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Book review: Rizwanul Islam and Iyanatul Islam, Employment and Inclusive Development

economies and their economic policies, often characterized by a distinct national and at times nationalistic focus in policy. How these policies were reconciling, if at all, national priorities (e.g. full employment) with other extra-national priorities – for example, those of the European Monetary System in the 1990s or the International Monetary Fund– World Bank–European Central Bank in 2015 – remains a rather overlooked question. Some answers to these questions come in Chapter 8, which focuses on the transformation of the labour markets in Greece and Turkey during and following the Global Financial Markets of 2008–2009 and the deep economic crisis that followed. One might wonder whether placing a central chapter like this one after seven others is the result of favouring a chronological criterion over a more theoretically audacious reading of the Political Economy of labour market reforms in these two countries. In any case, the chronological structure of this book works well to bring together a thorough review of recent economic policies with an explicit treatment of very recent events such as those following the Global Financial Crisis. In Greece and Turkey as in other parts of the world, financialization is a complex phenomenon, but it has a clear political economy rationality as it has ‘circumvented the tendency for the rate of profit to fall’ (p. 179). Whether indeed the theory that a falling rate of profit was the primary cause of the Global Financial Crises or rather ‘the economic crisis occurred as a result of the excessive growth of the financial market over the real economy and of fictitious profits over real profits’ remains to be ascertained. The analysis could have been integrated with a deeper and disaggregated analysis of what the financialization of these economies meant for ordinary people and households. Granted that financial markets’ deregulation, starting from the Monetarist era of the late 1980s and 1990s, was legitimated as a strategy to alleviate falling wages and/or difficult access to real estate markets for first home buyers, but other questions concerning the differential participation of groups in these ‘new’ economies remain: how did these changes impact upon groups of workers differentiated by age or gender? And, even more importantly, how did the financialization of the Greek and Turkish economies contributed to change the delicate balance of power between labour and capital as it emerged from the monetarist period of the 1990s and 2000s? Despite these questions, Chapter 8 achieves its purpose of giving the sense of the profound transformation that the events of 2008–2009 and the economic crisis that followed brought in the entire Mediterranean area. In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in understanding the way labour market changes are conceived and implemented as political strategies even before being conceived as economic policies. What we gain from this reading is a deep understanding that economics is embedded in societal and cultural changes and that sometimes, changing the structure of markets means that societal and economic purposes change as well.