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631 results

2014
Level: beginner
James Robinson gives in this talk a short introduction into the theory and ideas of his popular book "Why Nations Fail" which was published together with D. Acemoglu in 2012. With many real-life examples he gives a lively description on the fundamentals for economic success from an institutionalist view. According to Robinson, the nature of institutions is a crucial factor for economic success. Whether institutions are inclusive (such as in prosperous economies) or extractive (poor economies) stems from the nation's political process and the distribution of political power.
Level: beginner
"Energy issues have always been important in international relations, but in recent years may have become even more important than in the past due to the widespread awareness of existing limits to energy sources and negative climate impacts. The course discusses global trends in energy consumption and production, various available scenarios for potential developments in the coming decades, the availability of oil reserves and the evolution of the oil industry. It then discusses natural gas and highlights the differences between oil and gas. It will also discuss renewable energy sources, nuclear energy and EU energy policy. The course aims at providing students whose main interest is in international relations a background on energy resources, technology and economic realities to allow them to correctly interpret the political impact of current developments. It also aims at providing students, who already have a technical background in energy science or engineering, with the broad global view of energy issues that will allow them to better understand the social, economic and political impact of their technical knowledge."
Level: beginner
"his course introduces the complex, but critical, concepts of sustainability and resilience and examines your impact on our environment."
2014
Level: beginner
In this short talk „On Economics“ Ha-Joon Chang, author of the book „Economics: The User's Guide“, gives a critical wrap-up on the economic discipline – on what is perceived as economics, what are dominant paradigms, the role of numbers and economics in public life. He further elaborates on the importance of heterodox schools of thought.
2015
Level: beginner
This multimedia dossier is part of the series „Understanding Finance“ by Finance Watch and presents a description and critical review of financial markets and their functions. It furthermore discusses recent developments, as high frequency trading.
2015
Level: beginner
Gilles Carbonnier, Professor of Development Economics and Director of Studies at The Graduate Institute Geneva, explains the emerging field of Humanitarian Economics. It analyses how economics can help to better grasp and respond to humanitarian crises, and why capturing market dynamics - including the humanitarian market itself, or in relation to e.g. kidnapping and detention in war - has become critical.
2019
Level: beginner
In this talk Robert Skidelsky analyses how sociology did and could enrich economic analyses, but also how critical sociological insights have been colonised by mainstream economics.
2019
Level: expert
This content submission has two parts: (1) a link to the post by Wolf Richter on deterioration of US subprime credit card debt and loans, driven in part by the overuse of hedonic quality adjustments in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and (2) to introduce Exploring Economics to the website Naked Capitalism, which is an effort to promote critical thinking through the medium of a finance and economics blog and fearless commentary.
2018
Level: advanced
This panel is about discussing the international development discipline from a critical perspective, exploring how the current practice entangles with Eurocentric/neo-colonial thoughts and how can we move beyond them.
2007
Level: advanced
This study offers a unique evolutionary economics perspective on energy and innovation policies in the wider context of the transition to sustainable development. The authors include: - an analysis of the environmental policy implications of evolutionary economics - a critical examination of current Dutch environmental and innovation policies and policy documents - systematic evaluation of three specific energy technologies, namely fuel cells, nuclear fusion and photovoltaic cells, within the evolutionary-economic framework.
2017
Level: advanced
In this book the author develops a new approach to uncertainty in economics, which calls for a fundamental change in the methodology of economics. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical appraisal of the economic theory of uncertainty and shows that uncertainty was originally conceptualized both as an epistemic and an ontological problem.
2015
Level: advanced
Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.
2018
Level: beginner
This course is an introduction to macroeconomics with a specific focus on the euro area. The theoretical part provides a critical presentation of the two key macroeconomic models: the (neo)classical approach and the Keynesian approach. This allows a comparative analysis of important macroeconomic topics: - unemployment - inflation - government debt and Modern Monetary Theory - banks and financial crises. The policy-oriented part discusses the monetary policy of the ECB and the specific challenges for fiscal policy in the euro area. The course also presents other euro area specific topics: Optimum currency area, euro crises, Next Generation EU and Green New Deal.
1990
Level: advanced
"The New Classical Macroeconomics "gives an accessible, rigorous, critical account of the central doctrines of the new classical economics, without unnecessarily difficult mathematics. It focuses on four central issues: the foundation of monetary theory; monetary and fiscal policy; labour supply and business cycles; and the attack on econometric models.
2021
Level: advanced
This is a new online course at bachelor level. It presents an introduction into macroeconomics with a specific focus on the euro area. The theoretical part provides a critical presentation of the two key macroeconomic models: the (neo)classical approach and the Keynesian approach. This allows a comparative analysis of important macroeconomic topics: unemployment inflation government debt and Modern Monetary Theory banks and financial crises. The policy-oriented part discusses the monetary policy of the ECB and the specific challenges for fiscal policy in the euro area. The course also presents other euro area specific topics: Optimum currency area, euro crises, Next Generation EU and Green New Deal.
2024
Level: beginner
This article outlines the fundamental challenges of democratically planned economies and categorises proposed models into six groups, each of which approaches planning and coordination at different levels of authority and between myriad economic units in a particular way, taking into account efficiency as well as democratic principles and environmental and social sustainability. Through a classification system based on decision-making authority and mediation mechanisms, the article provides a framework for understanding and comparing these models. By examining their different approaches, it offers insights into the complexities and potential paths of democratically planned economies in the 21st century.
2019
Level: beginner
This course provides future change makers in public and private sectors with a comprehensive overview on the structures and actors that shape markets.
2021
Level: beginner
The last 15 years have seen extensive research into ecosystem service valuation (ESV), spurred by the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005 (Baveye, Baveye & Gowdy, 2016). Ecosystem services are defined as “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems” (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, p.V). For example, ecosystems provide the service of sequestering carbon which helps regulate the climate. Valuation means giving ecosystems or their services a monetary price, for example researchers have estimated that the carbon sequestration services of the Mediterranean Sea is between 100 and 1500 million euros per year. The idea of ESV was a response to the overuse of natural resources and degradation of ecosystems, allegedly due to their undervaluation and exclusion from the monetary economy. ESV can be used (1) for policy decision-making, for example allocating funding to a reforestation project (2) for setting payments to people who increase ecosystem services, for example a farmer increasing the organic carbon content of their soil, and (3) for determining fees for people who degrade ecosystem services, for example a company that causes deforestation.
 
