Judith Clifton

Judith Clifton
University of Cantabria | UNICAN · Department of Economics

D Phil Political Economy, University of Oxford

About

172
Publications
45,249
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Introduction
Full Professor and Founding Director of the Jean Monnet Chair on Economic Policy, Faculty of Business and Economic Sciences, University of Cantabria. Editor in Chief, Journal of Economic Policy Reform. Also serves on editorial board of Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Elements in Public Policy, Policy and Society and other journals. Recipient of Fulbright-Schuman at Cornell University, 2014-15 and FNR Intermobility Senior scholar 2023.
Additional affiliations
January 2010 - December 2012
University of Cantabria
January 2005 - present
University of Leeds

Publications

Publications (172)
Article
Full-text available
Los Bancos Regionales de Desarrollo son esenciales para el desarrollo mundial. Este artículo expone cuatro razones fundamentales que explican por qué estos bancos son importantes para el desarrollo actual. Para ello, se analizan los cambios que han experimentado los bancos a lo largo de tres generaciones en su evolución. Como parte de este análisis...
Article
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One of the main criticisms of contemporary lending practice by different multilateral public banks in Europe made by scholars and policymakers focuses on overlapping loans, which can create duplications and inefficiencies. However, no database exists on the lending overlaps between these banks. With the aim of analysing these overlaps, all lending...
Article
A few years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the World Bank published Bureaucrats in Business, an influential report on State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) that provided a road-map on how to reform - or privatize - those “loss making state-owned-enterprises that are a significant burden on government budgets and […] hinder growth, impede market libera...
Article
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The European Investment Bank (EIB) emerged as the world’s largest multilateral public development bank from the 1990s. We explore the logic of EIB lending to the water sector in general, and to public water in particular. Water lending from the EIB’s establishment until 1990 reflected its core mandates, then, from 1991 to 2021, slippage occurred, a...
Article
Though State-Owned Multinational Enterprises (SOMNEs) now make up around 15 percent of the world´s largest non-financial Multinational Enterprises (MNEs), little is known about why State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) internationalize and how they behave once abroad. Whilst some scholars have claimed SOMNEs tend to behave as their private MNE counterpart...
Article
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The corporatization of public services by moving services previously provided in-house into various types of arms-length corporate forms of organization is becoming an important trend at multiple levels of government. Although the use of such corporate forms to deliver public services is not a new phenomenon, evidence on the impact of corporatizati...
Article
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Blockchain is emerging as one of the major disruptive technologies of our times. In the context of public administration, blockchain heralds major transformations of public service provision and has the potential to increase the transparency of, and citizens’ trust in, public administration and its services. However, the introduction of blockchain...
Article
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After more than thirty years of post-war relative regional convergence, since the 1980s geographical inequalities in economic prosperity and social conditions have widened again in most capitalist countries. In this paper we argue that this resumption of spatial inequality is in part explained by the significant changes observed in the role of the...
Article
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Surveys have become an established means by which scholars can evaluate and assess the quality of public services provided by governments. Though surveys must be interpreted with caution, as explained here, they also have the advantage of providing useful insights about public services that cannot easily be gauged from other assessment techniques....
Article
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Corporatization—arguably as important as privatization regarding public service reform—remains an under-researched topic in Public Administration. In this paper, we explore the extent to which the implementation of different types of corporatization strategies can be explained by the ideology of the ruling party in the Spanish public healthcare sec...
Book
Regional development banks (RDB) have become increasingly important in the world economy, but have also been relatively under-researched to date. This timely volume addresses this lack of attention by providing a comprehensive, comparative, and empirically informed analysis of their origins, evolution, and contemporary role in the world economy thr...
Chapter
Full-text available
The European Investment Bank (EIB) constitutes one of the main institutional pillars upon which the European Union (EU) was built. Strikingly, the institution has attracted little research. EIB Statutes can be condensed down to five overarching objectives that its lending should prioritize: originally, development, integration and investment, and,...
Article
Full-text available
Regional development banks (RDB) have become increasingly important in the world economy, but have also been relatively under-researched to date. This timely volume addresses this lack of attention by providing a comprehensive, comparative, and empirically informed analysis of their origins, evolution, and contemporary role in the world economy thr...
Chapter
Full-text available
In the context of protracted low levels of investment following the 2008 Great Recession and, with the launch of the European Commission’s “Investment Plan for Europe,” scholars have argued a new dimension of European integration may be emerging: a “hidden investment state.” Interlocking institutions through European-level policy making, and increa...
Article
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Blockchain is heralded as being “the next big thing” that promises to radically transform society and the economy in near-future applications. While scholarly literature on blockchain has largely focused on bitcoin and cryptofinance, in recent years, a body of scholarship has started to emerge on blockchain in the public sector. The characteristics...
