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This chapter begins with the idea that at the most general level, the goal of economic policy is to maximize long-term societal well-being in an equitable and sustainable manner. It addresses in detail the meaning and relevance of the goals of economic policy that are often put forward — from enhancing economic security and reducing unemployment, to reducing inflation, enhancing growth, and maintaining external balance. It also examines the link between stability and growth, and between short-term growth and sustainable growth. More specifically, the chapter critiques the narrow focus of the Washington consensus on price stability and emphasizes that economists should, instead, focus on long-term sustainable growth. The chapter concludes by highlighting the broader social consequences that choosing alternative economic policies may have and by emphasizing that all economic policies have trade-offs.

This chapter examines the policy of widespread engagement adopted by the two sides in the post‐Cold War era. It shows that since the mid‐1990s, the EU and its member states have adopted a firm policy of engagement with China, while Chinese leaders would come to prioritize the enhancement of relations with Europe. A new discourse on economic security emerged in both Europe and China at the beginning of the 1990s would provide the intellectual underpinning for the development of EU—China relations. This chapter explains how this securitization discourse would tie the protection of the EU's economic security and socio‐economic welfare position with China's steady and sustainable development. At the same time, it is explained how the emergence of new notions of economic security would lead Chinese policy makers to make a linkage between the enhancement of economic and technological relations with Europe and China's modernization and comprehensive national power.

Offers a green alternative to neoclassical economics based on ecological considerations as well as eco-feminist, ecological economics, and heterodox economic insights. Picking up on the discussion of economic growth in the previous chapter this chapter critically interrogates it, following John McMurtry, as denoting ‘the cancer stage of capitalism’. This chapter outlines and defends an alternative to economic growth—namely ‘economic security’ in which quality of life and well-being (especially free time) become central objectives of macroeconomic policy and the way we think about a sustainable economy. Key to this notion of economic security (which is suggested as appropriate only for ‘over-developed’ economies in the minority world) is the need to reduce socio-economic inequality. Other features of this green political economic alternative to the neoclassical orthodoxy include the centrality of principles such as sufficiency and moderation over efficiency and maximization, here linking back to the permaculture-inspired idea of resilience being a function of ‘slack’ and in-built redundancy, i.e. deliberative deviations from the norm of efficiency.

This chapter explores some of the conceptual, political and historical links between social and national security. Social security and national security are not often talked about together, despite the recent surge of interest in widening the security agenda. The chapter connects the emergence of ‘national security’ following WWII back to the emergence of ‘social security’ in the 1930s. It links social security and national security via the notion of ‘economic security’, and suggests that these historical links reveal the extent to which ‘security’ operates as a mechanism of liberal order building.

In the late 1930s, New Dealers, industrial unionists, and business groups led by the National Association of Manufacturers seized on the language of Americanism and launched public efforts to define the nation in ways that furthered their own political and social agendas. All addressed Americans’ desire to be free of want, and all attempted to connect economic and political concerns. Beyond that, however, they framed issues in profoundly different ways. President Roosevelt, CIO leaders, and others in the New Deal coalition stressed the majoritarian overtones of the word “democracy,” and called for an activist government to ensure Americans’ economic security. Industrialists and their allies, by contrast, emphasized individual rights and the libertarian dimensions of American “freedom.” The ensuing battle—pitting “democracy” against “freedom,” mutualism against individualism, and a progressive ethos against interclass unity—presaged contests that would continue into the postwar era.

The existence of a national security escape clause in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) has given rise in investment arbitration to a number of concerns in terms of its scope, process of review, and interpretation. It is settled now that the provision of ‘national security’ now encompasses ‘severe economic crises’. This chapter considers three general points from a development perspective, namely: the objective review of the economic emergency security defence in BITs; the interpretative approach to the economic emergency security defence in BITs; the processes involved in the interpretation of the economic emergency security defence in BITs.

This chapter's aim is to determine how best to measure economic well-being in order to understand better the relationship between economic well-being and health. It argues that an index of a society's economic well-being should include four components: current effective per capita consumption flows, net societal accumulation of stocks of productive resources, income distribution, and economic security. The chapter develops such an index for selected OECD countries and compares trends in economic well-being according to this index to trends in GDP per capita—the most commonly used measure of economic well-being. It concludes with a discussion of why the connection between health and economic well-being might be stronger than the relationship between health and GDP per capita.

