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[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

“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 article observes that current macroeconomic policy modeling, centered on domestic agents or agencies, fails to recognize the role that global investors play in determining the space for effective domestic macroeconomic policies, and argues that these actors must be brought to the center of macro analysis if one wants to understand how policies work in the global financial context. The article describes the key features of global investors, discusses their power to determine the prices at which public-sector liabilities (money and debt) trade in the international markets, and considers how this power affects the effectiveness of macroeconomic policies by national governments. As a result, no government is truly sovereign in a globalized world, and every government is subject to an intertemporal budget constraint (IBC), although, of course, not all governments are born equal and not all IBCs are equally binding: government IBCs are elastic, endogenous to global investor decisions, and yet ineluctable. The article concludes that choosing the correct country policy stance in today's financial global context would benefit from revisiting some of the key policy lessons that John Maynard Keynes left with us, considering his deep knowledge of global financial markets and how they affect country economies.

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.

During 2014–2016, many analysts have claimed the occurrence of a capital flight in China due to the reduction of the country's foreign reserves by over US$800 billion. This paper aims therefore to answer the question: did China really undergo a capital flight in this period? Its methodology includes a detailed analysis of the Chinese external stocks and flows between 2014 and 2016, and an examination of the currency hierarchy and the international usage of the renminbi (RMB). The authors conclude: the fall in the foreign reserves that occurred in China in 2015–2016 was partially due to (i) a strategy of the Chinese government to diversify its international assets; and (ii) Chinese residents (private entities) increasing their foreign-asset holdings. Besides that, there did indeed occur a capital flight in China in 2015–2016, mostly due to a reduction of the non-resident deposits and loans, but these outflows were partially in RMB. Due to that core difference, the effects on the domestic economy are much lower. Furthermore, the RMB outflows may contribute to the internationalization of the RMB.

The paper analyses the relation between premature deindustrialization in Latin America and what is termed premature financialization. Premature financialization is defined as a turn to finance, organized as an industrial concern, which is a vehicle for accumulation before the process of industrialization has reached maturity. This contrasts with developed countries where financialization occurs after an advanced stage of economic and social development has been reached, and where the growth of the financial sector, beyond a certain threshold, can be detrimental to economic activity. The paper examines the consequences of premature financialization for investment, growth, and financial stability.

To contain the COVID-19 pandemic, medical products play an important role around the world. This paper studies the relationship between trade and pandemic control by testing the impact of importing medical products from China on COVID-19 cases and deaths. Using a fixed-effects model, we find that there is a significant negative correlation between imports of medical products from China and COVID-19 cases; for every 1 percent increase in protection equipment imported from China, new COVID-19 cases per day drop by 0.24 percent, and COVID-19-related deaths decrease by 0.13 percent in two weeks. The evidence suggests that trade can play a vital role in fighting the pandemic.

This paper examines the Brazilian economy during the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic policies implemented in 2020 to address the economic and social crisis. Using primary and secondary sources, the article differs in its analysis from other heterodox approaches according to which state action in response to the pandemic crisis in Brazil was weak and inconsistent. It is argued that counter-cyclical actions, especially those relating to emergency aid, have had a strong counter-cyclical effect on the economy and on reducing poverty and social inequality, even though there was no strategy previously coordinated by the federal government. The article concludes that the poor outlook for the Brazilian economy relates to both the resumption of orthodox policies and the unleashing of a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, both contributing to a slow recovery of the Brazilian economy.

2020 was a terrible year for Asia but for some countries less than for others. Countries recovered divergently with some managing to grow positively notwithstanding the pandemic, namely mainland China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The rest of Asia had a hard time, facing problems such as current-account deficit, tourism reliance, and limited fiscal and monetary space. This article discusses the unevenness of COVID-19 and the divergent recovery of Asian economies in the post-COVID-19 era.

A revision of the European Central Bank's (ECB) strategy is urgently needed. For the new strategy, it is important to define the inflation target explicitly in symmetrical terms. Environmental policy objectives can in principle be reconciled with the ECB's mandate as long as they do not conflict with the objective of monetary stability. An essential element of any strategy is a heuristic that makes it relatively easy for the public to monitor whether monetary policy decisions are in line with the mandate. Among the possible heuristics, monetary targeting and the Taylor rule have to be ruled out while ‘inflation targeting’ offers a relatively simple navigation system for monetary policy discussions.

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.

