Cédric Durand

University of Geneva | UNIGE · History Economics and Society

This article explores the metamorphosis of profit-making and profit uses in the context of retailing’s digital transition. To assess the qualitative mutations of the sector, it is not enough to focus on technological changes since the unequal operational development of firms is also the outcome of managerial strategies and financial policies. This...

Correspondence: imogen.liu@maastrichtuniversity.nl I begin my reflections on Isabella Weber’s excellent How China Escaped Shock Therapy with a personal anecdote. In the late 1970s through to the mid-1980s, my father worked in the import department of the China National Technical Import and Export Corporation. Established in 1952, it grew to become...

This paper analyses the issues of digital sovereignty in Switzerland, particularly from a socio-economic and legal standpoint. It aims to contribute to the general debate on digital sovereignty in Switzerland and abroad, including on a Swiss cloud. Beyond Switzerland, the specificities of the Confederation ( federalism and distributed competencies)...

Cette contribution souligne que les hausses récentes des niveaux des prix ont une dimension conjoncturelle et que les conflits de répartition ne peuvent, dans l’immédiat, suffire à enclencher une dynamique inflationniste durable. En revanche, les séquelles de la financiarisation et les politiques monétaires non conventionnelles constituent un terre...

This paper reopens the question of Corporate Planning (CP) from a political economy perspective by analyzing its evolving role in capitalism. To account for the evolution yet persistent relevance of CP, we analyze the content of Harvard Business Review (HBR) since its foundation in 1922 until 2021 included, using text mining and network analysis te...

The ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) literature has provided ample empirical evidence for asymmetric transfer of material and energy resources from low-income to high-income countries. However, research has not been able to clearly specify the causal mechanisms driving these processes. This paper relates participation in global value chains (GVC...

This contribution documents the contrasting fate of three key actors of the retail industry since the mid-nineties: Carrefour, Wal-Mart and Amazon. Stylized facts about their respective financial trajectories and a description of their engagement with digitalization allow to identify their distinct dynamics. Through a combination of accounting, bus...

This paper argues that, as far as the investment behavior of non-financial corporations is concerned, the apparent continuity over the last four decades suggested by the corporate financialization label is misleading. Indeed, while the disconnection between profitability and investment is a robust stylized fact for most of the period, with cumulati...

This paper argues that, as far as the investment behavior of non-financial corporations is concerned, the apparent continuity over the last four decades suggested by the financialization label is misleading. Indeed, while the disconnection between profitability and investment is a robust stylized fact for most of the period, with cumulative detrime...

éditions Amsterdam, Paris. Traduction Nicolas Vieillescazes http://www.editionsamsterdam.fr/les-limites-du-capital/

This paper relates participation in global value chains (GVCs) to development patterns at the country level. It accounts for the diversity and interdependence of development through a cross-country analysis for 51 countries between 1995 and 2008. We identify three patterns of socio-economic development related to various degrees and modes of GVC pa...

The probability of a partial or complete break-up of the euro has risen over the last years. Such an event could create a balance sheet problem for economic agents, if the redenomination process introduced significant currency mismatches between the asset and liability sides. We propose a new assessment of this redenomination risk, by country and b...

This paper analyses the role of intangibles in global value chains (GVCs). We find that the intensification of the use of intangible assets within these chains has created new sources of market power. The analysis builds the notion of Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism, where government protections of intellectual property have the effect of locking...

The Mandel-Poulantzas debate of the seventies was one of the rare attempts in political economy to provide an explanation of the long-term European integration rationale. For Mandel, an amalgamation of national capitals at the European level was necessary, as capitals in Europe have no other choice than to gather forces in order to survive the comp...

Le numéro spécial de la Revue d'économie industrielle co-dirigé par Cédric Durand, David Flacher et Vincent Frigant sur les chaines de valeur est désormais accessible en ligne. https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-industrielle-2018-3.htm ci dessous le sommaire

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During recent decades, the link between profits and domestic investment has weakened in the largest high-income economies. In this article, we explore this attenuation of the profit–investment nexus through a profit-centred perspective. Focusing on the impact of the origins and uses of profits, we study the investment behaviour of non-financial cor...

This article discusses the origin and uses of the concepts of global value chains and global production networks. It traces the intensification of the circulation of these concepts in the 1990s and 2000s among researchers in sociology, management, geography, and economics. The article then discusses the reasons why, over the past decade, they have...

Suzanne de Brunhoff (1929-2015) était une économiste marxiste spécialiste des questions monétaires et financières. Les textes rassemblés dans ce volume témoignent de la fécondité de son œuvre et de son originalité. Ils feront découvrir au lecteur une trajectoire dont la remarquable cohérence intellectuelle et éthique tient à n’avoir jamais dissocié...

