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As offshoring allowed producers in the core states to circumvent trade unions and other downwardly redistributive paraphernalia of the post-1945 social structure of accumulation, it also enabled capital to further penetrate and thereby more fully integrate the states of the Third World into the imperialist chain of value extraction. While today Japan's developmental state apparatus is unquestionably weaker ([30]), Japanese capital remains sufficiently autonomous as a national interest bloc to warrant particular caution with respect to treating it as a homogenizing, globalist neoliberalism's East Asian outpost ([17]; [18]; [14]). In this respect, Cox's treatment of global production networks or value chains is consistent with that of [28], upon whose work Cox draws. Consequently, the limitations of realist and liberal treatments of international relations or world politics, stemming from their shared, axiomatic separation of state and economy, are summarily dispatched: "Realists assume that a state's security interest can be formulated as an independent expression of state policy. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the implications of one of the great intellectual revolutions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the replacement of Marxist economics by neoclassical economics in China. The analysis summarizes what is distinctive about Marxist and neoclassical ways of thinking. The paper then demonstrates how these differences led to different framings and different conclusions about a number of key topics related to the development of capitalism in China. Among the topics explored are the merits of state-owned enterprises, the nature of inequality in China, and the relationship between capitalism and the environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the different policy agendas that emerge from the different framings offered by neoclassical and Marxist economics. JEL Classification: B41, B51, P2, O53 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the application of neoclassical economics to the discussion of China's transition to the market in the 1990s and its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. It shows how this theory shaped, and misled, forecasts of the impact of that accession and of China's subsequent economic performance. It discusses the debate between mini-bang and big-bang transition policies in the 1990s and shows the two sides shared far more in common than separated them. Both sides misestimated, in fact grossly underestimated, the dynamism of China's economy. It shows how widely anticipated predictions of crisis and collapse with China's WTO accession were the natural result of the assumptions of the neoclassical model. It suggests that a rival model of market transition based on Bukharin and Kuznets has much to offer. JEL Classification: P22, P26, P21, B24 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper challenges the idea that neoclassical economics has demonstrated competition's efficiency. It does so by retracing the history of Pareto's criterion (in general equilibrium and in modern neoclassical economics), showing that it is only after a few shifts and transformations that it became an "efficiency" criterion while it was never called that in Pareto's work. Widespread belief that competition is efficient is rather the result of ideology than of rigorous neoclassical demonstration. JEL Classification: B13, B21, P16 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the Annual Macroeconomic database of the European Commission (AMECO) to confirm that textbook multipliers are nearly always greater than one and that they increase during recessions. Propensity to import falls in recessions through the combined effects of the amplified fall in investment and the high import content of investment. A change in saving behavior may also raise the multiplier. These findings strongly support the need for countercyclical fiscal policies during recessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By integrating selected Kaleckian and Marxian insights, this paper analyzes the sources of profit realization and the profit rate in the US economy from 1964–2013. The most significant sources of profit realization in the United States are capitalists' consumption and workers' debt, which historically have been under appreciated both theoretically and empirically. The insights gleaned by analyzing the sources of profit realization aid in understanding the Great Recession and the future of the US economy.JEL Classifications: B51, E11 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theoretically promised confluence of favorable biological, economic, and social outcomes in neoliberal solutions for fisheries is illusory. The required commodification of the fish, including the species and accompanying oceanic commons enclosures, result in contradictions that cannot be understood within the neoclassical economic paradigm. A process of dialectical abstraction and qualitative modeling exposes the source and mechanism of the contradictions providing an alternative basis for discourse on the fishery and the commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cambridge critique of the marginal productivity theory of distribution is entwined with the critics’ theories of value, price, distribution, capital, growth, and methodology that occurred alongside it. The article first discusses these dimensions, then the inescapable need to explain the origin and size and rate of profits in any approach to the theory of distribution. The need in the neoclassical approach to have a unit in which to measure capital that is independent of distribution and prices is examined. The alternative classical/Marxian alternative and the relationship of pricing and market structures to systemic relationships in Post-Keynesian theory are analysed. Unresolved debates among the critics of the mainstream are outlined including those between Garegnani and Hahn. Ways forward are suggested in the concluding section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to clear up some issues in a second phase of the Cambridge-Cambridge capital theory controversies, when the neoclassical argument was chiefly conducted in terms of the Walrasian specification of capital in intertemporal and temporary general equilibrium models. It is held that the response by the neoclassical side in that phase has not been as satisfactory to rebut the implications of reswitching and capital reversing as some neoclassical scholars have argued. The reason for this can be traced in the overlooking of the implications of the redefinition of equilibrium implied in those models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to criticize the common idea which sustains that current neoclassical economics is detached from ethics, and therefore is scientific knowledge. Using Kantian critical philosophy, we argue, on the contrary, that neoclassical economics is based on certain ethical postulates, and thus it cannot obtain the status of science. Although ethics is but one of the many institutions that affect economics, it plays a major role in setting the basis on which to build its entire theoretical structure. Approaching the analysis from institutionalism places ethical issues at the forefront of economic debate, thus opening the door to future dialogue between disciplines and analytical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the United States, commentators and politicians demonstrate