Many interpretations and developments of the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) rely on aggregate leverage ratio indicators to proxy non-financial firms’ sector financial fragility. Internal critiques of the FIH’s framework call into question the generality of this assumption. The issues arise due to limitations in untangling the monetary implications of pro-cyclical profits and lacking considerations about the role played by profit-rate heterogeneity. We construct an agent-based stock-flow consistent model (AB-SFC) that adds some missing elements in the FIH. The model bridges the evolutionary theory with a Keynesian-Kaleckian demand engine, including the financial development required to study financial fragility processes. Using a synthetic index measuring the joint profit-debt distribution, we show how cash flows distribution across firms impact the aggregate leverage ratio-systemic financial fragility relation. The reasoning is that the bottom-end of the firms’ leverage ratio distribution (low-leverage) is more variable, functioning as a pivotal driver of the economy-wide leverage ratio. Considering that, the systemic financial fragility is a cushioned and imperfect mirror of the aggregate leverage ratio. The results contribute to the literature in many ways. We provide theoretical reasoning that aids comprehension of why the empirical literature finds little support for the FIH. We propose a theoretical underpinning that helps giving substance to the burgeoning empirically-leaned recent literature on the influence of debt and indebtedness on economic fluctuations. We show the relevance of the inclusion of an evolutionary engine into the FIH. Finally, the paper shows the crucial importance of using a micro-macro analysisto analysethe financial fragility of firms.

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.

The aggregative and structural approaches are the main approaches used to investigate the US demand regime. They have reported mixed findings whereby the former tends to find profit-led results and the latter tends to find wage-led results. Blecker (2016) suggests that those conflicting findings can be explained, at least in part, by the different time dimensions captured by the two approaches. That is because the US economy tends to be profit-led in the short run and wage-led in the long run. This note discusses and extends Blecker's analysis. An alternative interpretation of the findings of studies using the structural approach is offered, suggesting that their conclusions rest on their handling of the short run. Specifically, the structural approach fails to find cointegration relations among integrated variables in most equations. That absence means it fails to pick up the stronger effect of the wage share on consumption in the long run, which is a key mechanism explaining different regimes across time horizons. The note concludes by briefly discussing other possible explanations for the conflicting results reported in the empirical literature.

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.

Almost 50 years ago, the Swedish econographer Axel Leijonhufvud (1973) wrote a seminal study on the Econ tribe titled ‘Life among the Econ.’ This study revisits the Econ and reports on their current state. Life has gotten more complicated since those bygone days. The cult of math modl-ing has spread far and wide, so that even lay Econs practice it. Fifty years ago the Econ used to say ‘Modl-ing is everything.’ Now they say ‘Modl-ing is the only thing.’ The math priesthood has been joined by a priesthood of economagicians. The fundamental social divide between Micro and Macro sub-tribes persists, but it has been diluted by a new doctrine of micro foundations. The Econ remain a fractious and argumentative tribe.

“Historicizing the money of account: a critique of the nominalist ontology of money” (Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 3, 43) argues that “money itself” is always something more than money of a...

In this study, the pricing behavior of Turkish manufacturing is analyzed using panel data on 22 sub-sectors for the period from 2004 to 2015. The empirical findings of the study largely support the...

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...

The book provides a series of expert commentaries on Bretton Woods, accompanied by a collection of essential historical documents.

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.

The new millennium has witnessed a rapid expansion of external balance sheets and significant changes in the capital, currency and sectoral compositions of foreign assets and liabilities of emerging economies. These have created new channels of transmission of global financial shocks and amplified the susceptibility of the value of their outstanding stocks of gross foreign assets and liabilities to global financial conditions, leading to sizeable wealth transfers between emerging and advanced economies. They have also resulted in significant income transfers in view of negative yield differentials between their gross external assets and liabilities. Altogether, such transfers to advanced economies are estimated to have reached 2.3 per cent of the combined GDP of the G20 emerging economies per annum during 2000–2016.

This study provides new evidence showing that the real exchange rate (RER) does not play an important role in the growth of Mexican GDP. Economic growth is not an automatically predetermined result of relative price correction, and it is important to consider distinctive aspects of national institutional arrangements (fiscal and monetary, for example) for understanding theoretical causality of demand. The empirical results show public expenditure is an overlooked variable in regressions where the exchange rate affects product growth. After incorporating public expenditure, the RER impact on growth becomes insignificant. For its part, public expenditure has a positive and significant effect on GDP in the long term. The RER does not lead to greater GDP since exports are not stimulated through price.

