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Unintended Austerity?

Financialization of the state and the harmonization of European public sector accounts

Aug 06, 2019

Hello AltAusterity readers! Apologies for the late content posting; we experienced some technical difficulties this week. This week we bring you a presentation by Sebastian Botzem from Free University of Berlin that he presented at our last conference in Berlin. Sebastian's talk goes over five main points: principles of accounting, financialization of the firm, financialization of the state, European public sector accounting with examples provides, and he concluded with a section on financialization and austerity.

The main argument is that European accounting rules become tools of austerity budgeting impacting resource allocation and altering accountability relations. Sebastian asks us to question who the addressees of financial information are, and what the effects of introducing new standards are?   

If you'd like to hear more about this great piece, you can find the presentation on our Research Page under 'Spending, Reform, & Marketization". Also, be sure to stay tuned in the coming weeks when we post Sebastian's full paper.

To see more from Sebastian, you can check out his faculty page, here: https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/polwiss/forschung/oekonomie/ipoe/mitarbeiter/botzem/index.html

We'll post new content every Tuesday morning and our AltAusterity Digest Friday mornings. To keep up with our work, you can subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter @AltAusterity and join the #altausterity conversation!