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Iceland's rise, fall, stabilisation and beyond

Author

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  • Robert H. Wade
  • Silla Sigurgeirsdottir

Abstract

Iceland is an unusually pure example of the dynamics that blocked regulation and caused financial fragility across the developed world for 20 years. This essay describes the statist-and-corporatist political economy of the country as it soared from near the bottom of the Western European income hierarchy at the end of the World War II to up near the top by the 1980s. It illustrates how a group of neoliberal politicians and allied civil servants drove through selective deregulation and privatisation in the 1990s and 2000s. In the space created for newly privatised banks, Icelandic financiers grew the banks and linked private equity firms through mergers and acquisitions abroad to the point where by 2007 tiny Iceland supported three banks in the world's biggest 300 banks, with assets eight times the GDP--second highest in the world after Switzerland. As profits from these overseas operations were partly redistributed back to Iceland the economy boomed, in the grip of super-Minsky processes. The government, the banks and the media interpreted the boom as testimony to the validity of neoliberal policies and went out of their way to hide increasing financial fragility from view, preventing a negative or self-correcting policy feedback loop. The accident waiting to happen happened in the wake of the Lehman collapse in September 2008. The essay charts the zigzags of the government's response and the citizens' response, and discusses the prospects for a resumption of growth on a more sustainable basis. It suggests that Iceland illustrates in miniature the ratcheting down of mass living standards underway across the Western world now that the cushion of debt has been removed, even as financiers and others in the top few percentiles of national income distributions increase their share of national income. But economic institutions and politics matter: in Iceland the large devaluation spread the cut in a relatively 'apolitical' way; the government let the banks go bust rather than bail them out at taxpayers' expense; it imposed capital controls on outflows; and it used fiscal transfers to protect the bottom half of the population from disproportionate cuts. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert H. Wade & Silla Sigurgeirsdottir, 2012. "Iceland's rise, fall, stabilisation and beyond," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 36(1), pages 127-144.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:36:y:2012:i:1:p:127-144
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    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/ber038
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    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. [A&C] L’ascesa, la caduta, la stabilizzazione dell’Islanda e oltre
      by Lorenzo Battisti in Pensieri Economici on 2013-07-22 18:37:00

    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Robert Boyer, 2013. "The euro crisis: undetected by conventional economics, favoured by nationally focused polity," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 37(3), pages 533-569.
    2. Makedonas Eleftherios & Bellos Sotirios & Turan Subasat, 2015. "IMF Lending and Poverty in Developing Countries," Journal of Heterodox Economics, Sciendo, vol. 2(2), pages 113-137, December.
    3. Thengilsdottir, G. & Gardarsdottir, H. & Almarsdottir, A.B. & McClure, C.B. & Heerdink, E.R., 2013. "The association between lifting an administrative restriction on antidepressant dispensing and treatment patterns in Iceland," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 111(2), pages 193-199.
    4. Robert H. Wade, 2023. "The World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery in the Context of the International Debt Crisis," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 54(5), pages 1354-1373, September.
    5. Thorvaldur Gylfason, 2015. "Social Capital and Crises with an Application to Iceland," CESifo Working Paper Series 5423, CESifo.
    6. Ilene Grabel, 2015. "The rebranding of capital controls in an era of productive incoherence," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(1), pages 7-43, February.
    7. Bruno Martorano, 2015. "Is It Possible to Adjust ‘With a Human Face’? Differences in Fiscal Consolidation Strategies between Hungary and Iceland," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 57(4), pages 623-654, December.
    8. Thorvaldur Gylfason, 2014. "Iceland: How Could This Happen?," CESifo Working Paper Series 4605, CESifo.
    9. Erik Larson, 2017. "Demand for credit, international financial legitimacy, and vulnerability to crises: Regulatory change and the social origins of Iceland's collapse," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 11(2), pages 185-202, June.
    10. Wade, Robert Hunter, 2023. "The world development report 2022: finance for an equitable recovery in the context of the international debt crisis," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120267, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    11. Bruno Martorano, 2015. "Is It Possible to Adjust ‘With a Human Face’? Differences in Fiscal Consolidation Strategies between Hungary and Iceland," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 57(4), pages 623-654, December.

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