the natural order of things these days, backed up by the received wisdom of neoclassical economics and the laws of social interaction it has “discovered”. Any investigation into performativity will tell you differently.

Can we study societies? No? Then why bother?

What is the point then? The point is that we need to shout louder about what sociology – and the social sciences more broadly – can do for society. About what it already has done. And about what we stand to lose without publicly funded research into the social sciences, both to understand society and to shape the type of society that we (collectively) aspire to. Do we value the rule of law? Do we value independence of the judiciary? Parliamentary supremacy? The free market? Labour regulation? Because these all started out as “good ideas” that someone had. You may not agree with all of these, but if we had never had “the social sciences”, chances are we would not even have “the State” now. We would still be living in a Hobbesian state of nature.

The response to this is that we have all these “good ideas” and solid institutions that we value now, so why continue funding investigations into how society works? This is a little like Francis Fukuyama’s end of history argument, that has been roundly debunked, notably by John Gray’s argument that history is cyclical. The things that we value need to be protected, otherwise they begin to disappear. And that means shouting loudly about what they have done for us, especially in the face of nationalistic, populist sentiment. Politics in the United States has shown that, and the neoliberal drive to set markets free and dial back the state in the UK has seen inequality rise and the safety net of the welfare state feel less secure than ever.

Why publicly funded?

Michael Burawoy’s chapter about the future of the university as a centre of knowledge production in an age of marketization and regulation makes some interesting points about the funding of research. Marc Spooner has also written an interesting post on the drive to publish and the perverse incentives now in place in higher education and research. Taken together, these posts provide an overview of the direction the sector is moving in, and the question that we keep coming back to is “for whom”? Who is paying for the research? Who is paying for the publications? And does this matter?

The Coburn Amendment in the US has seen a scaling back of public funding for social research into anything that does not directly apply to the national economy or the national defense. In Australia, the “national interest” test has prompted fears that curiosity-driven research will be pushed out altogether. In both Australia and the UK, there are ever higher demands for researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work and its benefit to society. The (somewhat flawed) riposte that is habitually trotted out here is Newton’s discovery of gravity; what is the impact of this? How does it benefit society? Newton would have failed under the current research excellence framework, and would probably not have convinced a funding body – let alone a Research Council – to pay him to study this.

The marketization and commercialization of the entire HE sector raises a number of questions that should probably be saved for another post. The point is that the application of the free market to the production of knowledge about society and for the good of society will produce skewed results. Yes, industry can and does fund social research – into how to market products and services more effectively, how to sell more, and how to understand consumer behaviour. Industry is unlikely to be interested in funding research into the big issues mentioned above – the big issues central to society. Why would they? These are things that we are mostly unaware of but impacted by every day. These institutions, beliefs and policies shape our interactions, our ambitions, and the options available to us in almost every aspect of our lives. The welfare state actively funds the companies to pay lower wages and remove labour rights through the very provision of the welfare state. The production of social knowledge is therefore, I suggest, a public good that should be publicly funded.

Categories
Development Research World Bank

World Development Reports (and another blog post)

(Originally posted 5th October 2016 on my previous site):

These are annual Reports published by the World Bank into development triumphs and lessons. Each World Development Report (WDR) usually has a focus, and the 2017 WDR’s title is “Law and Governance”. Being just a little excited about this, I wrote a blog post that was published on the SLSA website, exploring the extent to which the World Bank was likely to open itself up to different approaches. You can read it here.

Overall, I’m not holding my breath for a radical realignment of World Bank policy, and even though the rewards could be immeasurable, I’m certainly not holding out for Economic Sociology of Law-based approaches to feature. But even just considering the role of law and governance in enabling (or hindering) development is a step forward. The World Bank is beginning to recognize that there is more to life than just economic equations.

There has also been a move towards experimentalism in development, which builds on behavioural economics and other slight expansions in policy over the past few years. While this is to be welcomed, there is a long way to go.

Categories
PhD Research Thesis

My original research plan (oh, how things have changed)!

I’m in the process of moving everything over from my old site to this shiny new one, and wanted to bring some of the content with me. This (included below in this post) is one of the original pages I wrote for the old site, back in 2012 or so, when I was just starting out with the PhD. Reading back on it now is a little bit like looking back over a long journey and realizing just how far you’ve come. The final draft that I’m about to submit is so different to what I originally wrote!

Of course, this is all completely normal and just part of the process of doing a PhD. But there are a couple of other things that have leaped out at me too, rereading over the abstract. There’s so much “jargon”! There are entire sentences below that make me wince. It’s not that I don’t understand the terms – I’m completely comfortable relating to and with the ideas. But really, my supervisor and I are the only two people in the building who understand what I’m talking about, then what is the point?

This has become quite a significant part of the drafting process as time has gone on, and I have another blog post lined up about this. But in the meantime, the only way research is going to have impact in the real world is if people in the real world can understand what you’re saying. And for this to happen, the research has to be accessible and in plain English (as well as interesting, engaging, and relevant, of course).

In the meantime, here is what I was embarking on some seven years ago…

Recent World Bank policy documents are notable for hinting at a retreat from doctrinaire reliance on “investment climate” discourse frameworks. Although the concept of an “ideal paradigm” still informs much of the World Bank’s lending and consulting praxis, there has been a reappraisal of the empirical certainties underlying many assumptions. While a quantitative, leximetric approach to law and governance continues to define World Bank ideology, assertions of causation between these and economic development are increasingly being questioned.

By taking a socio-legal approach to an investigation of the interaction between law and the economy, this research offers a new approach. Taking law as a socially constructed phenomenon existing as perceived by the actors in their interactions both with each other (economically-oriented actions and interactions) (see the work of Roger Cotterrell) and with the local laws (operating on a range of scales from the micro, macro, meta and meso levels (see the work of Sabine Frerichs and Amanda Perry-Kessaris), this approach questions both current terminology as being overly laced with economic theory, and the frameworks that deny the normative bias of much of the current discourse. The research responds to calls for careful empirical socio-legal studies by Cotterrell and Swedberg, amongst others, by conducting grounded-theory informed ethnography in Sri Lanka, interviewing foreign investors about their interactions with the legal system prior to, and during the investment process. The framing of law in a socio-legal paradigm thus facilitates the use of the results not only to engage with questions of correlation between the legal environment in Sri Lanka and the actions of foreign investors, but also with causation; understanding clearly the motivations and perceptions of the investors themselves.

The results will enable clarification of the interaction between law and the economy in Sri Lanka, as well as the use, abuse and avoidance characteristic of the interaction between foreign investors and local laws. It is then possible to ask whether legal and governmental reform lending conditionalities recommended by the World Bank and other International Financial Organizations (IFOs) were a factor in the attraction of foreign investment to the country, and to what extent this might have been the case. The results will allow for an appraisal of current IFO policies, as well as the extent to which Sri Lanka should tailor its legal system to the requirements of foreign investors, potentially at the expense of other actors in the domestic legal and economic systems. Moreover, a careful selection of interviewees should allow a comparison between attitudes and approaches towards the importance of formal law and legal systems in an investment situation, both along nationality and institutional sectoral axes. This should thereby facilitate closer appraisal of the legal reform process with respect to more accurate tailoring of the reforms depending on the desired outcome. This should also work to minimise unintended, and undesirable, side effects of reforms on local businesses and entrepreneurs, while facilitating investment according to policy objectives.