Government & Politics

There is a certain rich irony attached to the sight of corrupt Russian oligarchs now posing as liberal champions of the rule of law as they find themselves sucked into the maelstrom of Cyprus’s ongoing financial crisis.

The relatively new field of inequality studies is gaining increasing momentum as economic disparity grows throughout the world, in advanced countries as well as less developed ones—especially in the United States.

Eric Beinhocker and Tony Dolphin argue that lasting reform to the financial sector will not be achieved without tackling the price rigging and anti-competitive behaviour that is rife in the industry.

The Azim Premji University-Institute for Economic Thinking Advanced Graduate Workshop in Poverty, Development and Globalization is interested in identifying the complex global interactions that influence poverty and development as well as the development strategies that have proven successful in promoting equitable growth, promoting capabilities, and reducing poverty.

What do you get when you put two of the most well known and most widely cited economists in the world, both Nobel laureates, on stage together? A healthy dose of economic reality.

The ongoing eurozone crisis has prompted many to argue that monetary union withoutfiscal union was bound to fail.

Leading thinkers from outside the developed countries look to the future, spotlighting the pitfalls and opportunities thatawait us.

Albeit the majority of the profession either ignores Minskyís Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) or considers it plainly wrong, at least since the mid-80’s a few influential economists —who have certainly not embraced any unorthodoxcredo —have grown more receptive to this idea and eager to incorporate it in their models, even if diluted and sometimes disguised in order to make it more palatable to the conventional “representative” macroeconomist

In the seemingly never-ending aftermath to the economic crisis that began in 2007, there is little disagreement that financial markets are characterized by instability rather than stability.

Taking a long‐run view from economic history, I make three points about instability in financial markets. First, I argue that economic historians have a relatively good understanding of the proximate causes of financial crises.

“Natural rate theory” has dominated interpretations of economic trends and policy prescriptions over many decades. European-type welfare state institution were claimed to cause a compressed wage distribution that distorts otherwise well functioning labor markets.

Many models of economic growth exclude materials from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate.

The topic of this session of the INET conference is a question: does the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stabilizing an economy depend on the underlying economic context in which the policy is implemented?

The present paradox, as ecological economist Bill Rees is fond of putting it, is simple yet profoundly troubling: “The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.”

The effectiveness of fiscal stimulus in promoting economic recovery appears to depend upon many factors.