Conference at Rutgers–Camden to Focus on Impacts and Responses to Global Financial Crisis

CAMDEN — The global financial crisis will be examined by some of the world’s top scholars during a Sept. 16-18 conference on the Rutgers–Camden Campus and in Philadelphia.

Sponsored by the Rutgers–Camden Center for State Constitutional Studies, the three-day conference Federalism and the Global Financial Crisis: Impacts and Responses will examine how federal countries are dealing with the crisis.  The event is co-sponsored by the Meyner Center for the Study of State and Local Government at Lafayette College.

“The conference is an opportunity to bring together leading scholars in federalism to explore how federal countries have responded to the economic crisis,” says G. Alan Tarr, director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies and a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers–Camden.

Tarr is the author of a paper titled “The Global Economic Crisis and Federalism: A View from the American States,” which will be presented at the conference.

Participation is open only to representatives of International Association of Centers for Federal Studies and to members of the Research Committee on Federalism and Federation of the International Political Science Association.  It is not a public conference.

Participating scholars will present their research on the global economic crisis during sessions held on the Rutgers–Camden Campus and at Hotel Palomar, located in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square section at South 17th and Sansom Streets.

“The expectation is that papers presented will be the basis for a book on responses for the global economic crisis,” Tarr says. “Although it is not a public event, these papers will be published online so the public can view them.”

Issues that will be discussed include:

Fiscal Arrangements: How has the crisis affected revenues, expenditures, budget priorities, borrowing, and deficit spending?

Institutional Changes: How has responding to the crisis affected the distribution of power between the national and constituent-unit governments and among the executive, legislative, and judicial institutions in various federal systems?

Impact: What responses to the crisis are likely to be institutionalized for the long-term and which responses are likely to be short-term and non-enduring?

Effects of Federalism: Overall, how did the federal features of various countries serve to aggravate and/or ameliorate the impacts of the financial crisis on your country? How did they foster or hinder effective policy responses to the financial crisis in your country?

For more information visit camden.rutgers.edu/federalism.