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While rising income inequality and financialisation are widely recognised as prominent features of advanced capitalist economies, theoretical explanations of these phenomena, and how they interact, have varied significantly. Many of these explanations involve the construction of all-encompassing cross-country narratives, which result in a lack of analytical specificity. By framing inequality through the lens of the functional distribution of income, and focusing on the case study of Australia, this thesis aims to paint a detailed picture of what the financialisation-income distribution nexus can look like in practice. The key theoretical approach adopted is a Sraffian model of financialisation, which proposes that an increase in the relative size of the financial sector, higher financial sector productivity, and reduced labour bargaining power, lead to a fall in the wage share of income. This model is synthesised with other heterodox perspectives in order to establish a nuanced understanding of the key historical events that have driven the financialisation process in Australia. In doing so, this thesis seeks to disentangle Australia’s experience of financialisation and a falling wage share from the ambiguity of neoliberalism, deregulation, and globalisation.

This Encyclopedia is an invaluable reference book for post-Keynesian and heterodox economics. It consists of 300 entries, written by 180 different authors. The volume includes entries on key concepts of interest to post-Keynesians as well as descriptions of some of the seminal books in the post-Keynesian tradition. It will interest both students and scholars of heterodox economics, as well as policy makers around the world looking for a better alternative to mainstream economic policies at national and international levels in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that burst in 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic crisis that began in 2020.

[EN] The objective of this article is to carry out a review of the links between institutional and post-Keynesian economics, in order to raise the possible compatibility and even complementarity between the two branches of economic thought. To this end, we first review the question of compatibility from the perspective of institutional economics and then from the post-keynesian standpoint. Next, methodological issues are addressed by presenting the essential elements that characterize post-keynesian and institutional methodology (and internal debates in this regard) and then by describing the areas of compatibility between the two. The final section presents the main conclusions and summarizes the basic elements that could constitute a theoretical framework of synthesis between institutional and post-keynesian economics. SI Publicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCLE

This paper examines the emergence of private debt-led growth in Canada since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) by means of a growth regimes and macroeconomic policy regime assessment. Examining each of the four business cycles in the 1983-2020 period, roughly encompassing the entirety of the neoliberal period, results demonstrate the emergence of a 'rising' weakly export-led growth regime in the early 1990s, a shift to a 'falling' weakly export-led regime by 2001, and a turn to a debt-led private demand regime since the GFC. The macroeconomic policy regime then identifies the structural changes and policy factors which have contributed to Canada's shifting growth regime. While price competitiveness played an important role in the first three cycles, it failed to re-establish an export-led regime in the postGFC period due to decreased non-price competitiveness. Instead, the post-GFC combination of negative real interest interests which encouraged the accumulation of private debt and fiscal policy which ex post did not address the negative financial balances of the household sector supported the turn to private debt-led growth.

The purpose of this study is to understand how countries have leveraged on their economic resilience to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus is on a global sample of 150 countries. The study develops a health vulnerability index (HVI) and leverages on an existing economic resilience index (ERI) to provide four main scenarios from which to understand the problem statement, namely ‘low HVI-low ERI,’ ‘high HVI-low ERI,’ ‘high HVI-high ERI,’ and ‘low HVI-high ERI’ quadrants. Countries that have robustly fought the pandemic are those in the ‘low HVI-high ERI’ quadrant and, to a lesser extent, countries in the ‘low HVI-low ERI’ quadrant. Most European countries, namely one African country (Rwanda), four Asian countries (e.g., Japan, China, South Korea, and Thailand), and six American countries (e.g., United States, Canada, Uruguay, Panama, Argentina, and Costa Rica) are apparent in the ideal quadrant.

“In Defence of the Nominalist Ontology of Money” by Geoffrey Ingham (published by the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 2021) contends that “Historicising the Money of Account: A Critique of the Nominalist Ontology of Money” (published by the same journal in 2020) is based on misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and imprecisions. The core proposition in “Historicising the Money of Account” is that the money of account, which is generally understood to be a universal attribute of money, is in fact an institution of late medieval and early modern times that has no significant equivalent in today’s world (or in the ancient world, for that matter). This reply is intended to provide further clarification on the historical and ontological specificity of the late medieval institution of the money of account.

