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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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318 results
Recovery from the Covid-19 crisis provides a chance to implement economic measures that are also beneficial from environmental and social perspectives. While ‘green’ recovery packages are crucial to support economies tracking a low-carbon transition in the short-term, green measures such as carbon pricing are also key to improving welfare in the long-term. This commentary specifies the need for carbon pricing, outlines its implications for our everyday lives, and explains how it works alongside value-based change in the context of climate action and societal well-being.
Carbon Pricing: The Key to Open the Way Toward a Sustainable Recovery and Long-Term Wellbeing
This course provides future change makers in public and private sectors with a comprehensive overview on the structures and actors that shape markets.
The Governance of Markets in Challenging Times: From Classic Authors to New Approaches
What are the implications of the politics of "behavioural change"? Alexander Feldmann took a closer look for you on nudging and framing and if this is a legitimate instrument being used by the state to make us behave better in terms of our carbon footprint.
Politics as supermarket? Or how current policy design changes the relationship between the state and its citizens
Deforestation is estimated to be responsible for about 12-29% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This essay will explore ecological economics as an alternative lens through which to approach forest conservation and the acceleration of climate change.
Ecological Economics: A Solution to Deforestation?
Environmental catastrophe looms large over politics: from the young person’s climate march to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, increasing amounts of political space are devoted to the issue. Central to this debate is the question of whether economic growth inevitably leads to environmental issues such as depleted finite resources and increased waste, disruption of natural cycles and ecosystems, and of course climate change. Growth is the focal point of the de-growth and zero-growth movements who charge that despite efficiency gains, increased GDP always results in increased use of energy and emissions. On the other side of the debate, advocates of continued growth (largely mainstream economists) believe that technological progress and policies can ‘decouple’ growth from emissions.
To Grow or Not to Grow?
Aim of this intensive workshop is to understand macroeconomic workings of climate change as as the background of sustainable finance; to analyse financial assets with ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) criteria attached to them and their markets and important institutional players; to develop a critical perspective on the current setup of sustainable finance; and to synthesise this knowledge by applying it on in-depth case studies.
Sustainable Finance
How did the coronavirus almost bring down the Global Financial System? What effects does monetary policy have on inequality? What role do Central Banks have in the social-ecological transformation? How could Central Banks tackle climate change? What is Central Bank Digital Currency?
Next Generation Central Banking
The objective of the course is to explore the main strengths and weaknesses of orthodox and heterodox paradigms within development economics.
Issues in Development Economics
Post-Keynesians focus on the analysis of capitalist economies, perceived as highly productive, but unstable and conflictive systems. Economic activity is determined by effective demand, which is typically insufficient to generate full employment and full utilisation of capacity.
Post-Keynesian Economics
Maria Nikolaidi on how Minsky’s theory has been modelled over past decades and how one can use these models in order to analyse contemporary issues such as financial fragility and financial instability caused by climate change.
Minsky's theory about financial fragility and financial instability
Can pluralism in economics be useful to tackle the fight against climate change? How can diversity in methods and ideas allow for a better understanding of the issue of the climate crisis? What solutions do different schools of thought offer to overcome the most pressing challenge of the 21st Century?
Clips on Climate: Ecological Economics
Can pluralism in economics be useful to tackle the fight against climate change? How can diversity in methods and ideas allow for a better understanding of the issue of the climate crisis?
Clips on Climate: Behavioral Economics
This video explains what the term 'Feminist Economics' describes and goes into detail on how feminist economists use methodology differently, why they advocate for diversity in research and how to look into preconditions for the functioning of our economies. It, additionally, highlights the link between feminist economics and the study of climate change.
What is Feminist Economics & what does it have to do with studying the climate crisis?
This panel was part of the conference "Next Generation Gentral Banking - Climate Change, Inequality, Financial Instability" 03. - 05.02.2021.
NextGen Central Banking: How the coronavirus almost brought down the global financial system
This panel was part of the conference "Next Generation Gentral Banking - Climate Change, Inequality, Financial Instability" 03. - 05.02.2021.
NextGen Central Banking: Central Banking Beyond Inflation
The workshop deals with the contribution of Plural Economics to the urgently needed change of the economic system towards sustainability and global responsibility.
After completing the module, participants should be able to demarcate and explain different economic approaches to sustainability. They should be able to evaluate the respective concepts based on their contribution to the ecological transformation of the economic system.
Pluralist Economics for a Sustainable Economic Future
This course provides a simple introduction to problems that social scientists are working on (e.g. racial disparities, inequality and climate change) in a manner that does not require any prior background in Economics or Statistics.
Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems
Some economic events are so major and unsettling that they “change everything.” Such is the case with the financial crisis that started in the summer of 2007 and is still a drag on the world economy. Yet enough time has now elapsed for economists to consider questions that run deeper than the usual focus on the immediate causes and consequences of the crisis.
Rethinking the Financial Crisis
As the world's energy system faces a period of unprecedented change, a global struggle over who controls the sector--and for what purposes--is intensifying. The question of "green capitalism" is now unavoidable, for capitalist planners and anti-capitalist struggles alike.
Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution
Jo Michell discusses some key implications of climate change regarding the standard policy prescriptions of Post-Keynesian economics, particularly relating to the possible necessity of consumption constraints and the presence of recurrent inflation.
Macroeconomic Policy Coordination: A New Approach for the End of Abundance
Capitalism cannot fulfil the promises of the French revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Why? Richard Wollf elaborates on Marx's analysis of the distribution and organisation of surplus in society and his conclusion that there is something inherently wrong in capitalist class structure that still causes economic crisis in our modern times. Change requires changing the organisation of the production. This goes far beyond a discussion of 'more-state' vs. 'less-state'.
Intro To Marxian Economics
In this radio interview, Andrew Sayer first outlines some features of neoliberalism and policies that are associated with it. Then a difference between wealth creation via investment and wealth extraction by means of lending money to those deprived of it or by acquiring property such as real estate or financial assets on the secondary market as absentee owner is established. In this context reference is made to J.A. Hobson's concept of "improperty." Finally, there are some words on the power dynamics associated with capitalism and its relation to climate change.
Why We Can’t Afford the Rich
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
This paper investigates how the concept of public purpose is used in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). As a common denominator among political scientists, the idea of public purpose is that economic actions should aim at benefiting the majority of the society. However, the concept is to be considered as an ideal of a vague nature, which is highly dependent on societal context and, hence, subject to change over time. MMT stresses that government spending plans should be designed to pursue a certain socio-economic mandate and not to meet any particular financial outcome. The concept of public purpose is heavily used in this theoretical body of thought and often referred to in the context of policy proposals as the ideas of universal job guarantee and banking reform proposals show. MMT scholars use the concept as a pragmatic benchmark against which policies can be assessed. With regards to the definition of public propose, MMT scholars agree that it is dependent on the social-cultural context. Nevertheless, MMT scholars view universal access to material means of survival as universally applicable and in that sense as the lowest possible common denominator.
Modern Monetary Theory and the public purpose
The current Great Recession, the worst crisis that capitalism has faced since the Great Depression, has failed, at least so far, to generate a change in the teaching and practice of Macroeconomics. This seems bizarre as if nothing has happened and the economists are just going about doing business as usual. In light of this, the current paper attempts to address how Macroeconomics ought to be taught to students at the advanced intermediate level, which gives them an overall perspective on the subject.
Plurality in Teaching Macroeconomics
Recording of the Workshop “The collateral supply effect on central banking”, 04.02.2021, part of the "Next Generation Central Banking - Climate Change, Inequality, Financial Instability" conference by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung
NextGen Central Banking: The collateral supply effect on central banking
This essay analyses how the role of central banks changed since the global financial crisis, and how this directional change was accelerated by the outbreak of Covid-19.
Revolution without revolutionaries: interrogating the return of monetary financing
Is our system capable of energy transition and climate protection? How plural is economic policy in practice and who makes the big decisions? What kind of change do we want?
Energy and Climate Economics - Where do we come from and where do we have to go?
As the global economic landscape evolves, demographics shift, inequality expands, climate change gets worse and technology continues to advance at breakneck speed, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is struggling to stay relevant.
Beyond GDP - Wellbeing Economy, Happiness Index and the postgrowth debate
The article discusses whether the turning point in EU's Russia policy with sanctions aimed directly at Putin's war chest of foreign reserves will change the landscape of countries' foreign assets.
The Monetary Consequences of Vladimir Putin
"Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer and researcher in political economy at University of Greenwich. She is currently in Ukraine on an extraordinary leave. And while she writes that she is, for the moment, in relative safety, that could change any moment. Being a Ukrainian, an activist and an academic, Yuliya traveled to Ukraine on Feb 19, 2022 as part of a fact-finding and solidarity mission with a number of MPs, trade unionists and journalists. The goal, she says, of this mission is to connect with civil society organizations, trade unions, activists and politicians, and “to express direct, cross-border solidarity from the UK working class to the Ukrainian working class.”
Yuliya Yurchenko expands the frame for understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine
An examination of women's changing economic roles. Includes an analysis of labour force participation, wage inequality, gender differences in education, intra-household distribution of resources, economics of reproduction, and how technological change affects women.
Women and the Economy
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