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• Circuitous change. • Prime mover. • Structural change. Changes in sector-wise patterns of output and employment, observed over last few decades in the global economy, call for an explanation. Those reveal a complex pattern of structural changes in weights as well as interdependence between the different sectors, subject to the technical and material conditions available in the economy. As pointed out in the available literature, those changes can be interpreted by the socio-political and economic forces within economies – which operate as prime-movers of structural changes, by affecting the relative profitability of activities. (Pasinetti, L 1965) We further point out that there exists a circuitous link between the socio- political and economic-forces and the changing weight or power relations across sectors, shaping the structural dynamics of the changes. The changes also indicate that with financial de-regulation finance grows faster than the industrial sector. The path that emerges manifest the respective changes in the real and financial activities, often moving in opposite directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prominent growth in environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment is evident, with the number of global assets managed sustainably more than doubled over the last decade. This trend is expected to continue until 2030. This type of financial data is positive but given the United Nations stated 'climate emergency' and 'climate survival' in society today, there needs to be an even greater acceleration of growth in ESG investment. Unfortunately, significant negativity has emerged on ESG in recent years. This 'Cutting Edge' study explores the reasons why and how ESG investment has veered off the journey towards enabling society to achieve both its targets under the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Energy Agenda and the 2015 Paris Agreement. It examines the factors prompting leading multinational companies, particularly in the energy and food sectors, to shift their corporate strategies. The key message advanced is that ESG frameworks and guidelines are not problematic; rather, the issue lies in the practice of ethics in decision-making within corporations. Addressing this ethical challenge, which is at the heart of ESG practices, across different professions and disciplines can rebuild trust among stakeholders in ESG investing. This form of interdisciplinary 'just transition ethics' can re-orient us back on the journey towards a just and sustainable world. • Reviews the importance and positive impact of ESG investments. • Negativity concerning ESG is noted but is misguided. • Key challenge is to diffuse ethics into ESG decision-making and frameworks. • Advances the need for 'just transition ethics' to align ESG with the just transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Uncertainty dominates our world, yet economics often fails to take it into account. • Economists such as Knight, Keynes, Hayek, Shackle and Hirschman recognised the significance of uncertain knowledge. • Complexity, ecological, feminist and narrative economics, among other heterodox approaches, do take uncertainty seriously. • Pastoral development and global finance examples highlight flexible adaptation and learning-by-doing when responding to uncertainty. • Reclaiming earlier insights from Albert Hirschman can help reframe economic theory and practice for today's world. Uncertainty, where we do not know the likelihood of future events, dominates our world. This article examines how economics as a profession and discipline can address uncertainty. From Frank Knight to John Maynard Keynes to Friedrich von Hayek to George Shackle, economics has highlighted the importance of uncertain knowledge and distinguished this from calculable risk. In this article we show how such insights were lost through the rise of narrow neoclassical thinking and were excluded through the emergence of a dominant economics of control that rose to prominence during the twentieth century and especially in the neoliberal era. However, through a range of perspectives in economics that emphasise the importance of complexity, informality, positionality and narratives, uncertainty is once again being embraced within an increasingly heterodox economics. In many ways, this chimes with the work of Albert Hirschman who, starting from the mid-1960s, emphasised the importance of addressing uncertainty in development theory and practice. Through two examples on pastoral development and global financial governance, we highlight the continued relevance of Hirschman's thinking on the importance of adaptation, flexibility and learning-by-doing as responses to uncertainty and for the development of reliable, robust approaches to development policy and practice. In conclusion, we argue that economics theory, methodologies, professional practice and training need to change, recovering some of the insights from previous generations of economic thinkers and practitioners, in order to reinvent an economics appropriate for our uncertain world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Implementation of aid-funded development projects depends on consultants' advice. • Selection of consultants is a political process: recipient governments prefer to hire domestic consulting firms. • Recipients' economic and political partners and the World Bank's major shareholders are more likely to receive contracts. • More experienced consultants and those from countries with greater expertise levels are more likely to receive contracts. • Selection