Abstract

The housing booms and busts in Ireland and Spain were among the most striking episodes of the Eurozone crisis. While asset price inflation and financialization of housing was gathering pace across the developed world, these two ‘most different’ cases converged on the same outcome as the most extreme forms of construction-based bubbles. The key contributions of this paper are threefold. Firstly, we show how cheap credit can be understood as analogous to a natural resource such as oil: resource abundance generates a ‘paradox of plenty’ whereby an asset becomes a liability. Secondly, we open the black box of political pathways through which this happens, expanding our understanding of how perverse outcomes are produced. Thirdly, we account for why Spain and Ireland were more susceptible to extreme outcomes than other European countries, thereby extending our understanding of asymmetries in the political economy of the Eurozone.

摘要

爱尔兰和西班牙的房地产繁荣和萧条是欧元区危机中最引人注目的事件之一。虽然发达国家的资产价格通胀和住房金融化正在加快步伐，但这两个“最不同”的案例与最极端的建筑泡沫形式的结果相同。本文的主要贡献有三方面。首先，我们展示了如何可以将廉价信贷理解为类似于石油等自然资源：资源丰富会产生“充足悖论”，从而资产变成负债。其次，我们打开了发生这种情况的政治途径的黑匣子，扩大了我们对不正当结果如何产生的理解。第三，我们解释了为什么西班牙和爱尔兰比其他欧洲国家更容易受到极端结果的影响，