This paper explores the economics and political economy of financialization using Matt Taibbi's vampire squid metaphor to characterize it. The paper makes five innovations. First, it focuses on the mechanics of the ‘vampire squid’ process whereby financialization rotates through the economy, loading sector balance sheets with debt. Second, it identifies the critical role of government budget deficits for the financialization process. Third, it identifies the critical role of central banks, which are the lynchpin of the system and now serve as de facto guarantors of the value and liquidity of private sector liabilities. Fourth, the paper argues financialization imposes a form of policy lock-in. Fifth, it argues financialization transforms popular attitudes and understandings, thereby generating political support despite poor economic outcomes. In effect, there is a politics of financialization that goes hand-in-hand with the economics. The paper concludes with some observations on why mainstream macroeconomics has no equivalent construct to financialization and discusses the disquieting unexplored terrain that the economy is now in.

This article compares inequality in employment across demographic groups in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We develop a measure to capture both how much employment declines during a recession and the persistence of employment losses. Results show a significant shift of job loss from men in the Great Recession to women in the COVID-19 lockdown. White workers fare better than other racial/ethnic groups in both recessions. Black and Hispanic women are hit especially hard in the COVID-19 pandemic. With our job-loss measure, less-educated workers had modestly worse outcomes in the Great Recession. However, during COVID-19, less-educated workers suffer much more severe employment consequences than more-educated groups. We discuss long-term effects of employment inequality and how these findings are relevant to debates about policy responses.

In post-Keynesian literature, Hein (2012b) was the first to incorporate financialization as an influential positive determinant of the rate of technological change. However, financialization is more like a two-edged sword which can affect technological change negatively as well. We capture both the positive as well as the negative effect of financialization on technological change which encapsulates the possibility of multiple equilibria. In analyzing the long run of the model, we endogenize the financialization parameter as well and get richer dynamics than Hein (2012b). We show that under certain circumstances, a higher speed of diffusion of technological innovation, more regulated financial markets, and higher intra-class competition among firms are desirable for stabilizing the economy. Finally, we provide some policy prescriptions for the same.

In a post-Keynesian growth model with two types of workers, an attempt is taken to understand changes in financial behaviour and income distribution and their macroeconomic causes and consequences. For a relatively strong speed of adjustment in the financial market and a relatively weak reserve army effect, a stable steady state is achieved in the wage-led demand regime. An endogenous and perpetual business cycles may emerge in both the regimes. While in some scenario, a contraction in the wage gap between white and blue-collar employments can make the steady state unstable, in a profit-led demand regime, a rise in the wage gap can destabilize the economy. A more regulated financial market is desirable for ensuring the economy’s stability in a weak wage-led or a weak profit-led demand regime. A more regulated labour market and a rise in unionization are desirable as these can mitigate income inequality.

Commission inspections pursuant to Article 20(4) of Regulation 1/2003 (i.e. dawn raids) interfere with the privacy rights of companies and individuals. This interference is disproportionate when it is not consistent with the requirements laid down in Article 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and Article 8 of the European Convention for Human Rights. In its recent judgments in the French Supermarkets cases, the General Court partially annulled four Commission inspection decisions for constituting an arbitrary and unjustified interference with the privacy rights of the inspected companies. The General Court found that the Commission had initiated inspections without having sufficiently serious evidence in its possession. This article examines this finding of the General Court and its practical implications for the protection of companies’ privacy rights in the context of dawn raids. In addition, this article examines possible remedies for challenging the seizure and copying of documents containing personal information of raided companies’ staff during a dawn raid.

We contribute to the recent debates on demand and growth regimes in modern finance-dominated capitalism linking them to the post-Keynesian research on macroeconomic policy regimes. We examine the demand and growth regimes, as well as the macroeconomic policy regimes for the big four Eurozone countries, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, for the periods 2001–2009 and 2010–2019. First, our approach supports the usefulness of the identification of demand and growth regimes according to growth contributions of the main demand components and financial balances of the macroeconomic sectors. This allows for an understanding of the demand sources of growth, or stagnation, if there is a lack of demand, of how these sources are financed and of potential financial instabilities and fragilities. Second, when it comes to the macroeconomic policy drivers of demand and growth regimes, as well as their respective changes, we show that the exclusive focus on fiscal policies, as in the previous literature, is too limited and that it is the macroeconomic policy regime which matters here, i.e. the combination of monetary, fiscal and wage policies, as well as the open economy conditions.

