Financialisation and labour conditions: comparative public policies in Brazil and Greece

Project holder:

Vinícius Araújo Martinez Camarinha (LADYSS, Université Paris Cité)

Research team: 

Iris Nikolopoulou (LADYSS, Université Paris Cité)

Project description : 

This project proposes a framework to illustrate how financialisation shapes economic and social dependencies between countries. Studies indicate that different paths of financialisation lead to distinct forms of dependence. We examine how financialised macroeconomic public policies impact labour conditions, using two parallel case studies: Greece and Brazil. In Greece, public debt has been one of the primary factors driving financialisation. However, the uncontrolled increase in public debt has led to the deregulation of labour and employment relations within the framework of Economic Adjustment Programs since the onset of the economic crisis in 2009. In Brazil, the main channel between finance and labour seems to be Foreign Direct Investment flows. After the 1990s, the country underwent an asymmetric internationalisation that favored financial rewards of foreign companies to the detriment of working conditions.

Empirically, we use data mainly from Eurostat for Greece, and from the World Bank, the UNCTAD and the Brazil Central Bank for Brazil. We apply times series econometric tests to comparatively examine the determinants of labour deterioration by international finance in these countries.