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on Post Keynesian Economics |
| By: | Pavlina R. Tcherneva |
| Abstract: | The conventional approach of fiscal policy is to create jobs by boosting private investment and growth. This approach is backward, says Research Associate Pavlina R. Tcherneva. Policy must begin by fixing the unemployment situation because growth is a byproduct of strong employment-not the other way around. Tcherneva proposes a bottom-up approach based on community programs that can be implemented at all phases of the business cycle; that is, a grass-roots job-guarantee program run by the nonprofit sector (with participation by the social entrepreneurial sector) but financed by the government. A job-guarantee program would lead to full employment over the long run and address an outstanding fault of modern market economies. |
| Date: | 2012–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:levypn:12-02&r=pke |
| By: | C. J. Polychroniou |
| Abstract: | The five-year-long crisis of Western finance capitalism is pushing advanced liberal societies to a breaking point. If governments continue to be proxies of finance capital and aspiring political leaders cheerleaders for their financial backers, a catastrophic economic scenario is not really as far-fetched as some might like to think. Governments, industries, and households are under debt bondage, with the result that revenues from every sector of the economy are being diverted toward interest payments and late fees for various loans taken out on largely exploitative, even fraudulent terms. Now, after years of building up a Ponzi financial regime, Western capitalism faces its ultimate test. Will it collapse, giving rise to long-term economic instability and authoritarian political regimes? Or will it find the strength and the wisdom to make a comeback? |
| Date: | 2012–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:levypn:12-03&r=pke |
| By: | C.J. Polychroniou |
| Abstract: | We live in a terrifying world of policymaking-an age of free-market dogmatism where the economic ideology is fundamentally flawed. Europe's political leadership has applied neo-Hooverian (scorched-earth) policies that are shrinking economies and producing social misery as a result of massive unemployment. Large-scale government intervention is critical in reviving an economy, but the current public-policy mania, which imposes fiscal tightening in the midst of recession, can only lead to catastrophic failure. The bailouts, for example, do not solve Greece's debt crisis but simply postpone an official default. What is needed is a political and economic revolution that includes a return to Keynesian measures and a new institutional architecture-a United States of Europe. |
| Date: | 2012–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:levypn:12-01&r=pke |
| By: | Christian Ghiglino; Antonella Nocco |
| Abstract: | We introduce relative concerns in the form of conspicuous consumption in a standard economic geography model a la Krugman. The primary intuition is that conspicuous consumption imposes a negative externality on some agents and generates a centrifugal force. We show that this is not always the case as the relative concern also rises the demand for the sophisticated good, strengthening the standard centripetal market size effect. We show that the resulting force is very sensitive to the topology of the network of "conspicuous" links in each region and on the level of economic integration. For instance, with relatively large shares of income devoted to the consumption of the standard good, we show that when trade is moderately costly and classes of workers are segregated, relative concerns tends to stabilize the symmetric equilibrium; on the other hand, if workers of different classes interact via their relative concerns, conspicuous consumption is a centripetal force generating stable fully or partially agglomerated equilibria. Finally, when the level of integration is high, the intuition holds and even small relative concerns destabilize the full agglomeration equilibrium, which is stable in the Krugman model |
| Date: | 2012–03–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esx:essedp:708&r=pke |
| By: | Clive L. Spash |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwsre:sre-disc-2012_04&r=pke |
| By: | Clive L. Spash |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwsre:sre-disc-2012_03&r=pke |
| By: | Loayza, Norman (World Bank); Rigolini, Jamele (World Bank); Llorente, Gonzalo (World Bank) |
| Abstract: | We revisit the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditures. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of people with income above 10 US Dollars a day in PPP terms), social policy on health and education becomes more active and the quality of governance regarding democratic participation and official corruption improves. This does not occur at the expense of economic freedom, as an expansion of the middle class also implies more market-oriented economic policy on trade and finance. The impact of a larger middle class appears to be more robust than those of lower poverty, lower inequality, or higher GDP per capita. |
| Keywords: | poverty, middle class, income, institutions, development |
| JEL: | D3 H5 O1 O4 |
| Date: | 2012–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6430&r=pke |
| By: | William Coleman |
| Abstract: | The paper interprets the neoliberalism' of Friedman, Hayek (and others), as a partly successful doctrinal reformulation of 'historical liberalism' that certain material realities had by the mid-20th century proved solvent of. It argues that in the post-War period it was the doctrinal reformulations of political and individual freedom associated with neoliberalism that re-established the potency of ideas of 'free market and 'limited government'. |
| Date: | 2012–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:acb:cbeeco:2012-572&r=pke |