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Il documento presenta i risultati di una ricerca che si concentra sull’evoluzione della distribuzione funzionale del reddito e del costo del lavoro in Italia. In particolare, viene calcolata la quota salari aggiustata e il CLUP per il periodo 1970-2020 a partire da dati di contabilità nazionale (Istat). Oltre al totale dell'economia, il contributo fa riferimento all'andamento della quota salari in quattro macrosettori (il settore privato non agricolo ad esclusione dell’immobiliare, il manifatturiero, i servizi commerciali e professionali, i servizi finanziari e di rete). Tali andamenti vengono inoltre analizzati con riferimento alla dinamica del salario reale medio, della produttività del lavoro e dei prezzi relativi.

The paper enters the current debate at the intersection of comparative political economy and international trade on the role of price and non-price competitiveness in influencing export. Through an econometric exploration, we identify price competitiveness as a non-negligible factor in driving export, for a set of OECD countries from 1994 to 2019. The documented price sensitiveness, combined with the institutions and policies adopted to promote export-led growth, casts an unsettling light on the prospects for a recovery, particularly for the Euro area. These worrying conclusions are not, however, unescapable. The emergence of the export-led growth model - with its twin brother, the debt-led one - answered the demand-generating problems created by years of wage share decreases and a steady retreat of the State from its traditional demand management role. Drastically inverting these tendencies would contribute to strongly narrowing the need for export-led strategies.

We develop an ecological open-economy SFC model that enables testing cross-area interactions among productive sectors, financial markets and the ecosystem. We show that the unequal technical progress across areas, coupled with rising ecological awareness, can force governments of less ecologically efficient areas to move further away from low-carbon assets. We argue that "green" monetary and fiscal policies can be used to tackle climate change and financial instability. However, their effectiveness depends crucially on the impact of cross-border financial flows and growth rate differentials on exchange rates. Without a cross-area policy coordination plan, currency fluctuations can bring about unintended consequences, undermining green policies' effects.

The paper provides a simple theoretical framework to assess the macroeconomic implications of debt-fuelled consumption. In particular, the analysis is conducted through an extended super-multiplier model with endogenous credit money, which highlights the role of the autonomous components of demand, and in particular autonomous consumption, as the main drivers of economic growth. The author sketches a comparison with alternative heterodox formulations. He argues that, unlike the neo-Kaleckian models, in the model proposed here output growth adjusts to the path of debt-financed consumption. Having treated investment as fully induced, it follows that also the rate of capital accumulation adjusts to the rate of growth, which is itself determined by the evolution of autonomous demand. Finally, it is shown that the stability of the ratio of debt to debtors’ income is affected, among other things, by the growth differential between workers’ autonomous consumption (and debt) and the other autonomous components of demand, i.e. public expenditure and capitalists’ autonomous consumption. JEL Classification: E11, E12, E44, G01, PSL Quarterly Review, V. 69, N. 278 (2016): September

As well-known, the canonical Neo-Kaleckian growth model fails to reconcile actual and normal rates of utilization in equilibrium. Some recent contributions revive an old proposal for solving this problem - making the normal rate of utilization an endogenous variable that converges to the actual utilization rate - justifying it with new, micro-founded premises. We argue that these new justifications for the convergence of normal to actual utilization do not stand closer scrutiny. First, the proposed microeconomic model relies on various restrictive assumptions, some of which are mutually inconsistent. Second, the derivation of the macroeconomic adjustment mechanism from the microeconomic analysis involves a logical leap, that can be justified only by a very arbitrary assumption with little economic justification. Finally, we discuss the way in which this mechanism has been incorporated into the Neo-Kaleckian growth model by proposers of this approach. We show that, even if one puts aside, for the sake of argument, the first two points, the existence of autonomous components of demand is sufficient to invalidate the resulting macroeconomic model.

This paper looks at the effect of demand shocks on the investment share of the economy. Using panel data on 20 OECD countries, we show that the rate of growth of autonomous demand (exports, public spending and housing investment) is positively correlated with subsequent values of the share of business investment in GDP. By means of an instrumental-variables strategy, we confirm a positive effect of demand dynamics on the business investment share. We instrument autonomous demand with US demand for imports interacted with exposure to trade with the US, openness to trade of a country's main export destinations, and military spending. A permanent 1% increase in autonomous demand growth raises the investment share by 1.5 to 1.9 percentage points of GDP in our preferred panel IV specification. Our results provide empirical support for the view that the influence of aggregate demand on capital accumulation can be a major source of hysteresis. Our results are inconsistent with the canonical New Keynesian 3-equations model, the Neo-Kaleckian model with flexible equilibrium utilization and Classical-Marxian growth models. A positive influence of autonomous demand on the investment share is instead compatible with demand-led models in which capacity adjusts to demand in the long-run.

PLS Quarterly Review Vol 69 N°276

The apparently never-ending phase of economic slowdown that advanced economies have been experiencing in recent decades has recently contributed to the resurrection of the hoary old argument of ‘se...

•The search for safe financial assets can affect economic growth and financial stability.•The search for green financial assets can exacerbate climate change if capitals are free and exchange rates are floating.•Lacking a strong coordination, green government policies are likely to generate negative side effects for other areas.•Ecological efficiency gains are likely to be offset by the higher growth rate of the economy (rebound effect).•The effectiveness of green behaviours and policies depends on the impact of cross-border financial flows on exchange rates.