a deep-rooted persistent adherence to a neoclassical model of the labor market, where a minimum wage increase is seen as an inevitable cause of unemployment, as it is assumed to occur at a point where the labor market was initially in equilibrium. The work of the Minimum Wage Study Commission (1981) uncovered the small size of the unemployment inflation effect, and the new minimum wage research also has corroborated this. Seen against these findings, the persistent rhetoric of sizeable “unemployment effects” of minimum wage increases simply shows the power of employers in a capitalist system. This paper suggests that counteracting the rhetoric is best done by recognizing the agency of the minimum wage worker and portraying this worker not as one who may “suffer unemployment” under a wage increase but who chooses to work fewer hours if hourly wages and benefits become sufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this piece I comment on Nancy’s Folbre’s David Gordon Memorial Lecture for the 2012 Allied Social Science Associations meetings, focusing on the strengths of how she combines Marxian sensibilities with neoclasscial analytical tools, the advantages of her proposed definition of political economy, and extending her call for developing a macroeconomic approach to human capital.JEL codes: B50; E11; E24 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article asserts the economic relevancy of human connectedness and community. It argues that if the goal of economics is to maximize human happiness, then approaches that directly address social phenomena and community building, rather than utility and income maximization by individual economic actors, are more promising and indeed “rational.” The fair trade movement, insofar as it supports community-based cooperatives, can play an important role in this process. However, the real story behind successful cooperatives is often more about the nature of the rural “peasant” community that supports it. Viewing economic decision making through the lens of the Mirembe Kawomera coffee cooperative in Uganda reveals a market that is socially embedded in a community rich in social capital, or more appropriately social productive power of labor, rather than one that constitutes a separate market sphere. When economic incentives encompass a more holistic set of costs and benefits, even those that may be less tangible, economic activity and strong community tend to be mutually reinforcing.JEL codes: O,P,Q [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I develop a critique of both standard neoclassical and standard Marxian conceptualizations of human capital that illustrates an important hypothesis of feminist political economy: collective conflicts based on class, gender, and age, as well as other dimensions of collective identity, affect the distribution of the costs of developing human capital.JEL codes: B50; E11; E24 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In my response to Garnett and Mearman, I argue that many of their comments are based on the assumption that mainstream economics has truth and value, which is in fact not the case. In addition, I argue that that the divided economics community arises from actions taken by mainstream economists and not due to actions taken by heterodox economists. Finally, I argue that pluralism through tolerance is the way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the impacts of global “social distancing” on employers and workers and examines community-based worker center strategies to mitigate those impacts. Through a case study of El Centro Humanitario, Denver’s human rights center for immigrant day laborers, the paper addresses how community organizations can respond to social distancing by “organizing the unorganized,” and crafting strategies such as worker-owned cooperatives to promote workers’ rights while reconnecting workers to their work and to each other.JEL classification: L31, L33, P32 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mainstream macroeconomic theory, especially as synthesized in the New Neoclassical Synthesis, is argued to have many problematic aspects, problems which have been especially underscored by the recent economic crisis, and which relate to its method, its views of the economy, and its goals and its policy implications. These failings call for greater pluralism in macroeconomic theory and greater acceptance of alternative approaches. One of these—which is based on accounting identities and behavioral and institutional relations, which stresses the importance of uncertainty and power, emphasizes the goals of reducing unemployment and distributional fairness, and views policymaking as an art—is particularly worthy of attention.JEL classification: B22, B41, E00 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In spite of its substantial results in understanding modern capitalism and the fact that, until the 1970s, Keynesian theory inspired the economic policy of most countries, the classical/post-Keynesian paradigm failed to become dominant on the theoretical scene. Why? Pasinetti’s book provides an answer by first pointing out the “unwise behavior” of the Cambridge group of Keynesian scholars, then by suggesting how to overcome the present theoretical impasse by the methodological device of the “separation theorem.” Economic enquiry, he argues, should distinguish the phase of “pure theory,” to be elaborated at a logical stage that precedes institutions, from the (applied) institutional analysis. The review concludes by maintaining that, while Pasinetti’s suggestion is fully valid, the theoretical strength of a paradigm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for becoming dominant. As the last decades show, the success or failure of a paradigm is also crucially dependent on social and power relations in society.JEL classification: B50; B31; E12 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reviewing a recent collection of readings on the controversy between post-Keynesians and neoclassicals on the foundations of political economy, this essay attempts to assess the debate and comments on the controversial question of reswitching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response is a defense of neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economics contains more than the perfectly competitive model: much of it concerns the problems of market failure including public goods, externalities, imperfect structure, and asymmetric information. The article acknowledges that economic models are abstract, but argues that abstraction can be useful, and that full-blown utility theory is not required to gain insights from the concepts. Neoclassical economics helps us understand how the world works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstrates how a radical approach to worktime can strengthen the radical critique of neoclassical unemployment theory. Extension of K.W. Rothschild's critique of the insider/outsider theory of unemployment by incorporating worktime concerns along with a Marxian critique of standard productivity theory; Choice for leisure and work-sharing with given labor demand.

Examines the implicit political economy of marginal productivity theory and argues that it is based upon a specific construction of capital-labor relations. Political economy of neoclassical distribution theory; Notion of objectively measurable marginal products as an impossible fiction; Extension of the ordinalist revolution associated with utility theory into the realm of production.