More than two decades of scholarship on global value chains (GVCs) has reshaped our understanding of the global economy while tracking the international fragmentation of productive process and its socioeconomic consequences. In this paper we focus on the effort by lead firms to capture market power in the provision of and production of intangible a...

This article explores the variety of socioeconomic outcomes from global value chains (GVCs) participation through a crosscountry analysis. In order to bridge the methodological and theoretical gap between GVCs critical insights and recent uses of the framework by international institutions, it proposes a novel definition of trade in GVCs and elabor...

“Crisis in the European Monetary Union: A Core-Periphery Perspective” explains what lies behind the decision of a set of politically, economically and socially heterogeneous countries, having in common a loose geographical proximity, to engage in a process of monetary integration, consisting of fully liberalizing goods and capital movements, establ...

The probability of a partial or complete break-up of the euro has risen over the last years. Such an event could create a balance sheet problem for economic agents, if the redenomination process introduced significant currency mismatches between the asset and liability sides. We propose a new assessment of this redenomination risk, by country and b...

How finance is a mechanism of social and political domination The 2007–08 credit crisis and the long recession that followed brutally exposed the economic and social costs of financialization. Understanding what lay behind these events, the rise of “fictitious capital” and its opaque logic, is crucial to grasping the social and political conditions...

interview avec Cedric Durand (CEPN)

Au tournant du xxie siècle, la mondialisation du capital s’est accompagnée d’un renouveau de la critique théorique. Le regain des approches marxistes prend alors trois principales directions que cet article propose d’introduire. La première lit la mondialisation comme l’expression du métabolisme capitaliste sans cesse à la recherche de nouvelles op...

In this contribution, we investigate the social relation to energy within the fordist accumulation regime and within the financialized and globalized capitalism that emerged in the 1970s. We aim at identifying shifts in the economy-energy nexus occurring alongside transformations in other fields. We analyse empirically and comparatively energy use...

El caso de Wal-Mart en México es, sin duda, el fenómeno más avanzado de un proceso más largo de internacionalización de las grandes cadenas internacionales de comercio durante los años noventa, en particular en muchas regiones de la periferia. Este proceso es de importancia mayor en términos de reconfiguración de las economías locales tanto a nivel...

This paper builds on post-Keynesian macroeconomics, the French Regulation Theory and a Neo-Gramscian International Political Economy approach to class analysis to propose an International post-Keynesian Political Economy approach that is used to offer an empirical analysis of European growth models and working class restructuring in Europe between...

***Résumé*** La grande distribution est ancrée dans les paysages périurbains et structure les modèles d’achat et de consommation depuis plusieurs décennies. Loin d’être réductible à un secteur économique analysable à partir des outils de l’économie industrielle, elle nécessite de mobiliser une approche multidisciplinaire, alliant entre autres l’urb...

Cet article explore les transformations contemporaines de la grande distribution à partir d’une étude de la trajectoire de l’entreprise Carrefour au cours de la première décennie du xxi e siècle. La perspective adoptée est celle de la financiarisation de l’entreprise. Nous montrons comment la restructuration de l’actionnariat a précipité un bouleve...

This contribution puts forward five theses which delineate the European issue in this second decade of the 21st century. The first thesis boils down to the observation that the euro is a major disaster in the economic history. The two subsequent theses draw a link between this failure and two possible levers for the European integration: on the one...

In 2010, the Eurozone became the epicentre of the world crisis. The vulnerability of Europe appears to be linked to the specific institutional arrangement which organises monetary, financial and budgetary policies within the Eurozone. This article tries to understand the evolution of the euduring a short but decisive historical sequence (2007–12) i...

Financialisation and globalisation have important implications for the functioning of economies and, in particular, for employment. However, their impact on labour market dynamics has not been sufficiently analysed. The aim of this article is to contribute to fill this gap in the literature with a cross-country analysis at the industry level. The a...

This article addresses a classic problem in the social sciences: what allows for or, on the contrary, prevents, the emergence of democratic institutions, i.e., of modern democratic statehood. This problem is tackled in relation to the internal socio-political logic of the European integration process. Drawing on the political economy of the French...

On explique souvent les turbulences des marchés financiers par l’immoralité des agents, les errements de la théorie économique ou les réglementations inadaptées. Bien que ces explications ne soient pas fausses, elles laissent de côté le principal problème : la nature et l’origine de la valeur financière. C’est ce mystère que Cédric Durand propose d...

Never before has Europe been so present in public debate. From 2009 onwards, not a month has gone by without new twists in the melodramatic rifts and reconciliations between EU governments and institutions. As the region dips further into recession and social desperation, the showdown between supporters and opponents of austerity renders the macro-...