Most empirical macroeconomic research limited to the period since World War II. This paper analyses the effects of changes in income distribution and in private wealth on consumption and investment covering a period from as early as 1855 until 2010 for the UK, France, Germany and USA, based on the dataset of Piketty and Zucman (2014). We contribute to the post-Keynesian debate on the nature of demand regimes, mainstream analyses of wealth effects and the financialisation debate. We find that overall domestic demand has been wage-led in the USA, UK and Germany. Total investment responds positively to higher wage shares, which is driven by residential investment. For corporate investment alone, we find a negative relation. Wealth effects are found to be positive and significant for consumption in the USA and UK, but weaker in France and Germany. Investment is negatively affected by private wealth in the USA and the UK, but positively in France and Germany.

In recent decades, the labour share has experienced a downward trend in Portugal that has occurred at the same time as a weaker and anaemic growth pattern. This seems to suggest that the fall in the labour share represents an important constraint on Portuguese economic growth, which does not support the orthodox claims around wage restraint policies as a necessary condition to improve macroeconomic performance due to their positive effects on private investment through higher profits and on net exports through lesser unit labour costs and a corresponding rise in competitiveness. This study assesses the relationship between labour share and economic growth by performing a time series econometric analysis focused on Portugal from 1970 to 2020. Findings show that labour share positively impacts economic growth in Portugal, which is in line with heterodox claims and particularly with post-Keynesian economics on the beneficial effects on private consumption played by the growth of wages. Findings also confirm that the Portuguese economy follows a wage-led growth regime instead of a profit-led growth regime; that is, a rise in wages boosts economic growth because its beneficial effect on private consumption more than compensates for a prejudicial effect on private investment and on net exports. The study points out the urgent need to adopt public policies to support the growth of wages to avoid more decades of dismal growth and a new ‘secular stagnation’ in Portugal. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Bitcoin got increasing popularity and was considered by the public as a great investment due to huge overvaluation in 2017. In parallel, economists and high-level technicians started to advocate the use of bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies as an alternative to national currencies. However, bitcoin is far from being considered as money, so it is hard for a monetary and payment system to emerge based on these technologies. This paper, apart from briefly presenting the Bitcoin System, shows why bitcoin is not money in the light of the Keynesian theory. We use Keynesian essential properties of Money and Modern Money Theory to define money, and to show that cryptographic currencies are not money. We then go back to Keynes' theory of portfolio choice, established in Chapter 17 of the General Theory, to show what bitcoin really is: at most, bitcoin is a perfect virtual commodity, a virtual liquid speculative asset.

There are basicly two views answering the question of how money is created: according to the exogenous money hypothesis of economic theory central banks have full control over the money stock in the markets and other policy instruments; whereas endogenous money theory postulates money is created by credit demand of economic actors . Demand for credits in turn arises from the production process, triggered by changes in production costs, basicly from a rise in nominal wages. This paper aims to analyze whether money supply creation is endogenous in the Turkish money markets during the period 2011-2018 by use of monthly data, for which cointegration between money supply (money base, M1, M2) and credits is tested by Johansen method and VECM is estimated for specifying direction of causality between the variables. Further, Toda Yamamoto test is applied to check robustness of the results obtained from VECM long and short run causality. Results point at relation from credits to money supply; i.e. money is endogenous and demand determined, also that credits extended by banks form basis of the money supply. İktisadi teoride paranın nasıl yaratıldığı sorusuna iki farklı cevap bulunmaktadır: dışsal para hipotezine göre merkez bankalarının para stoku ve diğer para politikası araçları üzerinde tam kontrolü bulunmaktayken; içsel para teorisine göre para ekonomik aktörlerin kredi talebi üzerine yaratılmaktadır. İçsel para teorisine göre para talebi firma üretim süreçlerinden ortaya çıkmakta, üretim maliyetlerindeki artış ve daha çok da nominal ücretlerdeki artıştan kaynaklanmaktadır. Bu çalışmada aylık veri kullanılarak 2011-2018 arasındaki dönemde para arzının içselliği araştırılmakta; para arzı M1, M2 ile krediler arasında Johansen koentegrasyon ilişkisi olup olmadığı sınanarak, VECM analizi ile değişkenler arasındaki nedensellik sorgulanmaktadır. Buna ilave olarak VECM kısa ve uzun dönem nedensellik testi sonuçlarının güçlü olup olmadığı Toda Yamamoto testiyle sınanmaktadır. Elde edilen sonuçlara gore nedensellik kredilerden para arzına doğrudur; para arzı içsel olup talep tarafından belirlenmekte, banka kredileri para arzının temelini oluşturmaktadır.