This article examines the charge that Thirlwall's law is a theoretical tautology. It shows that a certain approach to empirical testing of that law can sometimes – under conditions analysed here – result in econometric estimates that reflect an approximate identity or ‘near-tautology’. Nevertheless, other methods of empirically testing the law are not subject to the near-tautology critique, and hence the theory itself is not a tautology. Econometric estimates for the US and Mexico reveal that the near-tautology critique applies to data for the former but not the latter; the difference in these results is explained by exactly the reasons discussed here. The article offers an alternative interpretation of Thirlwall's law as implying a benchmark for analysing whether national income, rather than relative prices, is the main adjusting factor in response to current-account imbalances in the long run.

This paper surveys integrated assessment models applied to Brazil. We show that these models belong to the environmental economics literature that fails to consider some of the most important aspects of the modern macroeconomic dynamics in Brazil. These features include monetary and financial balances, income distribution, and physical limits to growth. We argue that the most suitable framework for modeling a low-carbon Brazilian economy would incorporate both Post-Keynesian and ecological economics principles. This new modeling method would strengthen our understanding of environmental mitigation action consequences and would allow us to explore new climate-policy packages.

This paper investigates the statistical relationship between the future expectations of the exchange rate and GDP growth and the current nominal exchange rate in Brazil during the period 2002–2017. The theoretical framework on which the paper is based is a decision-making model grounded in Keynes (1921; 1936) and Harvey (2006; 2009a), from which the paper's empirical model emerges. This model is tested empirically with autoregressive distributed lag models to identify short- and long-term statistical relationships in time series. The empirical estimations suggest that expectations of future changes in both the exchange rate and GDP growth have a statistically significant relationship with the current nominal exchange rate in Brazil, just as the Keynes–Harvey model predicts.

The present paper examines attribute substitution in terms of both heuristics and attribution theory in social psychology. Alternative “old” approaches in psychology were special because they considered choice in terms that were similar to attributional inference in social psychology and anticipated limitations of the static heuristics and biases approach. Attribute substitution plays an important role in reflective reasoning as an independent entity relative to rationality and produces good decisions, even those are sub-optimal and may be influenced by primitive processes such as intuition and habits. The attribute-substitution research enhances our understanding of intense shifts in economic expectations. It makes possible the conceptual incorporation of substantive theoretical constructions, which are inherent in psychological propensities of alternative, and mainly, heterodox approaches in economics such as Post Keynesian, Institutional and Austrian economics. This research agenda paves the way for possible forms of synthesis of those theories with behavioral economics.

This work builds upon “Keynes, Kalecki and Metzler in a Dynamic Distribution Model”. In that paper the dynamics of an economy from the ultra-short to the short period inside a Post-Keynesian perspe...

The paper examines the behavior of monetary policy and the institutional organization of economic policy in Mexico during the years of financial liberalization and the outgrowth of the financial industry. It argues that these policies have favored monetary and financial stability at the cost of reducing investment and negatively affecting the strength of the productive structure and the international competitiveness of the economy. The paper argues that such negative results, with the passage of time, increase the odds that current monetary policy will become unable to pursue monetary and financial stability. Unlike other outstanding critical literature, the emphasis of our evaluation regarding current policy's negative consequences is on the reduction of public investment that the institutional organization of economic policy has produced, instead of the overvaluation of the real exchange rate. As a final point, the paper discusses how institutional organization can be reformed to avoid further weakening of the productive structure and international competitiveness of the Mexican economy.

This paper models a representative bank, and uses this model to explore the assumptions and implications of a selection of money-creation theories. It is shown that the money-supply process tends toward the logic of exogeneity as banks' fears about liquidity stress increases. At present, banks do not fear liquidity stress because central banks are operating under a floor system with a superabundance of reserves following unsterilized quantitative easing. Secondly, a role for a ‘central-bank digital currency’ is suggested as a useful complement to reserves policy in an economy with large or collusive banks.

This paper explores the evolution of monetary policy at the People's Bank of China (PBoC) in the context of the distinct path China has adopted in fostering the international role of the renminbi. The paper highlights the challenges faced by the PBoC as it seeks to promote the use of the renminbi in international lending in particular, while simultaneously seeking to contain and discipline the inherent instability and potentially disruptive logic of finance. The problem it faces is not simply that of negotiating the impossible trinity, but rather the dilemma posed by its attempt to step out of the shadow of the US and forge an independent global role for the renminbi, while asserting control over the contours of its developing financial sector. The Chinese experiment tests the limits of the capacity of the state to tame finance.