Chapter
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The COVID-19 pandemic represents Europe’s worst humanitarian and economic crisis since the Second World War. However, initial responses by European Union (EU) institutions to the pandemic in general – and the European Investment Bank (EIB) in particular – were limited: national governments and National Promotional Banks reacted much more quickly an...
Article
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Latin America is one of the world's only regions to have witnessed a fall in income inequality in recent years. This paper evaluates the role fiscal policy played in this change. Recent scholarship has examined this in individual countries; lacking is a regional perspective. We examine the effects of nine fiscal instruments on income inequality in...
Article
The relationship between technology and work, and concerns about the displacement effects of technology and the organisation of work, have a long history. The last decade has seen the proliferation of academic papers, consultancy reports and news articles about the possible effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on work—creating visions of both ut...
Article
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Evidence is mounting that individuals do not always behave as strictly “rational” customers of the banking sector as neoclassical models of Economics would assume. Instead, scholars and policymakers are increasingly arguing that Behavioral Economics offers a more useful and realistic means of understanding customer behavior in the real economy. Dra...
Article
Re-municipalization is part of a broader set of reverse privatization reforms. We argue the term re-municipalization lacks conceptual clarity, confusing municipal level reversals from national ones, new service delivery from reversals, and mixed market positions from full public control. This conceptual confusion makes measurement of re-municipaliz...
Preprint
Evidence is mounting that individuals do not always behave as strictly ‘rational’ customers of the banking sector as neoclassical models of economics would assume. Instead, scholars and policymakers are increasingly arguing that behavioral economics offers a more useful and realistic means of understanding customer behavior in the real economy. Dra...
Article
Full-text available
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being heralded by governments and international organizations as a means of augmenting co-production of public services and a number of major initiatives are being rolled out around the world. In parallel to these activities, a body of scholarly work is emerging that investigates the extent to w...
Article
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being heralded by governments and international organizations as a means of augmenting co-production of public services and a number of major initiatives are being rolled out around the world. In parallel to these activities, a body of scholarly work is emerging that investigates the extent to w...
Article
L’administration publique s’intéresse aujourd’hui davantage aux « citoyens vulnérables » qui, pour des raisons qu’ils ne maîtrisent pas, sont désavantagés par rapport aux autres citoyens lorsqu’ils consomment des services publics. Les premières recherches se sont concentrées sur la manière dont le niveau socio-économique des citoyens conditionne le...
Article
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Drawing on the literature on public service co-production, we examine the individual-level and local government-level factors associated with pro-environmental behaviours. Statistical analysis suggests that individuals that have high levels of self-efficacy, have more civic engagement or are carers, are more likely to ‘co-produce’ environmental out...
Article
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The 2008 financial crisis has been seen as providing an opportunity for core eurozone members to push neoliberal policies onto the periphery in order to construct a European consolidation state. We adapt a policy transfer model to examine the extent to which the Troika transferred neoliberal policy onto Greece and Ireland. The size of the ideologic...
Chapter
Public Corporations are created when public services are transformed into a corporation via corporatization. But what are the consequences of corporatization, and does it make public service privatization more likely? This chapter presents and critically interprets the two main bodies of theoretical scholarship on corporatization which offer differ...
Preprint
Full-text available
The 2008 financial crisis has been seen as providing an opportunity for core eurozone members to push neoliberal policies onto the periphery in order to construct a European consolidation state. We adapt a policy transfer model to examine the extent to which the troika transferred neoliberal policy onto Greece and Ireland. The size of the ideologic...
Chapter
Full-text available
The introduction of market-driven mechanisms has been considered as a key means of improving healthcare management. Based on public choice and property rights theories, advocates of marketisation suggest that the performance of health services may improve by exposing previously protected in-house activities to a new environment characterized by mar...
Article
The European Investment Bank (EIB) constitutes one of the main institutional pillars upon which the European Union (EU) was built. Despite this, the institution has attracted surprisingly little research. The EIB Statutes can be boiled down to three overarching objectives that its lending would prioritise-development, integration and investment-but...
Chapter
Full-text available
AMÉRICA LATINA es una región que ha estado muy afectada por problemas crónicos de cohesión social vinculados con la desigualdad (Huber et al., 2006; Milanovic y Muñoz de Bustillo, 2008; Williamson, 2010; FitzGerald et al., 2011; Bértola y Ocampo, 2012). A lo largo de los años, el grado excesivo de desigualdad en América Latina fue considerado una a...
