The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.

The task taken upon in the book was to demonstrate why, even in the globalisation era, the need to investigate the nature of the state and state– class relation remains pivotal, and to examine the extent to which the state is autonomous from proprietary classes, if at all. The point was to reflect on the agrarian transformation by asking questions about economic structures and their interplay with the state. The interplay is of two types: the differentiated effects of class on state apparatus and, therefore, on policy formulation, and the effects of policies on the agrarian classes. The aim was to document an empirically informed understanding of agrarian classes, and a differentiation within the agrarian capitalist class in particular to reflect on the growing inequality. The method followed was empirical observations based on which conceptual categories were drawn. The methodology is particularly important given that a critique of Marxist political economy has been that it has tended to generalize, particularly about the Global South, without paying enough attention to the empirical reality and cultural context (Skocpol, 2010; Poulantzas, 1973). To understand the role of the state, I scrutinized state agrarian policies between 2004 and 2013 and three other policies that relate to rural life and their effect on classes. The class structure cannot be understood without the employment reservation policy and PRI policy which cater to specific castes but, as demonstrated, foster accumulation. Hence a discussion on these policies was also included. In the Introduction, I asked: is the inequality new or structural? The answer is it is both.

The period is chosen to understand if the state made concerted efforts to bring the agrarian capitalist class into a political settlement through specific policies in reaction to the loss of the BJP in the 2004 general elections. The study thus adopted a triangular frame bringing together political– economic–social processes to understand the relations between class and state. This book raised four key questions which are answered in the subsequent sections. The book found four fractions of the agrarian proprietary class to be relevant – big farmer, landlords, gentleman farmers, and capitalist farmers – and their sources of accumulation and political bargaining. It showed differentiation within the class with only two fractions accumulating from agriculture directly.

One of the enormous contributions of the Monetary Policy Committee is simply to make interest rate decisions a systematic process reflecting the needs of the economy. Over 25 years, the MPC has, I think, proved a great success in institutional reform. Inflation averaged close to the 2% target, at least until 2021. People accepted that this was a good way of making technocratic judgements to meet a target set by Parliament. This chapter offers five lessons for the continuing conduct of monetary policy. Inflation targeting is a way of living not a theory of the monetary transmission mechanism; money matters; set policy in the world not in a model; abandon point forecasts and finally understand the real equilibrium or disequilibrium of the economy

This chapter compares the decision-making process of the Bank of England to that of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve. The move towards making monetary policy decisions via committees coincided with the shift to central bank independence. This was a natural consequence of central banks no longer taking orders from their governments but being given the operational independence. Members of committees then needed to pool the information that would help them make good decisions in uncertain circumstances – a necessary step when performing complex tasks like monetary policy. The move towards central bank independence was crucial to ensure politically independent and goal-oriented conduct of monetary policy. The more long-term orientation and objectivity of monetary policy’s goals – contrasting with the shorter-term nature of political cycles and political bias to inflate the economy – proved beneficial to price stability, with more credible signals helping to manage inflation expectations

Chapter 3 focuses on political mobilizers of welfare nationalism, mainly popular attitudes toward welfare deservingness, and agents that mobilized anti-immigrant politics. The chapter elaborates on four types of deservingness criteria for migrants; need or vulnerability, ethnic closeness, contributions to receiving states’ economies and to their national security. It argues that societal norms for outsiders’ deservingness have narrowed in both Europe and Russia. Populist parties, anti-immigrant, and Euroskeptic are shown to be key mobilizers of welfare nationalism, abetted by anti-immigrant mass media. The chapter tracks one major populist party each in Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Poland, showing how that party gained vote share and national influence by opposing the CEE and MENA migrations. Using party programs and electoral outcomes, it shows how populists reinforced and amplified welfare nationalist grievances in societies, channeling them into electoral success and pressures for exclusionary migration policies. In authoritarian Russia, popular grievances against migrants are shown to be similar to grievances in Europe, but welfare nationalism was mobilized by regional elites, governors, and mayors. The chapter draws on arguments about authoritarian elites’ motivations to respond to popular grievances in order to explain how sub-national leaders used anti-immigrant mobilization for political advantage in Russia’s hybrid regime.

This chapter highlights a number of potential explanations for the apparent disconnect between the votes and the views of dissenting members of the Monetary Policy Committee. The MPC appears to agree more than would be expected on the basis of views expressed elsewhere in speeches and papers. None of them are particularly satisfactory. The obvious way to establish which, if any, of these explanations are relevant is to ask former members of the Committee what they think. There remains a compelling case for producing an oral history of the Monetary Policy Committee if we want to understand how and why committees function in practice.

The chapter examines how the size and diversity of the migrant population shaped economic outcomes in western Poland using statistical analysis. It shows that when state institutions were extractive, the composition of the migrant population played no role in shaping economic performance. Once institutions became more inclusive, however, municipalities settled by more regionally diverse populations registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates. The chapter then rules out a series of alternative explanations for these findings.

Provides a brief overview of elements of the Islamic normative tradition. I consider three key concepts – justice, the common good and community – and ambiguities of their contemporary application. The primary focus of the discussion concerns resources (including wealth and property) – their attribution and distribution. To whom do wealth, property and resources belong, and what are their responsibilities? How, by whom, and for what purposes are wealth and resources to be distributed, and who has the authority to make such determinations? In broad strokes, I outline how, according to religious norms, resources ought to be utilized and managed for the sake of the "common good." The purpose of this discussion is to provide a framework that facilitates a deeper understanding of the extent to which religious norms have been instrumentalized and at times, reformulated in the conduct of the four oil-financed institutionalized practices explored in subsequent chapters.

A discontinuous period for agrarian policies since 1990

The study of class relations in India and their interaction with state policy necessitates an overview of Indian polity in the post-liberalisation era. Liberalisation of India's economic policies started in 1991, aiming to make the economy more market oriented and expand the role of private and foreign investments. That decade was a period of economic, social, and political flux, from which India took about eight years to stabilise. Kohli (2001) points out that between 1947 and 1990, India had five general elections, and five general elections were held during the 1990s alone. Following this, the BJP-led NDA held power for two terms (1998–2004). The period between 1997–98 and 2004–05 registered low agricultural growth at 1.6 per cent per annum, which recovered to 3.5 per cent between 2003–04 and 2010–11 (Dev, 2012). The late 1990s witnessed the lowest agricultural growth since Independence. The period since 1997 has been characterised by agrarian distress culminating in farmer suicides (Patnaik, 2003). Political commentators argue that in view of the agrarian distress across states, the NDA lost support of India's rural voters, which proved to be the NDA's undoing. Against this backdrop, the UPA with the Congress at its helm came to power in the 2004 general election (Birner, Gupta, and Sharma, 2011; Bose, 2006; Mooij, 2005). The rise in agricultural growth right after that makes the problem of who benefitted worth thinking about. The various regional parties that had mushroomed during the 1970s and 1980s came to play a determining role in the formation of governments at the centre, because the national parties were unable to attain a simple majority on their own. Be it the BJP-led NDA or the Congress-led UPA, the coalition had to include regional parties to form governments.

Until 2014, the UPA held power at the centre, while governments changed hands at regional levels. The three states studied here – Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, and Karnataka – have mostly been under the rule of the BJP since 2000. Since its formation in 2000, Chhattisgarh has had a BJP government until 2018.