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From the financial crash to the climate emergency and Covid, this book demonstrates that recent crises have had unequal impacts, that they require a heterodox approach to economics for their understanding, and new ways of thinking are needed to address them. Drawing on a variety of heterodox and radical perspectives and global voices, including those from India, Africa, and South America, this collection explores the causes and impacts of global emergencies from a wide array of viewpoints. The first section outlines how the pandemic has shown up the biases of orthodox thought and policy, particularly its Eurocentric and patriarchal focus on the urban, formal economy. It outlines how adding an international dimension to institutional analysis uncovers systematic inequalities in the responses to emergencies, and how new paradigms can provide better alternatives. The massive interventionism worldwide has led to renewed interest in the global financial system, and also in Marxian approaches to money. The second section of the book therefore considers a range of alternative approaches to the study of finance – from Marx to Minsky – which are currently being revisited. The collection concludes with a suggestion for heterodox economics pedagogy, since changing economics education is vital for future dissemination of real-world ideas. The book will be of interest to a variety of researchers and postgraduate students, and lecturers, especially in the fields of development, health, labour and feminist economics, also international political economy and heterodox economics.
This book continues the ongoing debate about the need for alternative, interdisciplinary and heterodox approaches to teaching economics at university. It deals with challenges currently faced by economists, pursues an interdisciplinary approach to enhance collaboration with academics from disciplines other than economics, and analyses several questions and issues related to the 2007-08 financial crisis and the current Covid-19 emergency. The Covid pandemic has shown the flaws of the current neoliberal model and the inability of mainstream economic theory to address the problems created by the pandemic. The book engages with an academic audience interested in incorporating a wider range of economic approaches in their research and teaching, and with undergraduate and postgraduate economics students who are trying to understand the limitations of their current economics syllabi. The novelty of the book is the active involvement of undergraduate and postgraduate students who contribute to this volume with three chapters. The book will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, students and teachers interested in interdisciplinary and heterodox economics.
Contemporary capitalism is characterized by periods of vigorous economic growth and periods of slow or even negative growth. This book draws on the classical political economy approach to consider both economic cycles and economic growth and draw conclusions about the inherent instability of the modern economy. The book shows that the work of the old classical economists (Smith and Ricardo) and Marx is theoretically sound and capable of providing answers to both growth and cycles. It also demonstrates the potential and natural integration of growth and cycles in a single model. The microeconomic foundation of this model is the labor theory of value, which continues with the General Law of Capital Accumulation, the Law of the Falling Rate of Profit, and the movement of the Industrial Reserve Army of Labour. Finally, a dynamic model of growth-cum-cycles is constructed consisting of the evolution and interaction of five key variables, namely, the rate of profit, the propensity to invest in fixed capital, technological change, the reserve army of labour, and the rate of capital devaluation. The analysis demonstrates that economic growth and cycles are not disconnected from each other, as they have been treated in the literature, but rather interdependent aspects of the same evolutionary process of a capitalist economy. This book will interest readers in the history of economic thought, economic growth and development, macroeconomics, and political economy.
Unequal development has been a defining characteristic of capitalism. Throughout history, countries and regions have exhibited differences in labor productivity growth – a key determinant in poverty reduction and development – and although some nations may catch up with the productivity levels or well-being of developed economies at times, others fall behind. This book explores these processes of catching up and falling behind of developing countries from Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Africa in relation to the US economy from 1970 to 2019. The research presented in this book integrates a historical interpretation of post-World War II capitalism with economic theory and empirical analysis. By exploring the historical experiences of these countries, the book provides an overview of their economic transformations. The interplay between technical change, profit rate and capital accumulation, on one hand, and institutional change, on the other, are combined to explain the dynamics of catching up or falling behind in labor and capital productivities. Furthermore, the book provides, from the perspective of developing countries, fundamental lessons for the implementation of successful strategies for catching up and development. This book is a major resource for readers interested in economic growth and development, heterodox macroeconomics, development economics, and related areas.
An alternative theory of the firm is needed that helps better understand the nature and actual functioning of firms as well as the challenges raised by digital platform firms. In defining firms as economic collective ventures organised by political means, this book offers a “political economy” vision of firms. Specifically, the book provides an authority-based conception of the firm that supplies a theoretical grounding for democratic governance. It is argued that workers must be viewed as actors of the firm, not passive subjects of capital, given that authority is a non-coercive form of power. The book examines authority and subordination from the workers’ perspective and argues that when workers accept authority, it is because they see it as facilitating mutually beneficial cooperation between people with divergent interests. As managerial authority is based on its acceptance by workers, it calls for legitimacy. Neither ownership nor the function that authority performs makes it legitimate. The book shows that legitimacy entails the democratisation of corporate governance, within the framework of “pluralistic companies”, and thus joins the many voices that increasingly question shareholder primacy. The book will be of great interest to researchers and students in economics and law as well as labour professionals, employers, unions, policymakers and anybody interested in economic democracy.
