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Economics need to change - now more than ever! With Exploring Economics, we strengthen alternative economic approaches and counter mainstream economics with a critical and pluralistic vision of economic education. We also provide background analyses on current economic debates to strengthen a critical economic discourse.
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930 results
Ha Joon Chang exposes the main ideas of his book Bad Samaritans, namely that historically states have developed and industrialized by making policy interventions related to industry protection, tariffs and subsidies and not by opening their markets to free trade. Chang elaborates on the examples of Japan, the US, Singapore and Germany amongst others to show that an interventionist path to development has been the regularity and not an anomaly. In the end of the lecture, he argues that they idea of a level playing field should be replaced by a trade order that accounts for differences in power and economic capacities of different countries. The last 20 minutes are questions and answers.
Ha-Joon Chang - Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
This multimedia dossier is part of the series „Understanding Finance“ by Finance Watch and explores the following questions: What is bank capital and how is it regulated? It further presents controversies on the size of bank capital in the aftermath of the financial crisis and on how bank capital affects economic activity.
Bank capital – what is it and how is it regulated?
Founded in 1968, The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) is an interdisciplinary membership organization of academics and of activists. Its mission is to promote the study, development and application of radical political economic analysis to social problems. Concretely, this involves a continuing critique of both the capitalist system, and of all forms of exploitation and oppression. URPE’s mission also includes, coming out of this critique, helping to construct a progressive social policy, and a human-centered radical alternative to capitalism.
Union for Radical Political Economics
First historical instances of colonialism such as the crusades are revisited. Then a lengthy account of the colonial experience of the Spanish Kingdom in South America and of the British Empire in India is given. The Indian case is illustrated with large amounts of archival materials from a colonial administrator. There the workings of the colonial bureaucracy and law and its (positive) achievements as well as the ignorance and arrogance of the external rulers are demonstrated. After narrating the Indian independence to some depth some recent colonial wars (Algeria, Vietnam, Congo, Angola) are briefly examined. In the end, the impact of colonialism on current, i.e. 1970s, (economic) international relations is discussed. The general tenor is that colonialism is a dysfunctional system. Still, agency is mostly placed with the empire rather than with the ruled.
The Age of Uncertainty Episode 4 The Colonial Idea
Özlem Onaran analyses the current problems of secular stagnation from a global perspective. At the core of global economic problems is insufficient demand caused by falling wage shares, because most individual countries, and the world as a whole are “wage-led”. Hence a strategy for global growth is to aim at increasing wages and thus the wage share, and the abandonment of policies focusing purely on national competitiveness. Financialization has broken the link between corporate profitability and investment. Reregulation of finance and higher public investment is required in order to crowd in private investment, in this way, reversing the declining trend of potential output growth.
Current Problems of Secular Stagnation from a Global Perspective
Irene van Staveren, professor of pluralist development economics, presents her pluralist teaching method for the introductory level. Based on her textbook “Economics After the Crisis: An Introduction to Economics from a Pluralist and Global Perspective” she suggests to focus on real-world problems and pari passu apply economic theories such as Social economics, Institutional economics, Post-Keynesian economics as well as Neoclassical economics without wasting time to single out the latter. Besides pointing out advantages of such a pluralist method Irene illustrates her approach based on interesting topics such as growth or feminist economics.
Beyond stimulus versus Austerity: Pluralist capacity building in Macroeconomics
This video animates part of the talk “On Economics” by Ha-Joon Chang in which he states that economics is not a science for experts but for everyone. Chang further argues why it is important to take into account different perspectives on economics – he identifies at least nine school of thoughts which all have their strengths and weaknesses and presents examples on free trade and well-being. Chang further elaborates on the difficulties of changing the economic status quo.
Economics Is For Everyone!
How did economic growth become paramount as the public policy objective? Peter Victor discusses the role of growth within institutions, asks if it is possible to imagine a degrowth economy and discusses the role of grass-root movements.
Ecological Economics
In this radio program, the anthropologist David Graeber, explores the history of debt in (currently) 12 episodes. The program is based on his book Debt: The First 5000 Years. First, Graeber asks the questions of how debt and money are characterized, which meaning and roles they had in different historic episodes and how they were interrelated. In the most recent episodes, Graeber elaborates on how debt shaped society. He argues that debt had a different moral status in different times of history, one session analyses the current financial and economic crisis and the role of credit in this historical context.