Article
Full-text available
Este artículo examina la actuación del Banco Europeo de Inversiones (BEI) bajo un marco de estudio adaptado al estudio comparativo de las Organizaciones Financieras Internacionales (OFIs). Basándose en investigaciones previas, contribuye a la literatura emergente en análisis comparativo de políticas. Proporciona las directrices para analizar y comp...
Article
The European Investment Bank (EIB) constitutes one of the main institutional pillars upon which the European Union (EU) was built. Despite this, the institution has attracted surprisingly little research. The EIB Statutes can be boiled down to three overarching objectives that its lending would prioritize – development, integration and investment –...
Article
Full-text available
Within Public Administration, increased attention is being paid to ‘vulnerable citizens’ – groups of citizens who, for reasons beyond their control, are disadvantaged in comparison to other citizens – when consuming public services. Initial research focused on how citizens’ socio-economic background shapes their behaviour and satisfaction. Citizens...
Article
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The crisis brought into relief problems within the financial sector which seriously affected consumer trust. This paper provides new evidence on the experiences of two socio-economic groups associated with potential vulnerability – the less educated and the elderly – with financial service markets across Europe. We find that the less educated and t...
Article
The European Union (EU) has been hit by financial and economic crises since 2008. To shed light upon the impact of these crises, this article reviews punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to develop expectations that are tested against two cases of financial regulation and privatization policy. In one, despite the demand for a new model from EU leade...
Article
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Despite the growing prevalence of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in healthcare, scholars have paid little attention to its consequences for the workforce. PPP may have important consequences in labour-intensive services such as healthcare, since staff reductions and higher working loads may lead to a decrease in service quality and patient safet...
Article
On 14 March 2012, we lost a great intellectual, Professor Alice H. Amsden. The relevance of her work in development economics and development theory more broadly rests on extensive research and policy engagement in developing countries across the world where she identified crucial, though controversial, insights into the theory and practice of deve...
Article
Reducing public spending was a major objective when governments across Europe increasingly turned to outsourcing as a mode of public service provision from the 1980s. Today, despite its prevalence, there is still little consensus in the literature on whether outsourcing is an effective policy as regards reducing spending. Using a panel data model f...
Article
Reducing public spending was a major objective when governments across Europe in-creasingly turned to outsourcing as a mode of public service provision from the 1980s. Today, despite its prevalence, there is still little consensus in the literature on whether outsourcing is an effective policy as regards reducing spending. Using a panel data model...
Chapter
Full-text available
Latin America is a region which has been plagued with persistent problems of social cohesion linked to inequality (Bértola and Ocampo 2012; Fitzgerald et al. 2011; Huber et al. 2006; Milanovic and Muñoz de Bustillo 2008; Williamson 2010). Over the long term, the excessive degree of inequality in Latin America was considered an anomaly in internatio...
Book
Full-text available
América Latina es una región que ha estado muy afectada por problemas crónicos de cohesión social vinculados con la desigualdad (Huber et al., 2006; Milanovic y Muñoz de Bustillo, 2008; Williamson, 2010; FitzGerald et al., 2011; Bértola y Ocampo, 2012). A lo largo de los años, el grado excesivo de desigualdad en América Latina fue considerado una a...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the performance of the European Investment Bank (EIB) under an adapted framework for the comparative study of International Financial Organizations (IFOs). Building on previous research it contributes to the emerging literature on comparative policy analysis. It provides the guidelines needed to analyse and compare highly critic...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter examines the COCOPS survey on public administration managers for Spain. We argue the slow implementation of public administration reform, plus the radical austerity policies implemented by the government since the crisis, help explain why it is that Spanish public managers perceive much reform to be ineffectual or slow in coming.
Article
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Territorial cohesion has emerged as an important objective for European Union authorities, particularly since the Treaty of Lisbon. One important strand of territorial cohesion is citizen access to affordable public infrastructure services. While place of residence may influence use of services, insufficient evidence exists as to whether residence...
Conference Paper
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Market-oriented reform of telecommunications across EU countries introduced competition policy aimed at increasing opportunities of choice for consumers, thus augmenting consumer satisfaction. Despite the success of this reform, as measured by the growth of competitive suppliers, empirical analyses on the functioning of telecommunications markets h...
Research
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This chapter analyses how policy shapes FDI from Latin America to the EU. We seek to answer two questions. Firstly, how has FDI (liberalization or protectionism) policy as implemented by states across both regions evolved from the end of the 1990s to 2010? Secondly, did FDI policy shape investment patterns, how, and to what extent? We analyze FDI p...
Article
Full-text available
The re-emergence of China as a global economic power has intensified calls for the urgent reform of Western-dominated international organizations. We evaluate efforts by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to adapt to the challenge of China. From the first decade of the 2000s, the OECD has undertaken reforms to boost i...