of domestic consultants is associated with longer project implementation and lower project outcome evaluations. Scholarship on development aid investigates how donors' and recipients' political and economic interests interact to weaken effectiveness of aid. These influences have been traced at various stages of the aid cycle – from aid commitment and disbursement to impact evaluation. Yet, development assistance programs provide not only financial resources for recipient countries, but also human capital. Specifically, development aid agencies often rely on experts' and consulting firms' knowledge to enable project development and implementation. Such knowledge can increase recipients' capacity to implement domestic reforms, thereby spurring economic and social development. However, transfers of human capital may experience similar pressures that influence flows of financial capital and reduce their effectiveness. This article aims to investigate whether donors' and recipients' interests sway the flow of human capital provided through development programs. I focus on the procurement process for consulting services funded by World Bank development aid, and show that formal institutional requirements for consultant selection leave room for recipient governments to pursue domestic and foreign benefits from procurement decisions. In addition, my analyses show that governments' pursuit of such benefits has tangible consequences for aid effectiveness: when recipients favor domestic consulting firms, projects take more time to complete and tend to receive lower outcome evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This largely programmatic paper offers a new way of thinking through the incorporation of farmland into financial markets. Building on the notion of “operations of capital”, it sketches analytical entry points for scrutinizing the inner workings of agri-finance capital formation. The concept of operations can make two useful contributions to the existing discussion. First, it helps provide a more nuanced historicization of the entanglement between finance and farmland. Finance has a long history of penetrating agriculture and the new quality of the contemporary coupling of finance and farmland only becomes fully visible when adopting a more nuanced historical perspective. Rather than imagining the history of capitalism as one where industrial capitalism gives way to financialized capitalism, the concept of operations sensitizes us for the situated modes, processes and practices of financial economization that have reworked economy, society and nature at specific historical conjunctures. Second, it allows us to move beyond simply treating “financialization” as explanans . Shifting attention to the situated practical activities of global finance, it eventually helps us explore central categories of financial economization (“capital”, “resources”, “property” and “value”) as practical accomplishments rather than taking them for granted. Only then can we come to terms with how finance works through farmland in different geographical settings. Empirical material from an ongoing research project will support my arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We examine real returns to government debt of the G7 countries, for both short and long maturities. Our focus is on returns to fixed income investing rather than contemporaneous yields. We find evidence that investments in the same maturity across countries may be modeled as a cointegrated process, in a vector error correction framework, with common trends separated into their permanent and transitory components for the system. Our findings are based on analysis of both short-term maturities and long-term maturities. However, the structure varies excessively across maturities and time frames, with recent data showing less integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major challenges facing the 21st century world demands disruptive technology based solutions. One of the most promising exponential technology set to address world challenges is the Internet of Things (IoT) based Trillion Sensor System (TSS). The IoT supports many revolutionary commercial and societal solutions including wearable or unobtrusive medical sensors, Industry 4.0, power and water grids, smart cities, food production, education, transportation and roadway infrastructure needs. However, to support these solutions the current IoT infrastructure needs improved spectrum and the use of between one to ten Trillion Sensors (TS). The development of a robust IoT based TSS infrastructure would create an addition to world GDP equal to that of the U.S. GDP to double the worlds GDP. This new IoT based TSS would create a high paying job base that will form a new vibrant world middle class and an abundant economy. Yet while much is written about the ability of the IoT to transform society little effort is focused on its infrastructure. If this is true there is cause for concern. We add to the literature by developing a precursor road mapping construct which focuses on the service sector and supports 3rd generation road mapping techniques. We utilize the emerging IoT TSS technology base as our case study. We utilize the best thoughts of hundreds of experts from three organizations focused on accelerating IoT TSS road mapping efforts. • 3rd generation road mapping; TL HITR Techniques • Technology roadmapping techniques of the service sector • Abundance, and the rising middle class • IoT based TSS and Edge Intelligence infrastructure • Current IoT spectrum insufficient for an IoT based TSS [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]