Soumission à Epi-revel Russian outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) has expanded rapidly during the years 2000. The country has become the leading foreign investor among the BRIC countries (Figure 1), but the global crisis led to a spectacular retreat since 2008. The rise of multinational companies from non-triadic countries has attracted growi...

This paper presents some stylized facts about the expansion of the Russian metallurgical industry from the early nineties to the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. It retraces the internationalization of these firms and examines the characteristics of this movement in terms of geographical and industrial orientation (horizontal,...

De-growth theses point to a renewal of critical thinking able to link intellectual research projects and social movements. This paper provides an overview of some of the strands of arguments that are mobilised to criticise the ‘growth obsession’, and explains why issues raised by de-growth proponents are at odds with the regulationist research stra...

The current crisis takes place within a long downturn and new debates on the future of growth are emerging. This paper argues that some theoretical insights made by classical economists about the end of economic expansion are relevant for the discussion on the prospects for growth in rich countries. We focus on three key mechanisms related to conte...

Why major retailers fail or succeed abroad: the internationalization of Wal-Mart and Carrefour in comparative perspective This article examines at the meso and macro levels the institutional and economic elements determining success and failure of global retailers abroad through the trajectories of Wal-Mart and Carrefour. Three kinds of explanation...

In this paper, we analyze the differences in the sensibility of the distribution and transportation margin to exchange rate variations among different sectors in several European countries between 1995 and 2007. On the one hand, we provide further evidence that distribution margins react to exchange rate movements. However, we show that the sensiti...

From the beginning of the 1990s up until 2007, leading retailers experienced a slowdown of their growth in domestic markets and yet generated an opposite upward trend in return on equity (ROE). This apparent paradox is examined through an analysis of the 10 main retailers' accounts. Focusing on the links between financialization and globalization p...

In the context of a wave of retail foreign direct investment and increasing recognition across many disciplines of the profound developmental implications of transnational retail within the global economy, this paper examines the institutional and economic factors determining the performance of transnational retailers via a comparative analysis of...

In this contribution, we shall try to characterise the Russian growth model the way it appears to have emerged in the 2000s, which we believe useful to explain the country's macroeconomic successes at an earlier stage as well as the severe problems it has to face now. We shall begin by presenting the macroeconomic indicators of the Russian Federati...

The comeback of the State in the economy seems to define a significant inflexion in the trajectory of post-soviet Russia. This article specifies the extent and the characteristics of this re-engagement of the Russian State. It also proposes a twofold interpretation: the implementation of a developmentalist strategy and/or an instrumentalisation of...

Is a Russian form of developmentalism emerging ? The limits of a return to the producer State As the years 2000 advance, a return of the State is observed to be occurring in Russia. This is progressing by a process of extension of public property and the setting-up of new industrial-policy instruments. This change in situation suggests the emergenc...

Using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey for the period 2000--2004 we investigate poverty trends in Russia. We find that urban poverty declines at twice the rate of rural poverty so that by 2004 poverty in Russia had become a largely rural phenomenon for the first time since transition began. This finding does not stem from changi...

This paper examines the institutional and economic factors determining success and failure of global retailers abroad through the trajectories of Wal-Mart and Carrefour. Three kinds of explanations are considered : the time and modalities of entry and development, the factors that allow the exercise of an upstream market power and the sensitivity t...

The comeback of the State in the economy seems to design a significant inflexion in the trajectory of the post-soviet Russia. This article suggests to specify the scale and the characteristics of the reinvolvment of the Russian State. It also outlines a double interpretation: on the one hand, this evolution seems to be a new developmentalist strate...

contribution présentée au colloque du réseau Réseau d'Intégration Nord Sud (RINOS) “Globalisation, reconnexion Nord-Sud et recomposition des économies, des sociétés et des territoires”, Aix-en-Provence, 6 et 7 juillet 2007

Les entreprises de la métallurgie russe se sont engagées depuis 2002 dans une série d’investissements internationaux. Portées par une conjoncture très favorable, elles s’implantent dans des pays tant de la périphérie que du centre de l’économie mondiale. Cet article montre l’ampleur de ce phénomène symptomatique du développement de firmes multinati...

Cet article mobilise une analyse micro�conomique marxiste pour �clairer l'�volution de la capacit� de r�sistance des salari�s des pays d�velopp�s au cours de la p�riode de mont�e en puissance du n�olib�ralisme qui s'�tend des ann�es 1970 � nos jours. Plus pr�cis�ment, il s'agit de d�velopper l'hypoth�se selon laquelle la dislocation de la firme for...

Since 2002, Russian metallurgical firms have been investing abroad. Taking advantage of the favorable economic climate in the sector, they have set up plants in both peripheral and core countries of the world economy. How far does this phenomenon, which is symptomatic of the development of multinational corporations originating from emerging countr...