Focus panel 19 – A financial system fit for a postgrowth economy

Summary

For several decades, advanced economies have been witnessing a continuous slowdown of productivity growth, declining real interest rates and a lower or close to zero GDP growth. This trend has become increasingly global in more recent years, and yet growth remained a major policy objective. Policies to attain it relied mostly on a mixture of ever increasing liquidity, financial deregulation and financial innovation, with the overall result of increasing both the financial instability and inequalities of income and wealth.

A postgrowth-oriented policy would break with this approach and raise several questions as for the future of finance. First, what kind of financial system and financial regulations would we need to pursuit such a policy while simultaneously reallocating financial flows towards common-good objectives such as climate mitigation and adaptation? Second, what would be the implications for the current financial system, and how would it adapt to the new conditions?

Chair

• Aurore Lalucq - MEP (S&D), Beyond Growth Conference organiser

Speakers

• Jezabel Couppey-Soubeyran - Lecturer at University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Scientific advisor at Institut Veblen
• Daniela Gabor - Associate Professor at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol)
• Thierry Philipponnat - Chief economist, Finance Watch
• Philippe Zaouati - Founder and CEO, Mirova