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The Balkan countries undergoing the transition must advance their economies to be more competitive. The aim of this paper is to analyse economic growth with a primary focus on the analysis of economic convergence in the Balkan region in the period of 1997-2020. The research analyses the following Balkan economies: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia. This study applies Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of economic growth and is based on the neoclassical economic growth model: the Solow's convergence concept. The results show that the Balkan countries experienced economic convergence with a speed of 1.82% in the cross-sectional model and 7.87% in the panel data model. It means that the initially less developed economies noted higher economic growth than those richer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/context: The boom-and-bust of New World slavery in the nineteenth century has always been a major topic of scholarship. In this essay, I suggest that the literature devoted to this theme, the so-called “capitalism and slavery debate,” has made capital invisible as a category of analysis due to its over-reliance on classical and neoclassical economics. As a result, slavery itself has been poorly historicized. My purpose is to put forth an alternative framework to restore the historicity of capital and slavery. Methodology: The article explores critical value theory to conceptualize capital and capitalism in historically meaningful terms. It argues that value creation is never confined to one country. It requires a historically transnational social formation that turns concrete labor into abstract labor and use-values into commodities through the multi-scale operatives of world money and world markets. The history of slavery should be narrated within this broader globalizing setting. Originality: The article’s claim is that the global value relations of industrial capital redetermined spatial relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering overlapping layers of a world geography of accumulation that both stimulated and challenged slavery. Conclusions: While most scholars present the relation between slavery and capitalism as constant for the period 1780-1880, I conclude that New World slavery went through two moments of boom-and-bust (c.1780-c.1820 and c.1830-1880), which were formed through, respectively, the global value relations of cotton production and coal-and-iron industrialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The household as the primary decision-making unit is founded on classical and neoclassical economics. However, household behaviour changes have been noticeable in the last decade, moving towards more green and sustainable patterns, which have been pronounced in EU countries striving for a more significant share of renewable energy sources (RES) in energy consumption. These behaviours can be attributed to sustainable economics and are an essential part of energy transformation, as they are focused on pro-ecological attitudes, considering both financial activities and those related to caring for the environment and future generations. This article aims to segment energy consumers and to determine what attitudes prevailed in the selected segments and to what extent consumers were pro-ecologically oriented when making decisions regarding RES management before the pandemic and the energy crisis outbreak in Europe. We propose a three-segment model for archetyping household energy consumers in Poland by considering the following groups of factors: environmental and energy goods protection (F1), the mirror effect (F2), and energy and devices profitability (F3). The segments are distinguished based on factor analysis and the fuzzy c-means method. The number of segments is determined based on the cluster validity measure. The presented results prove that the F1 factor plays the leading role in each segment. The percentage of positive responses for each segment, including a migrating group of households, oscillates over 80%. It gives strong hope for retaining sustainable attitudes regardless of the pandemic and energy crisis that occurred in 2022 in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grieve Chelwa, Darrick Hamilton, and Avi Green explain how existing accounts of capitalism systematically neglect racial identity group stratification. Their approach points to an important comparative dimension and two significant research agendas that could supplement their arguments. First would be to inquire into the role that equal respect plays in pushing back against stratification. Second would be to investigate how other aspects of social norms may have consequences too, perhaps drawing insights from a new body of research on racial stratification that draws upon Marxian and neoclassical economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to critically analyze Environmentally-Adjusted Multifactor Productivity (EAMP), by considering the Classical-Post-keynesian environmental framework Ecological Macroeconomics, integrated with the Evolutionary Environmental Economics. The paper introduces EAMP as rooted in in neoclassical economics and derived from Cobb-Douglas function with natural resources built by Solow (1974). I present theoretical critiques of EAMP's neoclassical assumptions by developing perspectives from heterodox Ecological Macroconomics literature. Finally, I discuss the shortcomings of EAMP's conceptual framework, making specific reference to the policy debate on Porter Hypothesis. The article puts in evidence how the assumptions of constant returns to scale, perfect competition and perfect input substitutability seriously alter the meaning and promise of sustainability policy. The analysis indicates that EAMP is a poor instrument to study complex issues regarding the promotion and effectiveness of green innovations and should therefore be abandoned to face the great challenges regarding the process of ecological transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual Property (IP) and innovation law scholarship is generally concerned with the question of how to promote socially beneficial innovation. Until recently, the analysis brought to bear on that question in the literature has been dominated by an individual, rational-actor-centered