Christian Suter

Coping with Global Debt Crises: Debt Settlements, 1820 to 1986

The settlement of the external debt of insolvent sovereign borrowers has become one of the most important issues in relations between the north and south since the outbreak of the global debt crisis in the early 1980 s. For the past eight years representatives of governments and international organizations, bankers, and scientists have suggested several proposals and plans to solve the present debt crisis. The most prominent schemes in this respect are the Baker Plan of 1985, which suggested massive new credits for the most highly indebted developing countries, and the recently adopted Brady Plan, which proposes partial debt discounts and reductions in interest rates. Both of these debt settlement proposals were initiated by the United States and are supported by the other principal creditor countries. However, despite the ten years of crisis management, world leaders have not yet agreed upon a longterm solution to the current debt problems. In the history of the capitalist world economy, the current problems of coping with a global debt crisis do not represent a unique event. Rather, recent empirical studies demonstrate that sovereign borrowers have experienced many instances of debt-servicing difficulties during the past 150 years (Eichengreen and Portes 1986; White 1986; Eichengreen and Lindert 1989; Marichal 1989; Suter 1989).

Relative Deprivation and Well-being: Switzerland in a Comparative Perspective

Using data from a European welfare survey this contribution examines the actual Swiss standard of living, the degree and distribution of relative deprivation (the lack of socially perceived necessities) and their consequences for subjective well-being within a European context Although Switzerland has maintained its high level of standard of living, its low level of relative deprivation and its high level of subjective well-being, the differences between Switzerland and the other European countries have become less pronounced. Despite disparities concerning the actual standard of living and a corresponding east-west gradient there is a large consensus among the examined four countries concerning the minimum standard of living regarded as absolutely necessary for a decent life. In all countries relative deprivation negatively impacts on individual well-being whereas societal well-being that concerns the broader social environments of the individuals remains largely unaffected by deprivation, income and other inequality measures.

Lange Wellen im Weltsystem

Dieser Beitrag arbeitet die theoretische und empirische Literatur uber lange Wellen im Weltsystem auf, gibt dadurch einen Einblick in den gegenwartigen Stand der Forschung zu Kondratieff- und Hegemoniezyklen und weist auf die Bedeutung dieser Forschung fur Theorien der internationalen Beziehungen hin. Es werden empirische Befunde zur Frage der Existenz von Kondratieffzyklen diskutiert und die verschiedenen in der Literatur vorherrschenden okonomischen, politologischen und soziokulturellen Theorieansatze eingehend dargestellt. Die Relevanz zyklischer Prozesse fur Theorien der internationalen Beziehungen ergibt sich aus der wechselseitigen Beeinflussung der wirtschaftlichen und politischen Spharen, sowohl auf innergesellschaftlicher wie zwischenstaatlicher Ebene. Lange Wellen in okonomischen, politischen und soziokulturellen Bereichen konnen dabei als Teil eines umfassenden Zyklus von Aufbau und Zerfall von Ordnung verstanden werden.

Household Role in Coping with Precarious Work. Evidence from Qualitative Research in Urban Romania and Switzerland

Abstract This paper presents the results of a qualitative comparative study that looked at the meaning of ‘precarious work’ in households situated in the position of ‘precarious prosperity’ in Switzerland and Romania in 2013. The aim of this research is to explore the experiences of individuals with precarious work and to embed them into their household and national structural contexts. Employment patterns in the two countries are similar in terms of uncertainty and instability, yet vary in many other aspects. While in Romania insecurity is due mainly to the very low incomes, in Switzerland it stems from nonstandard contracts. The research shows that for households of precarious prosperity, precarious work is both a strategy to cope with uncertainty and instability and a circumstance leading to precariousness. The analysis explores qualitatively the meaning that individuals living in households of precarious prosperity attribute to their employment situation as contextualized by the interplay between household and individual situation.

Do Opposites Attract? Educational Assortative Mating and Dynamics of Wage Homogamy in Switzerland, 1992–2014

Abstract This paper addresses homogamy and assortative mating in Switzerland. The empirical analysis monitors trends for education and hourly wages using the Swiss Labour Force Survey and the Swiss Household Panel. The analysis disentangles the effects of educational expansion from mating patterns and incorporates not only couples, but also singles. Results show an increasing level of assortative mating both for education and for wages. For wage homogamy, selection is more important than adaptation.