Promises, Promises: A history of debt
The Lecturer Prof. Francesco Lissoni presents basic concepts of the Economics of Innovation. Firstly, he distinguishes between invention, innovation and diffusion and relates innovation to economic growth. Subsequently, he elucidates learning and network effects.
Economics of Innovation 1/2
In this lecture, Beatrice Cherrier explains why it is worth to research the history of JEL codes. The changing relationship between theory and application and the rise and death of new economic topics in the XXth century through the successive revisions of the classification system economists use to publish, recruit and navigate their discipline.
Understanding the transformation of Economics through the history of JEL codes
At the 2013 Climate, Mind, & Behavior Symposium, Rebecca Adamson of First Peoples Worldwide illustrates alternative economic systems modeled after indigenous worldviews and the power they have in pushing us towards a more sustainable existence.
Rebecca Adamson: Enoughness - Restoring Balance to the Economy
Prof. Robert Wade (London School of Economics, UK) discusses industrial policy, the challenges of economic development for emerging countries like Brazil and...
Prof. Robert Wade discusses industrial policy - Rethinking the State
In order to describe the global structure of the monetary and financial system and its effects on the global economy, most economics textbooks rely on unappropriated theories that provide nothing but outdated descriptions. In this talk, key speakers in economics, economic history and banking try to make this complex system a little more understandable by relying on real-world insights.
Global Money: Past, Present, Future
The MINE website explores the interplay between nature and economy. Focusing on such fundamental concepts as time, thermodynamics, evolution, homo politicus and justice, a new outline of economic activity emerges within nature. The dominant approach of Mainstream Economics, which considers nature as a subsystem of the economy, is thus replaced by a broader and more integrated framework. The visual map and its links between concepts provides an orientation. The visitor can approach the content from their own starting point and follow their own path to discovery. Each concept starts with the historical background and moves on through theory and practice.
The research behind MINE began in the 1970s at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in an interdisciplinary group spearheaded by Professor Malte Faber, including scientists from economics to mathematics, physics and philosophy. The research has contributed to the field of Ecological Economics.
MINE is directed at students, scientists and decion-makers. More on http://nature-economy.de/faq/
MINE - Mapping the interplay between Nature and Economy
This infographic gives a summary of the 2018 Trade Wars. This simple, compiled overview is suitable for those without a strong political or economic background.
The infographic explains briefly basic concepts related to trade and provides a short timeline of events. It furthermore checks Trump administration's arguments to launch the the trade war against facts and estimates of how the 2018 trade war can affect the global and North-American economy.
2018 Trade Wars Infographic
Since Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Price in Economic Sciences in 2002, a new branch of economics gained academic and popular interest. That is, the so-called area of behavioural economics. However, some scholars claim that this new area of economics is not changing much of the mainstream paradigm. Why?
Is Behavioural Economics the New Mainstream?
In this blog article Steve Keen elaborates on flawed climate change modelling and mainstream economics forecasts. In specific, he stresses the climate change forecasts of the DICE model (“Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy”) by Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner William Nordhaus.
The Cost of Climate Change
What data is used in the economic models of the IPCC? How problematic is it, that tipping points are often ignored? A very interesting presentation by Steve Keen during the OECD Conference "Averting Systemic Collapse".
Averting Systemic Collapse
In this article, Gareth Dale analyzes and compares the main characteristics and differences of two visions that are currently emerging to tackle Climate Change: the Green New Deal and Degrowth. Which are the consequences from the environmental, economic and political point of view? And what are the underlying doctrines?
Degrowth and the Green New Deal
The world is coping with a global disaster, as the new Coronavirus takes a toll on many lost lives and a severe impact on economic activity. To provide a long-run perspective, this column documents the international response to a variety of disasters since 1790. Based on a new comprehensive database on loans extended by governments and central banks, official (sovereign-to-sovereign) international lending is much larger than generally known. Official lending spikes in times of global turmoil, such as wars, financial crises or natural disasters. Indeed, in these periods, official capital flows have repeatedly surpassed total private capital flows in the past two centuries. Wars, in particular, were accompanied by large surges in the volume of official cross-border lending.