model grounded in the neoclassical economics tradition. Under this model, individual innovators are assumed to respond to innovation incentives in rational ways, unswayed by their social environments or their own psychology. Of course, as innovation scholars are beginning to recognize, the road to innovation is much more winding and complex than the straight path from incentive to innovation that the rational actor model implies. Innovators are people, and people cannot be divorced from their own psychology or social influences. If scholars truly want to understand how innovation happens and how best to encourage it, they must also understand how innovators' social context and psychology influence both their decisions to innovate or copy and their choices regarding which innovative projects to pursue. A rich literature in both the sociological and psychological sciences has remained largely untapped in legal innovation scholarship. In this Article, we discuss how building bridges between these literatures and the legal innovation literature can help legal scholars better understand many of the social forces that influence potential innovators and the psychological factors that explain why these social norms emerge and persist. Among other things, this type of work adds complexity and richness to traditional legal economic accounts of innovation and helps prevent legal innovation scholars from unnecessarily "re-inventing the wheel" by bringing them into conversation with preexisting and well-developed accounts of behaviors relevant to innovation. It also generates testable hypotheses, guiding how legal innovation scholars pose questions and paving the way for new avenues of original research. We conclude this Article by exploring some of the questions that might be particularly promising candidates for original research going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Behavioral Economics poses an important question: does it substitute or complement Neoclassical Economics? This article makes an analysis to identify how the substitution-complementarity issue is highly sensitive to the epistemic context. In particular, the paper distinguishes four epistemological contexts: descriptive, explicative, predictive, and prescriptive. The idea that the behavioral substitute the neoclassical approach in descriptive and explicative contexts is defended; however, there is a complementarity in the predictive and prescriptive contexts, where there are some domains in which the neoclassical approach might still work well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of 'opportunity cost' has been neglected in economics. The reason is that any such measure of cost is invisible, unobservable, and untestable. Yet the so-called 'competitive ideal' in neoclassical theory is based on claims of decreasing returns and substitutional tradeoffs in production, consumption, and social relations, and therewith an exclusive focus on scarcity in economics. Within this view, collusion is suspect: it raises prices, reduces sales, and so harms social welfare. This is the baseline emphasis of neoclassical microeconomic theory. The opportunity costs of this framework involve a significant loss of perspective on actual economic phenomena, the potential value of which may far exceed that of orthodoxy. The unbounded character of economic effects suggests an analytical bound derived from our rational limits, since we cannot see the full range of outcomes stemming from our decisions: planning horizons so enter this scene. The paper describes the horizonal theory that would have emerged from the 1930s debates on cost had Hicks not walked away from increasing returns and had Hirshleifer not promoted a false 'rescue' endorsed by Alchian in 1968, declaring decreasing returns 'a general and universally valid law.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we have analyzed the sensitivity of the aggregate volume of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) in Brazil to fluctuations (shocks) in the Economic Uncertainty level from 2010 to 2021 under behavioral and neoclassical theoretical foundations on the M&A causes. We estimated a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model with the volume of M&A announcements, the Brazil Economic Uncertainty Index (IIE-Br), and macroeconomic and market variables. There is evidence that the M&A announcements in Brazil can respond positively to an economic uncertainty shock. Thus, we contribute with empirical evidence to understand the role of macroeconomic factors, including economic uncertainty, in the future conduct of the M&A market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author honors professor Peter Gerhart's legacy to the legal academy by his books on unified theory of several different areas of law including "Tort Law and Social Morality," "Property Law and Social Morality," and "Contract Law and Social Morality." Topics discussed include tension between scholarship in the tradition of neoclassical economics and its progressive counterpart, dyad that characterizes most contemporary property scholarship and contemporary property theory.

This article explores the work of Professor Svetozar (Steve) Pejovich, focusing on his research on property rights, capitalism, socialism, and freedom. Pejovich argued that property rights are essential for organizing production and distribution, and he compared the differences between capitalist and socialist systems. The text emphasizes the importance of private property and the ability to exchange ownership rights. It also examines the impact of property rights on labor-managed firms in Communist Yugoslavia, highlighting the hindrance of economic calculation and pricing due to the inability to exchange ownership claims. The article concludes by discussing the emergence of "liberal socialism" and arguing that socialism, in any form, is incompatible with liberalism and democracy. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on classical economics. Topics include that the neoclassical mathematical theory of value culminated in Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu's model characterizes the static general equilibrium state of an economy; and that the principle of individual utility maximization has no interesting implication for aggregate market demand.