John Maynard Keynes's (1936) concept of ‘animal spirits’ or ‘spontaneous optimism’ as a major driving force in business fluctuations was motivated in part by his and his contemporaries' observations of human reactions to ambiguous situations where probabilities couldn't be quantified. We can add that in such ambiguous situations there is evidence that people let contagious popular narratives and the emotions they generate influence their economic decisions. These popular narratives are typically remote from factual bases, just contagious. Macroeconomic dynamic models must have a theory that is related to models of the transmission of disease in epidemiology. We need to take the contagion of narratives seriously in economic modeling if we are to improve our understanding of animal spirits and their impact on the economy.

Neoclassical economic theory views current-account imbalances as the result of (individual) decisions to save more than to invest domestically. Monetary analysis in the Keynesian tradition rejects such approaches and emphasizes that a country's net savings are the result, not the cause, of net selling of goods and services to foreigners. The latter, in turn, depends on global demand patterns and absolute advantages between countries. We complement this Keynesian approach, taking a closer look at the financial account of the balance of payments: a necessary condition for countries to net-sell goods and services to foreigners is the willingness of domestic sector(s) to accumulate net foreign assets. While previous analysis of global imbalances has partially discussed the role of central banks' reserve accumulation it has failed to incorporate the macroeconomic role of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). We analyse eight surplus countries' external positions and find that the public sector typically purchases and manages significant amounts of foreign assets via both central banks and SWFs. This, in turn, supports current-account surpluses. We then consider the particular case of Switzerland where, contrary to other surplus countries, public-sector purchases of foreign assets had been absent for a long time, yet set in massively after 2008.

Emiliano Libman's constructive comments on our recent book, Heterodox Macroeconomics: Models of Demand, Distribution and Growth (HM), raise three main points of contention: the suitability of single-sector/single-technique (as opposed to multi-sector/multi-technique) models; the appropriate choice of production function; and the distinction between limit cycles and closed orbits as representations of Goodwinian dynamics. In this reply, we respond to Libman's critique in a manner that is designed to develop his arguments into a useful addendum to our book. In so doing, we hope that this exchange will engage interested students and other readers in issues and avenues of inquiry that lie beyond some of the first-pass simplifications in HM.

This study is grounded on the propositions of Kaleckian–Post-Keynesian​ macroeconomic framework to explore the dynamic impacts of SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) stock market development and innovation on key macroeconomic variables in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia. For the reported empirical analysis, a Structural Vector Error Correction (SVEC) model and an impulse response function (IRF) were adopted. The evidence shows that SME stock market development and/or innovation have small but positive impacts on short-run economic stimulation. The SME stock market development promotes economic growth through the combination of the following channels: private investment, savings and productivity in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand. Innovation, on the other hand, fosters growth through the combination of these channels and the employment channel in all four countries.

Blecker and Setterfield's new textbook from 2019 presents an updated discussion of heterodox models of growth and distribution. This note clarifies and elaborates on three important issues discussed in the book. First, the text presents mainly one-sectoral and one-technique models, which is a reasonable set-up to keep things simple but not always enough to discuss some controversial issues. Second, continuous substitution is important but not essential for neoclassical growth theory. Third, the popular Goodwin model presented in the text does not produce ‘limit cycles.’

In a post-Keynesian growth model with positive saving propensity out of wages, this paper analyses the implication of different kinds of government expenditures on aggregate demand and economic gro...

Since 2014 the Spanish economy has recovered positive GDP growth, and the country has been growing well above the eurozone average. This recovery has sparked an academic and political debate concerning the role that structural reforms, prescribed by the ‘Troika,’ have played in peripheral Europe. For certain scholars and institutions, these structural reforms have allowed the market, through greater wage flexibility, to make the necessary adjustments to restore economic growth, resulting in a ‘healthy’ economic recovery. But to what extent is this mainstream narrative solidly backed up by the empirical evidence? Can Spain be held up as an international example of the ‘success’ of these reforms? The aim of this paper is to shed light on this debate. We consider that labor market reforms and wage devaluation policy are not the drivers of economic recovery. Instead, we offer an alternative explanation for recovery based on the theory of demand-led growth.