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.
2022
Level: beginner
Cédric Durand locates the Russian War on Ukraine in relation to Russian Economic Development and Political Economy after the collapse of the soviet union.
2016
Level: beginner
A review of: [1] Intermediate Microeconomics, H.R. Varian [2] Mikrooekonomie, R.S. Pindyck, D.L. Rubinfeld [3] Grundzuege der mikrooekonomischen Theorie, J. Schumann, U. Meyer, W. Stroebele
2022
Level: beginner
The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the deep structural rifts in modern capitalist economies. It has exposed and exacerbated the long-lasting systemic inequalities in income, wealth, healthcare, housing, and other aspects of economic success across a variety of dimensions including class, gender, race, regions, and nations. This workshop explores the causes of economic inequality in contemporary capitalist economies and its consequences for the economy and society in the post-pandemic reality, as well as what steps can be taken to alleviate economic inequality in the future. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary insights, the workshop encourages you to reflect on your personal experiences of inequality and aims to challenge the way in which the issue is typically approached in economics.
2019
Level: beginner
The article pursues the two related questions of how economists pretend to know and why they want to know at all. It is argued that both the economic form of knowledge and the motivation of knowing have undergone a fundamental change during the course of the 20th century. The knowledge of important contemporary economic textbooks has little in common with an objective, decidedly scientifically motivated knowledge. Rather, their contents and forms follow a productive end, aiming at the subjectivity of their readers.
2020
Level: expert
This journal article by Radhika Desai, Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, was originally published in 2010 and republished in an revised format in 2020. The article is a comprehensive treatment of Marx's theory of crisis, focusing on the role of consumption demand in capitalism and in the emergence of crises.
2019
Level: expert
This paper attempts to clarify how the European economic crisis from 2007 onwards can be understood from the perspective of a Marxian monetary theory of value that emphasizes intrinsic, structural flaws regarding capitalist reproduction. Chapter two provides an empirical description of the European economic crisis, which to some extent already reflects the structural theoretical framework presented in chapter three. Regarding the theoretical framework Michael Heinrich's interpretation of 'the' Marxian monetary theory of value will be presented. Heinrich identifies connections between production and realization, between profit and interest rate as well as between industrial and fictitious capital, which represent contradictory tendencies for which capitalism does not have simple balancing processes. In the context of a discussion of 'structural logical aspects' of Marx's Critique of the Political Economy, explanatory deficits of Heinrich's approach are analyzed. In the following, it is argued that Fred Moseley's view of these 'structural logical aspects' allows empirical 'applications' of Marxian monetary theories of value. It is concluded that a Marxian monetary theory of value, with the characteristics of expansive capital accumulation and its limitations, facilitates a structural analysis of the European economic crisis from 2007 onwards. In this line of argument, expansive production patterns are expressed, among other things, in global restructuring processes, while consumption limitations are mitigated by expansive financial markets and shifts in ex-port destinations.
2007
Level: advanced
This collection of essays, a supplement to History of Political Economy, brings together prominent scholars from economics, sociology, literature, and history to examine the role of biography and autobiography in the history of economics. The first of its kind, this volume looks at the relevance of first-person accounts to narrative histories of economics.
2022
Level: beginner
This open access book presents an alternative to capitalism and state socialism through the modelling of a post-market and post-state utopia based on an upscaling of the commons, feminist political economy and democratic and council-based planning approaches.
 
Austrian economics focuses on the economic coordination of individuals in a market economy. Austrian economics emphasises individualism, subjectivism, laissez-faire politics, uncertainty and the role of the entrepreneur, amongst others.
Level: beginner
An essay of the writing workshop on contemporary issues in the field of Nigerian economics: In Nigeria, it appears that there is nothing in the constitution, which excludes the participation of women in politics. Yet, when it comes to actual practice, there is extensive discrimination. The under-representation of women in political participation gained root due to the patriarchal practice inherent in our society, much of which were obvious from pre-colonial era till date.
2022
Level: advanced
"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.”
2019
Level: advanced
The book explores the imperialist tendency inherent in global capitalism by using a rigorous political economy framework.
2017
Level: beginner
Multimedia dossier on unpaid labor (featuring the UK statistics office unpaid work calculator), migrant care labor and feminist political economy more generally.

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