The traditional Lockean justification of property rights has been argued to be no longer valid in a world in which much wealth does not derive from acquisitions of natural resources, and in which much property, such as money, is intangible. This means that libertarians need to reconsider whether and why property rights are justified for objects that fall outside of the scope of the Lockean justification. This paper gives a justification of property rights in relation to modern money, which uses the self-ownership principle as its central premise. Since modern money is a form of credit, I start with a justification of credit property rights. I then consider both money under gold convertibility and present-day fiat systems, showing that the justification of credit property rights remains valid under these conditions.

In the modern economy, algorithms influence many aspects of our lives, from how much we pay for groceries and what adverts we see, to the decisions taken by health professionals. As is true with all new technologies, algorithms bring new economic opportunities and make our lives easier, but they also bring new challenges. Indeed, many competition authorities have voiced their concerns that under certain circumstances algorithms may harm consumers, lead to exclusion of some competitors and may even enable firms (knowingly or otherwise) to avoid competitive pressure and collude. In this article, we explain how algorithms work and what potential benefits and harms they bring to competition.

‘Big data’ and ‘big tech’ have become central topics in recent antitrust debate and regulation. For example, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently published a report on online platforms, expressing concerns that the major platforms like Google are now protected from competition by such strong incumbency advantages. Underlying the CMA's theory of harm is the essential facility theory of antitrust, under which Google's ability to control access to its click-and-query data is seen as preventing its rivals from competing effectively. EU jurisprudence has identified three criteria to determine whether data are an essential facility and whether access should be mandated. First, the data must be indispensable to compete in the market. Secondly, absent data sharing, technical improvements by competitors must be hampered or precluded. Thirdly, there must be no objective justification to refuse competitors access to the data. It is difficult to reconcile the authorities’ concerns with Google's click-and-query data with these criteria, however. Actual and potential alternatives exist; Google's competitors have been innovating in the search market for more than a decade; and there are objective reasons to limit data access, including threats to innovation and privacy concerns.

The global financial crisis and ensuing weak growth have increased interest in macroeconomic issues within comparative political economy (CPE). CPE, particularly the dominant Varieties of Capitalism approach, has based its analyses on mainstream economics, which limits analysis of the relation between distribution and growth and neglects the role finance plays in modern economies. It overstates the stability of the capitalist growth process and understates the potential effectiveness of government interventions. Baccaro and Pontusson have suggested a post-Keynesian (PK) theory of distribution and growth as an alternative. This article generalizes their point. PK theory highlights the instability of the growth process and lends itself to an analysis of income distribution and power relations. The article identifies the analysis of financialization and financial cycles, the understanding of neoliberal growth models, and the political economy of central banks as areas where PK economics provides specific insights for CPE. It also highlights that these arguments have important implications for government policy in an era of secular stagnation with ongoing social, distributional, and economic crises.

Post-Keynesian institutionalism (PKI) has always been about starting with the reality of human experience and working to fashion a better world rooted in broadly shared prosperity. In contrast, a d...

For a developed market economy, the COVID-19 crisis is a new type of crisis, but such a crisis has parallels with economies at other times, and with crises in many places. We discuss some mechanisms from the traditional macro literature and from the literature on macroeconomics for developing countries. Phenomena such as bottlenecks, rationing, forced savings, production constrained by access to inputs, liquidity constraints, sector heterogeneity, and costs running despite production being shut down, are all permanent phenomena in developing countries. During the COVID-19 crisis, however, they have also emerged as key mechanisms in developed market economies. We discuss some of these well-developed but partially forgotten mechanisms by extending simple textbook descriptions, and we provide some examples of how the effects of policy are changed in a time of crisis. © 2021 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.