✕
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.
Unfortunately, we are running out of money to continue our work.
With a small contribution you can help Exploring Economics to stay online. Thank you!
We are a registered non-profit organization | Bank account: Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik e.V., IBAN: DE91 4306 0967 6037 9737 00, SWIFT-BIC: GENODEM1GLS | Imprint
361 results
One hundred years ago the idea of 'the economy' didn't exist. Now, improving the economy has come to be seen as perhaps the most important task facing modern societies. Politics and policymaking are conducted in the language of economics and economic logic shapes how political issues are thought about and addressed.
The Econocracy
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
This essay deals with the concepts of Sustainable Land Management (SLM) and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN).
The importance of a Land Degradation Neutrality approach to achieving Sustainable Land Management
How can we establish new institutions and practices in order to use fare-free public transport as a beacon for sustainable mobility and a low-carbon lifestyle? The author of this essay elaborates on how practice theory and institutional economics can help to answer this question.
Towards a practice of fare-free sustainability
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.
A Pluralist Perspective on Ecosystem Service Valuation Introduction
Focusing on Kenya’s path-breaking mobile money project M-Pesa, this book examines and critiques the narratives and institutions of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality, arguing for a politics of redistribution to guide future digital financial inclusion projects.
The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion
This lecture of the anthropologist David Graeber gives a brief introduction to the thoughts of his 2011 published book Debt: The First 5000 Years.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
The usual background and distinctions between complexity and neoclassical economics are presented Neoclassical economics deals with perfectly rational representative agents this creates states of equilibrium On the other hand complexity economics relaxes these assumptions to deal with responsive agents in an uncertain dynamic environment this creates states of disequilibrium More …
Foundations of complexity economics
This syllabus opens a literary overview of must-read papers in the field of development economics.
Development Economics
This course focus on the behaviour of individuals from an pluralist economic and an interdisciplinary bevavioural science apprach.
Actors, Behaviours and Decision Processes
Getting to the policy discussion table is one of the objectives pursued by feminist scholars and advocates. However, some participants in this process have remarked that “you cannot get to the policy discussion table until you have proven that you can crunch the numbers.”
Statistics for Feminists
This teaching pack focuses on the practice and real-world activities of central banks. It assumes students have a grasp of basic macroeconomic concepts already, and is therefore most suitable to be used at the end of introductory macro courses, or in more advanced macro or monetary economics courses.
The Practice of Central Banking
In this teaching pack, we take a look at satellite crop monitoring and how it is used for both real and financial economic activities. By looking at commodity futures, we give students a sense of what financialization can mean. In the active exercise students learn to discuss these matters and reflect upon them.
Space & Agriculture
Throughout 2022 it has become increasingly difficult for people around the world to meet their basic needs – even those who live in relative affluence in the Global North. This 30-minute classroom exercise takes this common recent experience as a starting point for an exploration of the different economic mechanisms and organisations that can be used to provide for people’s basic needs.
Meeting Basic Needs
In this teaching pack, we look at the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. In particular, we focus on what it means to take a company private and how the deal was financed.
Musk buys Twitter
The 2022 FIFA World Cup (including the construction work required for it) provides a clear example of economic activity that has taken place despite the financial costs to the Qatari state being an order of magnitude larger than the financial benefits it will receive. Whilst this is a fairly extreme case in terms of how many different costs and benefits are involved and how unequally they have been spread, many economic decisions are more complicated than mere financial calculations and it is therefore vital for students to be able to think about multiple dimensions involved in economic decisions.
The Economics of a World Cup in Qatar
Ecological economics addresses one of the fundamental flaws in conventional economics--its failure to consider biophysical and social reality in its analyses and equations. Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications is an introductory-level textbook that offers a pedagogically complete examination of this dynamic new field.
Ecological Economics - A Workbook for Problem-Based Learning
Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit is not only empirically borne out, but the theory he proposed seems to describe accurately how that happens. Furthermore, the whole process is useful for understanding the history of contemporary capitalism.
On the Rate of Profit
Challenging the Mainstream in the Twentieth Century Economics is a contested academic discipline between neoclassical economics and a collection of alternative approaches such as Marxism radical economics Institutional economics Post Keynesian economics and others that can collectively be called heterodox economics Because of the dominance of neoclassical economics the existence …
A History of Heterodox Economics
.