Explaining the Decline in Subjective Well-Being Over Time in Panel Data

Switzerland reached the top five countries which have the highest rate of subjective well-being (SWB), which converges with the economic prosperity and high quality of life in this country. Based on transversal data (European Social Survey), SWB measured through a global question remained globally constant over the last decades. However, SWB declined between 2000 and 2015 when measured with longitudinal data (Swiss Household Panel, SHP). In this context, the aim of this contribution is to examine to what extent the decline in SWB in longitudinal data is a robust result showing an actual decrease or reflect some specific methodological artifacts of these data. We identified more precisely four possible methodological issues: non-random attrition (NRA), panel conditioning (PC), refreshment sample, and aging of participants. Because of its structure, SHP data are particularly appropriate to challenge these issues, with a special attention to panel conditioning on several measures of SWB (i.e., global question vs. questions by life domains). SHP has been administered annually since 1999. A first sample was randomly selected in 1999, a second sample in 2004, and a third sample in 2013. First, we found that attrition was selective in the predictors of SWB all along the waves and that the respondents leaving the panel were more frequently represented in modalities of predictors associated with lower SWB. Second, panel conditioning was found to affect SWB measure in the first five waves for the global question and no specific patterns for questions by life domains were found. Third, we found higher SWB mean score in new samples than in old ones. And fourth, we found that aging modified the characteristics of the sample—for example, an increase of inactive persons or a decrease of persons with a low education affected the levels of SWB. Thus, SWB and its determinants were affected by NRA, PC, refreshment, and aging. Moreover, it has to be noted that it was difficult or impossible to distinguish these methodological issues from one another—aging from PC or refreshment from PC for example—as well as to propose methodological “remedies” to them. Finally, it resulted from our research that once these methodological issues have been neutralized, SWB did not decline anymore over the last fifteen years in Switzerland.

Application of Partial Order Theory to Multidimensional Poverty Analysis in Switzerland

Poverty has been conceptualized and measured from a multidimensional perspective, generally by applying the classical composite index approach. However, this approach is far from capturing the diversity of individual’s poverty profiles and suffers from several shortcomings, notably regarding comparability, weighting, and aggregation issues. Such multidimensional indices are based on a dichotomized simplistic view of poverty in which binary category opposition prevails such as poor and non-poor, deprived and non-deprived. Furthermore, combining dichotomized threshold-based scores hides the complexity of ‘in-between poverty and prosperity’ profiles. In this chapter, we show that in comparison to the traditional composite index approach, the partial order theory allows to detect these ‘in-between’ profiles. In our study, monetary poverty, material deprivation, and well-being, measured with objective and subjective indicators, are used to analyse multidimensional poverty in Switzerland. The empirical analysis is based on the Swiss Household Panel data of 2013 and is realized by using partial order R package PARSEC.

From dissonance to well-being and adaption? Quality of life in Switzerland over the past decades

Switzerland occupies a top position on most global rankings of well-being and quality of life, which has often been attributed to Swiss exceptionalism. This chapter traces back this exceptional pattern of well-being until the early 1960s, when one of the first quality of life studies of the country diagnosed a “Swiss malaise”, caused by a contradiction between the high material well-being and the societal norms demanding ascetic lifestyles. Our analysis of the evolution of societal and individual well-being over the past decades across the various key areas and life domains, for both objective living conditions and subjective evaluations and satisfaction suggest a softening of these inconsistencies and a normalisation of Swiss exceptionalism. The Swiss pattern of well-being and quality of life has thus moved from a constellation of “dissonance” towards “well-being” and “adaptation”.

Globalization, economic and social transformation, and inequality: Introduction to special issue

The relationship between globalization, economic and social transformation, and growing global inequality has been widely debated over the past 10 years. There is a certain consensus that economic inequality in general, and within-country income inequality in particular, has increased in most (but not in all) countries in the past 20 to 30 years. However, despite much debate concerning the distribution of economic inequality, the causal mechanisms of growing inequalities and the importance of globalization effects on (growing) inequality are still not clear (Alderson et al., 2005; Cornia and Addison, 2003; Müller and Scherer, 2003; OECD, 2008; Therborn, 2006). Although a majority of countries show increasing income inequalities during the 1980s, the 1990s and the early 2000s, there is considerable variation in the extent, the pattern and the structural characteristics of rising inequality (e.g. pure ‘upgrading’, i.e. the more privileged groups gain comparatively more than the less privileged groups; ‘downgrading’, i.e. the less privileged groups lose more than the more privileged ones; or a combination of both trends over time). Several countries, both within the core and the periphery of the world society, have experienced stable or even decreasing inequality (e.g. France, Greece; see OECD, 2008). Different national, institutional and societal arrangements (i.e. employment regimes, welfare state types, educational systems, family models), the strength of counterbalancing forces and the specific nature of economic, social and political transformation processes obviously affect how income inequality evolves over time. Similarly, globalization processes affect individual countries differently: globalization effects in core countries and semi-peripheries are rather different from those in peripheral countries. Global economic integration is characterized by a strengthening of regional trading blocs, that is, increasing economic integration within Europe, within North America, within East Asia, etc., as well as between the most important regional trading blocks, rather than international trade and investment intensifying between individual national economies in general. The three contributions to this special issue complete the debate on the relationships between globalization, economic and social transformation, and inequality launched in the IJCS special issue of October–December 2009 with a first group of five articles. All eight contributions were presented at the ISA-RC02 Midterm Conference on ‘Inequality beyond Globalization: Economic

Between Social Structure Inertia and Changing Biographies: Trajectories of Material Deprivation in Switzerland

In contemporary societies, attaining a decent standard of living which allows people to lead a socially integrated life is a key issue for human rights and social policy. In a context in which social structures are more porous yet still quite powerful, the risk of poverty is influenced both by the inertia of these structural determinants and by uncertain life events.