Coping with disasters: Lessons from two centuries of international response
Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and the co-founder of the international DiEM25 platform, discusses the economic and political impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic, in particular with regards to the Eurozone and southern European countries.
Coronavirus Economics and the Eurozone
John Christensen from the Tax Justice Network addresses the Modern Monetary Theory idea that governments don't need tax revenues if they want to spend money. Doing so, he sums up the main points made by MMT proponents and their critics, and shows how MMT can be reconciled with another progressive economic narrative: "Modern Tax Theory". While MMT made valuable contributions to the policy debate on fiscal policy, it misrepresents the importance of taxation as a political matter and as a way to generate public revenues. This is where MMT steps in.
The Magic Money Tree: From Modern Monetary Theory to Modern Tax Theory
As part of a larger series on Just Transitions, the author describes how the current corona crisis comes with new economic policy responses which would have been considered unthinkable only a year ago. Arguing that with the current high levels of confidence in politicians and scientific advice, combined with the realisation that the market has not been able to solve this problem on its own, we are now in a unique position to implement a radically different solution than was politically possible previously.
A Social-Green Deal, with just transition—the European answer to the coronavirus crisis
An analysis of the modern neoliberal world, its characteristics, flaws and planetary boundaries aiming to end new economic politics and support a global redistribution of power, wealth and roles.
In this online lecture, economist and Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK. Costas Lapavitsas, explains the limitations of the neoliberal market in creating financial stability and growth in both, developing and developed countries.
The Limits to Neoliberalism: how states respond to the crisis
Most mainstream neoclassical economists completely failed to anticipate the crisis which broke in 2007 and 2008. There is however a long tradition of economic analysis which emphasises how growth in a capitalist economy leads to an accumulation of tensions and results in periodic crises. This paper first reviews the work of Karl Marx who was one of the first writers to incorporate an analysis of periodic crisis in his analysis of capitalist accumulation. The paper then considers the approach of various subsequent Marxian writers, most of whom locate periodic cyclical crises within the framework of longer-term phases of capitalist development, the most recent of which is generally seen as having begun in the 1980s. The paper also looks at the analyses of Thorstein Veblen and Wesley Claire Mitchell, two US institutionalist economists who stressed the role of finance and its contribution to generating periodic crises, and the Italian Circuitist writers who stress the problematic challenge of ensuring that bank advances to productive enterprises can successfully be repaid.
Finance and Crisis: Marxian, Institutionalist and Circuitist approaches
"Bank Underground" is the staff blog of the Bank of England, founded to publish the views and insights of the people working for one of the world's oldest central banks. The blog covers a wide range of macroeconomic topics, mostly linked to the effects of monetary policy, of course, but not all the time. It provides timely, relevant analysis of contemporary challenges in economic policy and is thus often a perfect primer.
Bank Underground
We collect selected high quality working papers from the leading international universities and research institutes in the field of plural and heterodox economics. The working papers in our selection present economic schools of thought and debates in a first-class way and give an insight into the latest research.
Exploring Economics Working Paper Selection
This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which however do not give any explanation for the occurrence of financial crises and thus cannot suggest any remedies for the present situation. A broad range of theoretical approaches analyzing financial crises from a medium term perspective is then discussed. Within this group we focused on the insights of Marx, Schumpeter, Wicksell, Hayek, Fisher, Keynes, Minsky, and Kindleberger. Subsequently the contributions of the Regulation School, the approach of Social Structures of Accumulation and Post-Keynesian approach, which focus on long-term developments and regime shifts in capitalist development, are presented. International approaches to finance and financial crises are integrated into the analyses. We address the issue of relevance of all these theories for the present crisis and draw some policy implications. The paper has the aim to find out to which extent the different approaches are able to explain the Great Recession, what visions they develop about future development of capitalism and to which extent these different approaches can be synthesized.
Theories of finance and financial crisis: Lessons for the Great Recession
The documentary features a talk of the US-American writer and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin summarising the main points of his 2011 book "The Third Industrial Revolution."
The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
Karl Marx: An early post-Keynesian?
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
Development of heterodox economics at public German universities since the 1970s
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