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The European Commission has been urged to take radical steps to boost its investment industry and channel more retail savings into capital markets to help it overcome the dual challenges of Brexit and the coronavirus recovery. In a landmark report published on Wednesday, a group of financial executives, investor representatives and former policymakers called on Brussels to make a fresh push to revive its capital markets union plan, which was designed to reduce the bloc’s reliance on bank borrowing. Europe has long nurtured ambitions to develop investment markets similar to those of the US, in which funds can grow to a larger scale, bringing down costs for investors and enabling greater retail participation. However, the capital markets project has achieved limited progress since launching in 2015. The high-level forum advising the commission said “rapid and bold measures” were needed to stop Europe falling behind as it emerges from the economic crisis sparked by Covid-19. Several ...

S ven Beckert has  produced a fascinating and wide-ranging history of cotton, from its early appearance in household production in Asia thousands of years ago, via its modest debut in local exchanges, to its eventual role as a key ingredient in the Industrial Revolution and its continuing importance for today’s consumers, poor or rich. Importantly, this is an account of both stages of cotton’s production, in the fields as well as the factories, agriculture as well as manufacture. A German historian now based in the United States, Beckert is the author of  The Monied Metropolis  (2001), a study of the consolidation of New York’s bourgeoisie in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His new book,  Empire of Cotton , is enriched by research into documents and archives from two dozen countries. This is by no means untrodden territory. Giorgio Riello in his—also prizewinning— Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World  (2013) has recently provided a fasc...

the Soviet Union had a profound impact on China’s thinking about political ideology, institutions and development.footnote1 The disastrous consequences for social welfare in Russia arising from the cpsu’s demise reinforced Beijing’s determination to resist external and internal pressure to move towards parliamentary democracy. Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union disintegrate while the Communist Party of China (cpc) was able to survive and strengthen its position? The dramatic divergence in the trajectories of the two Communist superpowers has been of incalculable significance for the global political economy of the twenty-first century, with effects potentially enduring far into the future. The two regimes had a common point of departure in the political-economic system established in Russia in 1917–21. Its essential features—a monopoly of political control in the hands of the Party, state ownership of the means of production, state control over finance and trade—were dev...

the Soviet Union had a profound impact on China’s thinking about political ideology, institutions and development. footnote 1  The disastrous consequences for social welfare in Russia arising from the  cpsu’s  demise reinforced Beijing’s determination to resist external and internal pressure to move towards parliamentary democracy. Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union disintegrate while the Communist Party of China ( cpc ) was able to survive and strengthen its position? The dramatic divergence in the trajectories of the two Communist superpowers has been of incalculable significance for the global political economy of the twenty-first century, with effects potentially enduring far into the future. The two regimes had a common point of departure in the political-economic system established in Russia in 1917–21. Its essential features—a monopoly of political control in the hands of the Party, state ownership of the means of production, state control over fin...