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About Guy Standing

Guy Standing is professorial research associate at SOAS University of London and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an international NGO that promotes basic income. He is author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) and his most recent book is Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (2019).

progressive alliance

Building a progressive alliance in Britain

by Guy Standing on 15th January 2020

Labour must abandon faith in one more heave for Westminster victory and embrace a progressive alliance, including for electoral reform.

Guy Standing

Left Should Stop Equating Labour With Work

by Guy Standing on 23rd March 2018

It is intellectually excusable for those on the political right to want to restrict the meaning of work to labour, or income-earning activity. It is inexcusable for those on the political left to do so. Social democrats are paying a heavy political price for having done so throughout the 20th century. They fell into their […]

Guy Standing

The Five Lies Of Rentier Capitalism

by Guy Standing on 27th October 2016

We live in the age of rentier capitalism. It is the crisis point of the Global Transformation, during which claims made for capitalism have been wholly undermined by a developing system that is radically different from what its advocates say. They assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that they are […]

Guy Standing

Basic Income Pilots: A Better Option Than QE

by Guy Standing on 9th February 2015

With much fanfare, Mario Draghi announced on January 22 that the European Central Bank (ECB) would be pumping €60bn a month into the financial markets until September 2016, in what is euphemistically called “quantitative easing” (QE). This amounts to 10% of Eurozone GDP and 10% of its gross public debt. Many observers guess the flow […]

Guy Standing

How To Combat Inequalities Produced By Global Capitalism

by Guy Standing on 12th May 2014

Rising inequality is one of the most salient issues in global and European politics. Guy Standing writes that what we have witnessed in recent decades is not simply an increase in inequality, but also the emergence of a new globalised class structure. A key component of this structure is what he terms ‘The Precariat’: a new class […]

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Social Europe Publishing book

The Brexit endgame is upon us: deal or no deal, the transition period will end on January 1st. With a pandemic raging, for those countries most affected by Brexit the end of the transition could not come at a worse time. Yet, might the UK's withdrawal be a blessing in disguise? With its biggest veto player gone, might the European Pillar of Social Rights take centre stage? This book brings together leading experts in European politics and policy to examine social citizenship rights across the European continent in the wake of Brexit. Will member states see an enhanced social Europe or a race to the bottom?

'This book correctly emphasises the need to place the future of social rights in Europe front and centre in the post-Brexit debate, to move on from the economistic bias that has obscured our vision of a progressive social Europe.' Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland


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The macroeconomic effects of the EU recovery and resilience facility

This policy brief analyses the macroeconomic effects of the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). We present the basics of the RRF and then use the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to analyse the facility's macroeconomic effects. The simulations show, first, that if the funds are in fact used to finance additional public investment (as intended), public capital stocks throughout the EU will increase markedly during the time of the RRF. Secondly, in some especially hard-hit southern European countries, the RRF would offset a significant share of the output lost during the pandemic. Thirdly, as gains in GDP due to the RRF will be much stronger in (poorer) southern and eastern European countries, the RRF has the potential to reduce economic divergence. Finally, and in direct consequence of the increased GDP, the RRF will lead to lower public debt ratios—between 2.0 and 4.4 percentage points below baseline for southern European countries in 2023.


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Industrial relations: developments 2015-2019

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