::: published in New Political Economy :::
with Hans Volmary and Leonhard Plank
“Austrian exceptionalism in the financialisation of housing and care: a precarious interplay of bulwarks and conduits.”
Abstract: This article investigates the sectors of housing and residential care in Austria regarding the extent of privatisation and exposure to financialisation through real estate investment, private equity or shareholder value orientation to ascertain reasons for Austria’s comparatively low levels of financialisation. We argue that country-specific welfare regimes give rise to different degrees of financialisation of social provisioning. We refer to the regulatory frameworks and institutional arrangements enabling and/or restricting this process as bulwarks against or conduits for financialisation. At the more general level, we identify the conservative-corporatist welfare model with its emphasis on continuity and preference for incremental over drastic change as a key reason for the stability in welfare provision. Further, our sectoral analysis reveals three key bulwarks across both sectors, namely (1) path-dependent institutions that have developed out of Austrian social partnership; (2) widely (although not exclusively) upheld common-good stipulations for publicly funded goods and services; (3) strong frameworks of tenant, service users and workers’ protection. However, we also see that financial investment opportunities are sought around the fringes by (1) taking advantage of fragmented regulations; (2) exploiting sectoral variation, for example, by investing in care homes as real estate.