Abstract

Many economies in the Western world have been through a regime shift towards fiscal austerity since the 1970s. Existing scholarship ascribes trends in austerity to globalisation or the influence of a new economic paradigm. This paper develops a different approach by stressing the strategic intervention of central banks in governments’ fiscal decisions. It analyses archival documents from the German Federal Cabinet and the Bundesbank Council over more than two decades (1960–1981) and finds that the fiscal regime was shaped by changes in transnational institutions which the central bank used to strategically expand its institutional power within the larger macroeconomic framework. With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, the Bundesbank was able to greatly increase its power resources while the government’s powers diminished. The Bundesbank used its new powers to strategically ‘overreach’ into the fiscal sphere and ‘bargain’ with the government to achieve fiscal reforms. By shedding light on the interactions of global legal and economic developments and the micro-level strategies of state actors, the paper proposes a more complex view of the role of the state and brings state-actor strategies into our understanding of the grand shifts in economic policymaking.

摘要

自 1970 年代以来，西方世界的许多经济体都经历了向财政紧缩的体制转变。现有的学术研究将紧缩趋势归因于全球化或新经济范式的影响。本文通过强调中央银行对政府财政决策的战略干预，提出了一种不同的方法。它分析了德国联邦内阁和德国联邦银行委员会二十多年来（1960-1981）的档案文件，发现财政制度是由跨国机构的变化所塑造的，中央银行用来在更大范围内战略性地扩大其机构权力宏观经济框架。随着布雷顿森林体系的瓦解，德国央行得以大幅增加其权力资源，同时政府的权力被削弱。德国央行利用其新权力战略性地“越界”进入财政领域，并与政府“讨价还价”以实现财政改革。通过阐明全球法律和经济发展的相互作用以及国家行为者的微观层面战略，本文提出了一个更复杂的国家角色观点，并将国家行为者战略纳入我们对经济大转变的理解中。决策。