Pluriverse
Economic sociology is an entire subfield and one could write an series on it, so I’m going to stick to probably the most prominent economic sociologist and the founder of ‘new economic sociology’, Mark Granovetter.
Economic Sociology: the Contributions of Mark Granovetter
This course introduces students to political economy and the history of economic thought. We will cover the core ideas in various schools of economic thought, positioning them in the historical and institutional context in which they were developed. In particular, we will cover some economic ideas from the ancient world and the middle ages; the enlightenment; the emergence of and main ideas in classical political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and others); Marx, Mill, and Keynes; European versus American economic thought through history; the rise of mathematical economics; economic theories around state-managed economies versus socialism; Austrian economics; behavioral economics; and the future of economics.
Political Economy and the History of Economic Thought
The goal of the class is to acquire familiarity with recently-published research in alternative macroeconomics with a focus on the distribution of income and wealth, cyclical growth models, and technical change.
Theory Seminar Macro-Distribution
This edited volume explores how dependency theories can be adapted and applied to understand limits and possibilities for development in Latin America and Europe It explores core periphery relations across different sets of countries specific mechanisms of dependency as well as the role of race and gender in dependency analysis …
Dependent Capitalisms in Contemporary Latin America and Europe
This essay suggests to bring together two aspects of economic thought which so far have developed largely separately: degrowth and feminist economics. In this strive, the concept of care work and its role in feminist economics will be introduced and the downsides of the commodification of care work will be discussed. Subsequently, contributions to the discussion on the (re)valuation of care work will be taken into account.
Who cares? A convergence of feminist economics and degrowth
This essay draws on several analyses on the gender impact of the recession and of austerity policies, in which authors acknowledge a threat to women’s labour market integration and a potential backlash to traditional gender labour structures. We contribute to that literature by asking whether recession and austerity convey a gender effect on educational attainment. Our aim in this essay is to portray the likely effects of austerity measures on gender equality with a focus on women’s participation in tertiary education and to hypothesize the implications of these scenarios for labour market effects, to be tested in future empirical research.
The impact of Austerity on Gender in Tertiary Education: A Theoretical Analysis
In this essay, the principle of capital accumulation, as well as the idea of homo economicus as the basis of the growth model, are located and analyzed from a feminist perspective. The sufficiency approach is presented as an alternative to these two economic logics.
Enough! The Sufficiency Approach and the Limits of Economic Growth
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
A Time for Precaution
As the Covid-19 fueled economic downturn begins to intensify this winter, an extended study of the Italian cooperative sector’s historical resilience in times of crisis can serve as a learning experience for other countries seeking to create policies that foster more stable economies, with job security, care for marginalized communities and adequate counter-cyclical policies. Particularly, the Italian cooperative sector’s contributions to three aspects should be noted in closing. Firstly, the innovative phenomenon of cooperative enterprises has contributed to social inclusion of immigrant communities, the activation of youth, the unemployed and people with disabilities, a true compensation for both a market and state failure. Secondly, they have contributed to a reduction in income and wealth inequalities at a time when the issue of inequality is of global significance. Thirdly, the Italian cooperative movement has helped local communities revitalize in the face of demographic shifts and rendered them more resilient to the ravages of globalization. Each of these in their own right is a remarkable achievement.
How to strengthen the social economy
Balance of payments stability is of paramount importance for developing countries, both to secure the value of their domestic currencies as well as reliable foreign currency inflows. But how is that stability ensured and how important is the growth of exports for stability?
Thirlwalls Law Introduction
The concept of financialisation has undergone a similar career as ‘globalisation’, ‘neoliberalism’ or even ‘capitalism’, in the course of which it changed from the explanandum to the explanans; the process of financialisation is taken for granted, while the concrete historical and empirical causal conditions of its realisation and perpetuation are being moved into the background.
A holistic theory of financialisation
This course will survey contemporary heterodox approaches to economic research, both from a microeconomic and a macroeconomic perspective. Topics will be treated from a general, critical, and mathematical standpoint.
Heterodox Approaches to Economics
We use cookies on our website. Click on Accept to help us to make Exploring Economics constantly better!