Chapter
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The OECD has adopted a bold new mantra in recent years: to guarantee its global nature and relevance in the architecture of international organizations (OECD, 2006). Organizational changes toward this aim have accelerated. Enlargement to Chile, Estonia, Israel and Slovenia in 2010, bringing membership to 34 countries, and planned enlargement to the...
Article
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Madrid has recently become the site of one the most controversial cases of public healthcare reform in the European Union. Despite the fact that the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) into Madrid hospitals has been vigorous, little scholarship has been done to test whether NPM actually led to technical efficiency. This paper is one of the...
Article
For two decades, the metaphor hollowing out dominated discussions about the changing role of the state in delivering public services. Today, this metaphor no longer captures important contemporary developments. European Union policy has expanded deeper and deeper into public service sectors , increasingly constraining government’s capacities to del...
Article
Full-text available
ABSTRACT: The re-emergence of China as a global economic power has intensified calls for the urgent reform of the Western-dominated international organizations. We evaluate efforts by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to adapt to the challenge of China. Since the decade of the 2000sthe OECD has undertaken reform to bo...
Article
In the face of continuing financial and economic crises in Europe, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has been criticized for being overly-conservative in its loans to Europe. Critics in particular have called on the EIB to vastly increase its investment in utilities as a counter-cyclical measure. To take stock and, in order to evaluate the role of...
Article
Full-text available
Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called...
Article
Full-text available
Consumer satisfaction with utility services has received increased attention from firms, consumer associations, regulators and governments since the 1990s. Evidence is mounting that consumers in specific socio-economic groups express lower satisfaction levels than their peers, at least, in some utility markets. Seeing this as part of their remit to...
Article
Full-text available
Marketisation of urban service delivery gained renewed intensity in the crisis. Mobilising Polanyi’s concept of double movement, we analyse how marketisation of public services both creates and constrains the potential for urban counter movements in the USA and Europe. We identify three main urban responses: ‘hollowing out’, where cities engage in...
Article
Full-text available
This article discusses the problems and opportunities facing any ‘young’ political scientist working – or wishing to work – in Spanish universities. Starting with a brief description of the delayed development of political science in Spain, it then explains some of the problems facing those seeking jobs in research, before analysing the ongoing ref...
Article
Full-text available
Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter analyses how policy shapes FDI from Latin America to the EU. We seek to answer two questions. Firstly, how has FDI (liberalization or protectionism) policy as implemented by states across both regions evolved from the end of the 1990s to 2010? Secondly, did FDI policy shape investment patterns, how, and to what extent? We analyze FDI p...
Chapter
Full-text available
From the 2000s on, foreign direct investment (FDI) from emerging markets has increased significantly: as a consequence, emerging markets multinational corporations (MNC) have come of age. The rise of emerging markets MNC is but one manifestation of the process referred to by Angus Maddison as ‘shifting wealth’ in the world economy, whereby long-ter...
Chapter
Full-text available
The Spanish Agency for the Evaluation of Public Policies (Agenda Estatal de Evaluatión de las Políticas Públicas y la Calidad de los Servicios — AEVAL) was established in 2007. One of the original justifications for creating this agency was to improve public policy evaluation with the end result of improving government’s coordination of public poli...
Article
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Did New Public Management (NPM) actually lead to a smaller public sector? NPM has been the subject of extensive academic debate as to its successes and failures. However, empirical assessments of whether NPM reached its stated objectives are relatively scarce, mainly due to the difficulty of quantifying the impact of such reforms. This article atte...
Book
Utilities have long been essential for societies, supplying basic services for nations, organizations and households alike. The proper functioning and regulation of utilities is therefore critical for the economy, society and security. History provides an invaluable insight into important issues of the economic and social regulation of utilities an...
Article
Full-text available
Augmenting consumer welfare was a key justification behind the reform of utilities from the 1980s. But three decades later, evidence is mounting that consumer satisfaction with household utilities is quite uneven. Moreover; governments, regulators, and international organizations are increasingly recognizing that consumers from specific socio-econo...
Article
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The European Commission’s proposal for a Directive on the award of concession contracts has sparked vigorous public debate and intense opposition. This Directive is controversial because of the nature of the policy it proposes and because the sectors involved are highly sensitive. This Forum examines the weaknesses of the Commission’s proposal and...
Article
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Selling off formerly state-owned telecommunications incumbents played a major role in governments’ privatization programmes from the 1980s. One major consequence was that, from the late 1990s, a number of incumbents emerged as the world’s largest Multinational Corporations (MNCs). Despite the importance of this transformation, the determinants of t...