The article focuses on neoclassical economic theory and the realities of individual decision-making described by behavioral economics to begin to grapple with the complex problem and people enroll in health insurance policies. It mentions repeal will have a negative impact on the insurance markets and negative implications of decreased health insurance enrollment, beyond just the instability that healthy people leaving insurance markets will cause.

The article identifies the assumptions of "orthodoxy" by observing their evolution in economic analysis. Topics include no correlation between orthodoxy or heterodoxy in economics and political beliefs and commitments, how the French Revolution has disrupted political culture and intellectual life in France, and competition among buyers and among sellers.

The challenge of sustainable development can be approached from different angles. In this essay it is argued that one also needs to examine the present close to monopoly position of neoclassical economic theory at university departments of economics in many parts of the world. An open debate is needed about paradigms in economics as well as ideological orientations. An alternative to neoclassical theory is outlined where individuals and organizations are regarded as political actors, each guided by an ideological orientation or mission. Reference is made to the 17 UN sustainable development goals suggesting that impacts need to be seen in multidimensional terms and an alternative definition of economics as "multidimensional management of limited resources in a democratic society" is proposed. It is argued that economics need to move away from its technocracy-oriented tendencies to democracy-oriented approaches. This is exemplified by a move away from neoclassical Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) to Positional Analysis as approach to decision-making and sustainability assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, Ludwick Fleck's philosophy and sociology of science will be briefly outlined in order to establish a 'theory of the resilience of scientific misapprehension'. This theory will be use in order to gain insights into the modes of operation of defence and resilience of modern neoclassical economics in the face of recent harsh critique by singling out a case of extreme deviation of theoretical prediction from empirical evidence: minimum wages' impact on employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper challenges the mainstream stance in the study of applied ethics in international development. Applied ethics is positioned at the macro-social level of global ethics while a specific codification is attempted by formulating international development based on its structural synthesis, in a threefold level: First, the structural synthesis -associated with the framework of existing international development policy-can be found in the 'market relations'. Second, the analysis specifies the policies applied at the national level and the role of nation-state policy. Third, the paper criticizes the international development institutions' policies. In each of the levels mentioned above, the analysis reveals the fundamental policy theory issues of neoclassical economics, as the intellectual defender of free market economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main weakness in the neoclassical theory of economics is its static nature. By a static model one cannot explain observed time paths of economic quantities, like the flows of production of firms, the flows of consumption of consumers, and the prices of goods. The error in the neoclassical framework is that there economic units are assumed to be in their optimum state and thus not willing to change their behavior. Therefore, in neoclassical models a static equilibrium prevails. In this paper, the authors change this assumption so that economic units are assumed to be willing to improve their current state that may not be the optimal one. In this way, one can explain economic dynamics where every economic unit is changing its behavior towards improving its welfare. The authors define the economic forces acting upon the production of firms, the consumption of consumers, and the prices of goods. They show that in this dynamic system, business cycles and bankruptcies of firms emerge in a natural way like in the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Economic-Environmental Models are deeply disaggregated macro-economic systems, which are used in economic environmental studies to explain the emissions of pollutions and the extraction of resources. Concerning the economic base two approaches can be differentiated – the neoclassical and the Keynesian paradigm. Models based on the neoclassical paradigm are depicting equilibrium of perfectly competitive markets, whereas the models based on the Keynesian paradigm have been developed from a critical position vis-a-vis neoclassical theory stressing the importance of market imperfections. The paper at hand shows in its theoretical part that this fundamental difference to a large extent is responsible for differences in modeling results concerning the impact of policy instruments on the economy and the environment. Furthermore the two paradigms prefer different ways of parameterization which has consequences for the empirical validation of the models, the construction of the references and the effects of environmental policy. The paper at hand further shows that the theoretical arguments allow explaining the totally different and partly opposite results of concrete policy simulations in the POLFREE project, where the large scale economic environmental models EXIOMOD (neoclassical) and GINFORS (Keynesian) have been used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a sigmoidal production function that considers production possible even when the only input is labour. The long-run behaviour of an economy described by the neoclassical Solow-type growth model with differential savings is investigated considering the technology presented. It is found that labour productivity influences the existence of boom and bust periods as well as the level of capital per capita in equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indeed, the artificial entity 'Homo-Economicus' plays a central role in modern neoclassical economic theory. Maybe an illegitimate child of markets' self-regulation doctrine and the emerging rationalism - professed by the post-modern realms of neoliberalism and the ongoing globalization process - this theoretical