This chapter looks at private letters and other unpublished sources about defendants other than the Keyserlings to recapture the subjective experience of being investigated, not as an exercise in voyeurism but to explain why the effects were so profound. The experience of being under loyalty investigation produced a wide range of responses from individuals and had many long-lasting effects—on their economic security, mental and physical health, personal relationships, and civic participation. Many loyalty defendants preferred to remain silent about these humiliating experiences, but examining them is necessary to establish the context in which these people made difficult strategic and ethical decisions about how best to protect themselves.

This chapter examines the implications of global transformations on family income, the ability of children and parents to exit poverty, and the degree of equality between girls and boys, men and women. At times, the goal of having both men and women in the family in the formal labor force was to increase economic security. At other times, the goal was to increase gender equality. As parents have moved from trading their labor in kind to being paid in cash, from controlling their own hours to answering to an employer, from working with their children right by their sides to working far from home, what has happened to their economic security? The chapter also examines whether parents are able to succeed in formal and informal workplaces, in cities and towns transformed by the global economy, at the same time as rearing their children.

This concluding chapter argues that privacy and security have to take primacy as aspirational values as networks shift from digital only to directly embedded in the physical world. It calls for various stakeholders to urgently take serious cyber-physical policy choices and collectively elevate cybersecurity as a generational imperative necessary for human security, economic security, and national security. For example, a long-standing Internet policy tradition, while varying by region, is immunity from liability for information intermediaries. What counts as an intermediary in cyber-physical architectures and how should risk, accountability, and liability be reconceptualized in the high-risk era? Ultimately, the chapter contends that policy attention needs to shift from digital content to digital infrastructure.

Chapter Three discusses the more than 300,000 braceros —Mexican men on temporary labor contracts—who worked the Arkansas Delta’s cotton fields between 1948 and 1964. In some years, these braceros comprised more than a third of all the Arkansas Delta’s cotton laborers. Braceros seldom received the wages and working conditions guaranteed in their contracts, and initially were excluded from whites-only establishments. But during the decade following their arrival, they successfully resisted Jim Crow-style exclusion through appeals to the Mexican government. The victory was ambiguous, and gave way to a new, more fluid separation in which Mexicans insisted on access to white public space but in practice preferred to socialize with African Americans. And, the first-class citizenship that Mexicans demanded with an end to their formal segregation never extended into the economic realm, where they fought for, but failed to win, broad guarantees of economic security.

This chapter examines the relationship between economic security and the broader national security agenda in the United States. It begins by outlining some of the common features of economic policy and national security, focusing on how politicians balance the domestic regulation of economic risk with the external defense of the nation. It then considers the implications of fiscal constraints for elements of economic security such as health insurance and social security, and for the resources available for national security. The chapter also discusses the effect of social capital on national security, how the concept of state institutional capacity links national security to the management of economic risks, and how economic security affects the long-term viability of a nation-state. Finally, it assesses the implications of the relationship between economic security and national security for modern states and their citizens.

This chapter explores the gendered impacts of the economic crisis in order to examine how it has affected women’s economic security in North Korea. North Korean women experienced a series of profound changes in the post-socialist revolution era. During the state-building period, North Korea promulgated various laws, including the Law on Sex Equality, which emphasized equal rights in all spheres, aiming for the most progressive change in the traditional position of women. Despite the legal provisions and institutional mechanisms for improving women’s lot in the economy, however, North Korean women never achieved a level of economic security equal to that of men. Women continued to receive lower wages than men and remained concentrated in occupations with low wage levels and high wage differences between men and women.

On the forefront of global economic relations since the 17th century, Virginia and the South were at the center of American global integration in the 1990s. This is the main story of the region in the fading years of the 20th century, and is likewise that time frame's dominant story for the whole American experience. Virginians, like most average Americans, were drawn into the flow of economic changes that fundamentally altered their sense of possibility and eroded the moderate economic security they had achieved in the post-war era. Market ascendancy and the subsequent decline of the social contract decisively influenced their hopes for the future.

This chapter focuses on contemporary social movements in Europe and Latin America that are taking shape as forms of action that aim not only at defending some achievements of ‘reformed capitalism’ but also at exploring the possibility of forms of social and economic organisation that go beyond purely capitalist logics. More specifically, it examines the efforts of these movements as they try to regain control over production and distribution. The chapter first considers the meaning of the post-World War II ‘social deal’ as well as the actors, historical trajectories and societal self-understandings that contributed to its emergence. It then explains why, both in Europe and North America and in Latin America, the guarantee of degrees of socio-economic security went hand in hand with a decrease of collective economic sovereignty. It also analyses the effects of the neo-liberal turn on the working populations' socio-economic security and on the social deal.