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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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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.
Women Participation – Women Contribution to Economics and Politics
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
Yes, Money is Endogenous. Who Cares?
How do people make decisions? There is a class of models in psychology which seek to answer this question but have received scant attention in economics despite some clear empirical successes. In a previous post I discussed one of these, Decision by Sampling, and this post will look at another: the so-called Fast and Frugal heuristics pioneered by the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. Here the individual seeks out sufficient information to make a reasonable decision. They are ‘fast’ because they do not require massive computational effort to make a decision so can be done in seconds, and they are ‘frugal’ because they use as little information as possible to make the decision effectively.
Bounded Rationality: the Case of ‘Fast and Frugal’ Heuristics
Michael Kalecki famously remarked “I have found out what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows”. Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) models were developed precisely to address this kind of confusion. The basic intuition of SFC models is that the economy is built up as a set of intersecting balance sheets, where transactions between entities are called flows and the value of the assets/liabilities they hold are called stocks. Wages are a flow; bank deposits are a stock, and confusing the two directly is a category error. In this edition of the pluralist showcase I will first describe the logic of SFC models – which is worth exploring in depth – before discussing empirical calibration and applications of the models. Warning that there is a little more maths in this post than usual (i.e. some), but you should be able to skip those parts and still easily get the picture.
Stock Flow Consistent Macroeconomics
One method of economic modelling that has become increasingly popular in academia, government and the private sector is Agent Based Models, or ABM. These simulate the actions and interactions of thousands or even millions of people to try to understand the economy – for this reason ABM was once described to me as being “like Sim City without the graphics”. One advantage of ABM is that it is flexible, since you can choose how many agents there are (an agent just means some kind of 'economic decision maker' like a firm, consumer, worker or government); how they behave (do they use complicated or simple rules to make decisions?); as well as the environment they act in, then just run the simulation and see what happens as they interact over time.
Agents, agents everywhere
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
By conducting a discourse analysis (SKAD) in the field of academic economics textbooks, this paper aims at reconstructing frames and identity options offered to undergraduate students relating to the questions ‘Why study economics?’ and ‘Who do I become by studying economics?’. The analysis showed three major frames and respective identity offerings, all of which are contextualized theoretically, with prominent reference to the Foucauldian reflection of the science of Political Economy. Surprisingly, none of them encourages the student to think critically, as could have been expected in a pedagogical context. Taken together, economics textbooks appear as a “total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible action” (Foucault), therefore, as a genuine example of Foucauldian power structures.
The power of economic textbooks: A discourse analysis
Developmental economics
The roots of dependency theory
This short video examining the concepts of rents and rent-seeking, and the high cost of orthodox liberal anticorruption policies.
Rent-Seeking, Corruption and Development
Participants should be able to distinguish the strictly non-cooperative (methodological individualist) foundations of traditional neoclassical economics as being couched in self-interested individuals, as well as having basic knowledge of an alternative set of theories based on the primacy cooperation and social norms and extending the breadth of economic analysis beyond exchange.
Cooperative Economics
This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of work-related gender issues and to enable students to analyze the issues using the tools of economics.
Women, Men, & Work
The author discusses the various dimensions of the recent hike in inflation in the context of the United States and policy dilemmas around high inflation GDP decline and unemployment Servaas Storm Institute for New Economic Thinking
Inflation in a Time of Corona and War
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 text provides an easy to understand introduction to complexity economics for non-specialist audiences such as bachelor's students.
Think Complexity Economics is too Complicated? Then this is for you.
Use economic models to learn how prices and markets benefit society in the face of scarcity and then apply those models to analyze policy Jonathan Gruber edX Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Microeconomics
Economics has long been the domain of the ivory tower, where specialized language and opaque theorems make it inaccessible to most people. That’s a problem.
Economics for People
To prevent the coronavirus shock to demand precipitating a long-lasting depression, government needs to become short-term payer of last resort.
Introducing the Payer of Last Resort
Peter Bofinger argues that the Modern Monetary Theory gives theoretical justification for bold answers to the corona crisis.
Coronavirus crisis: now is the hour of Modern Monetary Theory
Understanding international trade is central to economics and is currently a hot political issue. It’s an area where popular perceptions of mainstream economics are low, since they have historically missed some important downsides of trade agreements, especially the hollowing out of former manufacturing hubs in the Western world. et economists have for long time had a theory of trade with an impressive amount of scientific clout behind it: the gravity trade model.
A Theory of Enormous Gravity
In the fifth part of the Economics of COVID-19 Webinar by SOAS, Jo Michell sketches out the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the wider macroeconomy and warns against a resurgence of austerity politics.
Will Coronavirus Mean the End of Austerity? The Macroeconomics of the COVID-19 Crisis
In this short podcast, Naomi Fowler, the Tax Justice Network's creative strategist, discusses how the laws made by those who profited from slavery and the empire and, the extractive business models of the major financial sector continue to impoverish some of the poorest nations.
Systemic racism, reparations and tax justice
Podcast series with six 12-minute parts introducing the the values and ideas behind our neoliberal economic system: where it came from, how it spread, and how we could do things differently.
Beginner’s Guide to Neoliberalism
In this podcast, Laura Basu focuses on how capitalist markets and nation-states perpetuate structural racism.
Is capitalism racist?
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
Reclaiming the university: Transforming economics as a discipline
A detailed introduction into dependency theory that rethinks its relevance to modern development challenges.
Dependency Theory and Uneven Development
Central banks have once again proven to be the first line of defense in crisis-ridden times. With their far reaching actions they prevented the world from experiencing a collapse of financial markets on top of the severe health and economic crisis caused by Covid-19.
NextGen Central Banking: Central Banking and Climate change - A new era of monetary financing?
This course will introduce key concepts, theories and methods from socioeconomics. The first part of the course, will deal with the main economic actors and how their interactions are governed. Markets are seen as sets of social institutions. Institutions shape how consumers, firms and other economic actors behave. While it is difficult to understand how novelty emerges, we can study the conditions that are conducive to innovation. We will review how economic performance, social progress and human wellbeing are measured and what progress has been made. In the second part of the course, we will study a specific macroeconomic model that accounts for biophysical boundaries and inequality.
Foundations in Socioeconomics
In this webinar for the Princeton Bendheim Center for Finance, Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus explains the main problems regarding the economics of a low-carbon energy transition.
Climate Compacts to Combat Free Riding in International Climate Agreements
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
Looking for a pithy introduction into John Maynard Keynes's economic thinking? This BBC radio programme may be it.
Keynesianism: The Story Behind This Key Economic Theory
Exploring Economics, an open-access e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
Time to Ditch the NAIRU
The need for the movement Black Lives Matter and the tragic events that preceded it are the clear manifestation of the problem of discrimination today, which we all intuitively perceive as a poignant socio-economic question of our times.
Economics of Discrimination - A CBD Perspective
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