abstraction is promoted as a potential prototype of human behavior. It is firmly believed, that this individualistic, self-motivated, and above all, perfectly informed 'entity' could, theoretically, lead the economic system into profound balance between supply and demand, consumption and production, utility maximization, and so on. The present paper consists of a criticism to the mainstream prototype of Homo-Economicus, with further extensions to the neoclassical paradigm. Placing this criticism in the context of ecological economics, the paper argues that the notorious rationality of Homo-Economicus seems to be vanished in the deadlock of a futile race towards non-renewable natural resources depletion and increasing environmental externalities. Finally, a brief review of alternative theoretical frameworks and evidence from institutional and behavioral economics, delineates an emerging pressing request for a paradigm change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conceives of the market as an institution, and contrasts two theoretical approaches: Institutionalism, with an evolutionary and analytical bias, whose theoretical basis comes from "Old/Original" Institutionalism, and New Institutional Economics, with an analytical, contractual approach, linked to mainstream economics. Both approaches have given relevant contributions, as they consider the importance of institutions for economic performance. The limits of New Institutional Economics are particularly relevant, whose analysis of the operation of markets is centered on the logic of transaction cost economics as a determinant of economic performance. Evolutionary Institutionalism, in turn, sees the market within a broader scope, in which cost economies only partially explains economic performance, but it is not necessarily seen as a determining factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study integrates neoclassical economics and institutional theory to examine the relationship between market factor distortion, technical innovation, and China's electricity consumption, using business data from China (2008–2014). First, we provide evidence that factor market distortion promotes electricity consumption of industrial enterprises in China. Secondly, we divide technical innovation into traditional technical innovation and green innovation, finding that the level of technical innovation has an inverted U-shaped effect on the electricity consumption of industrial enterprises. Further, we also provide evidence that factor market distortion amplifies the inverted U-shaped effect of the technical innovation plot. The results show that accelerating the reform of the market, and promoting green innovation, should be regarded as important strategies for national energy saving and emission reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances the idea that socio-ecological inquiry could benefit more by analyzing the dynamics between states of scarcity, abundance, and sufficiency (SAS), instead of viewing them as distinct branches of inquiry. The paper identifies three weaknesses in the literature: postulating scarcity, normative opposition of SAS, and conceptual entanglement. In bridging these, the paper proposes a unified agenda for SAS studies. This agenda includes: (a) a definition of the cases (population) of SAS; (b) a causal map of the determinants of SAS; (c) an outline of key strategies individuals employ to handle SAS. This agenda relies on the language of probability to systematize SAS studies. This approach subsumes the allocation problem of neoclassical economics within a super-set of problems. Recalibrating socio-ecological inquiry to research the dynamics of scarcity, abundance, and sufficiency will not only cast new light on old problems, but also discover new problems that traditionally have been reserved for neoclassical economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economics as a discipline is currently in disarray. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, academic experts, students, commentators, practitioners and politicians all questioned the status of academic economics and many called for a 'new economic thinking'. Nearly a decade later, however, there is little evidence of a transformation in research and teaching. The present study first clarifies what is meant by a transformation of economics as a discipline, since this remains an ill-defined term and may be interpreted in very different ways. It then establishes the conditions of a successful transformation of the discipline in terms of intra-disciplinary and extra-disciplinary factors. The paper argues that economics as a discipline cannot be expected to trigger this transformation by itself (i.e. via self-regulation), since the 'market for economic ideas' is prone to market failure. In addition, the influence of external factors and actors on the market may serve to distort the congruence between the individual researcher's utility and societal welfare. External incentives are therefore required to establish constitutional guardrails that ensure fair competition between ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic valuation is often deemed an important source of information for land-use decisions. Stated preference (SP) methods are a particularly potent class of economic valuation methods, but they are also particularly controversial. In response to accumulating criticism of SP, deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) has been proposed as an alternative approach and has gained considerable attention in recent years. However, being a combination of elements from two theories – neoclassical welfare economics and theory of deliberative democracy – it lacks a convincing, consistent theoretical foundation. In our paper, we propose some clarifying adjustments regarding rationality assumptions and aggregation issues by drawing upon the work of Amartya Sen. We find that many of his ideas lead to a harmonisation of DMV's theoretical foundations, e.g. meta-rankings of preferences, impartial spectator and the plurality of impartial reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of neoclassical economics that provide detailed operational guidance for public policy. It mentions the guidelines imposed by the government of Australia that mandate the use of CBA for decision-making. It outlines the two aspects of CBA that have a major bearing on its practical application.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including neoclassical orthodoxy, Marxist economics and ecological economics.