Introduction: social economy, a third sector in a plural people-oriented economy

Excerpt

The current recession is not just another economic crisis. When the most powerful country in the world sees its treasury bonds reduced from a triple A rating to double A, when the crisis of sovereign debt has not only the peripheral economies of developed capitalism in its grip, but also threatens European economies that are central but weak, thus entailing a high risk of producing domino effects, when price variations for certain agricultural products in international markets and a succession of bad harvests hail the return, as of yore, of widespread famine in the planet’s poorest countries, when due to the prolonged stagnation of the world’s economies, we do not manage to galvanize consumption, and with it international trade, when the governments of developed countries apply economic policies to stem the crisis, which have turned out to be not only inefficient, but also have aggravated the imbalances and reduced levels of welfare reached in previous decades, when governments are incapable of dealing with the structural problems of co-evolution between the economic system and the natural environment and of eradicating poverty and hunger, when unemployment and job insecurity become high and constant even amongst the most powerful economic nations, despite having lived through one of the periods of greatest economic growth in history, we are not faced with another recession, but rather a profound, deep-rooted, structural crisis, only comparable with the Great Depression of the 1930s, with which it shares alarming similarities. …