The authors provide a critical assessment of the emerging academic and policy consensus over the potential of local social economy initiatives to deliver social and economic regeneration. Drawing on material from 60 case studies in the United Kingdom, they examine three central claims made for the social economy: that it is empowering, economically sustainable, and capable of providing a real alternative to the 'mainstream' public and private sector economies. They argue that the empirical evidence offers only ambiguous support for these claims and that the full potential of the UK social economy is not being realised. They identify several factors currently inhibiting the development of effective local social economy projects in the United Kingdom. They conclude by proposing a range of measures that could remove the financial and practical barriers currently constraining the development of an effective and lasting social economy in the United Kingdom.(1) These features of social enterprises are paraphrased from a longer definition appearing in Borzaga and Maiello (1998, page 77).
This article argues that the geographies of taxation offer an important but neglected insight into changes taking place in the nature of the contemporary state in the context of globalisation. Following Schumpeter's analysis of the “tax state”, the paper argues that, historically, the theory and practice of fiscal space are fundamental both to state form and to the possibility of political and social institutions. Despite this, the complexity and fluidity inherent in fiscal space has been obscured by the dominant normative conception of “the” fiscal state. As the concept of “fiscal sovereignty” becomes less and less salient in practice in the context of economic globalisation, it remains a powerful ideological concept for state governance. This paper reviews the primary contemporary accounts of fiscal space across a range of disciplinary contexts and scales of governance. Despite the expectation and or desire for some form of “fiscal globalisation” on the part of commentators, in practice what we see is an increased centralisation of state fiscal control coupled with a creeping individuation and privatisation of fiscal responsibility. This radical respatialisation of fiscal space has profound implications both for the state itself and for any prospect of the creation of a global “public domain” founded on a global fisc.
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