The original Maastricht regime designed the Eurozone's fiscal segment in a way that sought to keep member states' treasury budgets balanced by disciplining them through market forces, reducing the overall volume of public indebtedness, prohibiting monetary financing, and avoiding that Eurozone treasuries bail each other out. In this article, we analyse how these 'neoliberal' rules for fiscal governance have been gradually superseded by an alternative approach that we call 'governing through off-balance-sheet fiscal agencies' (OBFAs). OBFAs are special purpose vehicles that complement treasuries in supporting public investment, offering solvency insurance for banks, providing capital insurance of last resort for other treasuries, and expanding the stock of safe assets. By sponsoring OBFAs, treasuries can substitute 'actual' liabilities on their balance sheets, which are potentially in conflict with the EU's neoliberal fiscal rules, with 'contingent' liabilitiesguarantees that do not appear on-balance-sheet. Together, national and supra-national treasuries and OBFAs form a 'fiscal ecosystem' in which neoliberal fiscal rules get reemphasised but in practice are increasingly mitigated. This new mode of Eurozone fiscal governance is reflected not only in multiple policies implemented since 2010the Recovery and Resilience Facility for examplebut also represents the main strategy in many Eurozone reform proposals.

How to finance the Green Transition towards net-zero carbon emissions remains an open question. The literature either operates within a market-failure paradigm that calls for a Pigou tax to help markets correct themselves, or via war finance analogies that offer a ‘triad’ of state intervention possibilities: taxation, treasury borrowing, and central bank money creation. These frameworks often lack a thorough conceptualisation of endogenous credit money creation, for instance when resorting to loanable funds theory, and disregard the systemic and procedural dimensions of financing the Green Transition. We propose that ‘monetary architecture’, which perceives the monetary and financial system as a constantly evolving and historically specific hierarchical web of interlocking balance sheets, offers a more comprehensive framework to conceptualize the systemic and procedural financing challenges. Using the US as an example, we draw implications of a systemic financing view while considering a division of labor between ‘firefighting’ institutions such as the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, and ‘workhorse’ institutions such as off-balance-sheet fiscal agencies, commercial banks, and shadow banks. We argue further that financing the Green Transition must undergo three ideal-typical phases—initial balance sheet expansion, long-term funding, and possibly final contraction—that require diligent macro-financial management to avoid financial instability.

This paper uses the case of prison privatization in England and Wales to scrutinize what it means to “economize the social” through numbers. It argues that we ought to be careful not to equate quantification with economization. To uncover the multiple effects of economization and quantification brought about by new public management reforms and prison privatization, one needs to set presumed dichotomies between the public and the private aside and turn instead to the multiplicity of economizing practices (curtailing, marketizing, financializing) and their implication in different forms of quantification. Ironically, numbers and state contracts governing privately managed prisons also shielded these establishments from economization (e.g. budgetary savings requests); and it is the public prisons that have been exposed the most to measures of government austerity.

Despite having been around for a decade now, Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) payment by result contracts funding social programmesare still a niche instrument. Constituting but a fraction of the overall impact investment sector, they were expected to grow much faster and augur a new model of pursuing social policy objectives. Whilst this has not yet occurred, they nevertheless continue to benefit from a great degree of political support and academic interest. But outside of the practitionerfocused literature, the scholarship investigating SIBs has largely identified financialisation and the erosion of social solidarity as the main dynamics underpinning this development. This article argues that it is important to also attend to SIBs as expressions of transformations occurring within the design and pursuit of social policy objectives. By looking at SIBs as a form of governance of social risks, the article argues that SIBs nurture their own forms of social solidarity. Based on three distinguishing tenets of SIBs, three types of solidarities are emphasised: inter-temporal, cross-sectoral and risk-insurance solidarities. Whilst these can spur social inclusion, innovation and collaboration, the article discusses how they can also be spurious and can come undone.

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