This book examines why democracy has failed to deliver effective solutions to income inequality problems over the last four decades, and if democracy can offer solutions to various increases in inequality in the future. It also addresses what elements are necessary for democracy to serve as an effective alternative for addressing inequality issues. Historical experiences over the past 40 years, including the global financial crisis, not only underscore the need for fresh perspectives on income inequality in economics but also question the ability of democracy to continue providing alternatives for addressing the escalating forms of inequality. Seo and Kang’s response to these inquiries diverge from conventional research in several significant ways. Primarily, what sets this research apart from existing studies is its intensified focus on income inequality as a product of the complex interplay between the political and economic domains, rather than a standalone examination of income inequality in isolation. Through a political economy perspective, this book argues that income inequality and income redistribution are shaped by the institutions, policies, and laws generated by the political system, with their formation and nature being determined by the power distribution among socio-political groups. A useful resource not only to researchers who study political phenomena in the field of economics, but also to scholars who study economic phenomena in the field of politics. Furthermore, it will be particularly intriguing for policy makers concerned with issues of inequality and income redistribution.
Both Keynes’s General Theory and orthodox economics seek to understand how competitive markets work, but they diverge sharply with respect to the nature and properties of the competitive equilibrium. The reason, as Keynes himself pointed out, is that the General Theory recognises that the future consequences of current decisions are fundamentally uncertain which, contra the orthodox view, radically affects decision-making and the functioning of markets. This book approaches macroeconomics on the basis of the General Theory, of which a new exposition is offered in the first part, purged of the grey areas that resulted from the context in which it was written, and of the considerable confusion generated for almost a century by the vain attempts of orthodox thinking to integrate such novel ideas in its deficient conceptual framework. The second part aims at extending the conceptual framework to the open economy and considering how uncertainty affects international linkages. The third part proposes an integrated conceptual and formal framework for analysing how changes in the national and international context, including macroeconomic policies, affect an economy. This new examination of General Theory is a major addition to the literature on Keynes, macroeconomics, economic theory and the history of economic thought.
This book introduces a new and original analytic approach to defining, understanding, and explaining financialization. It provides a precise and quantifiable definition of financialization, disaggregating financialization into its three varieties. These are examined through the lens of financial development, both before and after the Great Recession, providing the most in-depth analysis of the finance-real economy-labor nexus. It provides a historical perspective, looking at financialization as a key dynamic that has shaped real economic structures in terms of both growth and inequality of income over the last four decades in high-income, upper-middle-income, and lower-middle-income countries. The book makes its multidisciplinary content readily accessible to non-economists by providing economics background information, and to economists by providing social-theoretical context. It will be essential reading for academics, researchers, analysts, and students of economics, business, finance, sociology, politics, and international relations. It will also serve as a vital resource for policy-makers and bureaucrats in determining, formulating, implementing, and revising policy alternatives to govern the pros and cons of financial development in terms of its effects on real output and income inequality.
In 2011 the World Bank—with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—launched the Global Findex database, the world's most comprehensive data set on how adults save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. Drawing on survey data collected in collaboration with Gallup, Inc., the Global Findex database covers more than 140 economies around the world. The initial survey round was followed by a second one in 2014 and by a third in 2017. Compiled using nationally representative surveys of more than 150,000 adults age 15 and above in over 140 economies, The Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution includes updated indicators on access to and use of formal and informal financial services. It has additional data on the use of financial technology (or fintech), including the use of mobile phones and the Internet to conduct financial transactions. The data reveal opportunities to expand access to financial services among people who do not have an account—the unbanked—as well as to promote greater use of digital financial services among those who do have an account. The Global Findex database has become a mainstay of global efforts to promote financial inclusion. In addition to being widely cited by scholars and development practitioners, Global Findex data are used to track progress toward the World Bank goal of Universal Financial Access by 2020 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The database, the full text of the report, and the underlying country-level data for all figures—along with the questionnaire, the survey methodology, and other relevant materials—are available at www.worldbank.org/globalfindex.
This book explores a series of connected themes focused on the role economics and other influential forms of theory and thinking have played in creating the current predicament and the scope for alternatives and how they might be framed. Thirty years have passed since the inception of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the beginning of policy on climate change. Thirty wasted years. To most politicians, long-term collective interest has been denominated in meaningless units of time, a never and forever that has continually delayed action. From complacency has come potential disaster, and we are now living in a time of climate emergency and ecological breakdown. The next decade is a pivotal period requiring fundamental change. But numerous impediments remain. Continual material, energy and economic growth on a planetary scale are manifestly impossible, and yet economic theory takes these as a given and political leadership and policy seem unwilling to accept brute reality. Instead, they offer a series of implausible commitments and pledges rooted in technofixes, without addressing the fundamental drivers of the problems the world faces. The edited volume explores the issues and offers a variety of ways to think through the problems at hand, from postgrowth, degrowth and social ecological economics to policy assemblage and transversalism. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Globalizations.