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The 2008 crisis has highlighted the need for a more active industrial policy, and the lockdown and the collapse of supply chains due to the 2020 pandemic only reinforced this process. In this chapter, we show that the effectiveness of practical industrial policy solutions requires taking into account their geographical and sectoral aspects. Of particular importance are activities in the area of R&D support policy, which not only contribute to increased competitiveness of industry, but also determine the possibility of its transformation toward climate neutrality, especially in the renewable energy sector. We are well aware of the potential threats associated with the spending of public funds as they may interfere with the free market, but with an appropriate industrial policy these actions are likely to have more beneficial than potential negative effects. Taking into account the areas where firms source their inputs and the areas where they sell their products and services (they may do both locally and globally), we propose categorizing firms into four groups or cells. For each category, we propose a catalog of industrial policy tools. In our opinion, only actions that reflect the specificity of firms stand a chance of delivering the planned results. We suggest a generic way, from an institutional economic point of view, to analyse government policy in general and industrial policy in particular.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes interest in the ethics of economists and to advance a moral conception of the economic science. It focuses on the ethical behavior of economists and thus mainly concerned with deontology and professional economics ethics. The book discusses the education and training of the ‘ethical economist’: what it means to train and educate an ethical economist and what is needed for economics to become an ethical profession. It examines the ethics of econometric research and the categorical mistake made by some economists when considering that ethics is to be left for business, government and policymakers and not for the econometrician. The book presents the philosophical arguments for the removal of normativity and normative analysis from economics and what the implications of this issue are on the personal responsibility of economists.

This book is devoted to government failures, which imply that the government cannot fulfil its key obligations related to formulating rules. Representing the interests of society, the government establishes rules as frameworks within which market actors should act. However, while market failures have been discussed intensively in the economic literature, government failures are often neglected by scholars. In this book, the author tries to fill this gap through detailed consideration of the meanings of and reasons for government failures. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the first chapter, "Introducing Government Failure", and the second chapter, "How Market and Society Relate". In the first chapter, the author formulates the research problem and describes the structure of the book. The second chapter investigates how market and society are interrelated from three theoretical perspectives, as follows: society and markets as separate entities, markets embedded in society, and society within the market. The author also explores how markets and governments may contribute to social welfare. The case of healthcare reforms is used for this purpose.

Informal networks are often emphasized as facilitating knowledge transfer. However, we find that formal networks also contribute significantly to knowledge transfer, and in fact contribute more than informal networks. This is particularly the case when knowledge is transferred between units. Additional analysis shows a synergetic effect between formal and informal ties, which suggests that knowledge transfer effects that in previous studies were attributed to informal networks only, may in fact be caused by the combination of both formal and informal networks. We conclude that there is more than one path to transfer knowledge effectively.

Staatscourant

Algemeen Dagblad

In The Economist's Oath (2011), George DeMartino presents arguments in favour of the ethical reform of economics and what he sees as its usual style of policy formation and implementation. A central component of his argument is a harm-based thesis that points to the too often profoundly negative implications of economic intervention. He couples this with a character-based account of the normative basis of a needed revision of existing economic praxis. While the harm-based aspect of DeMartino’s thesis draws attention to the consequences of economists’ professional conduct, the character-based dimension considers its consistency with their personal moral outlooks. The harm-based aspect provides a normative reason to introduce a behavioural code into professional economic practice, while the emphasis on character is intended to prevent this reducing to mere rule following. I argue in this chapter that DeMartino cannot easily help himself to either of these positions. Harm and character-based views are found wanting when viewed in the light of certain structural features of a professional economic ethic. They produce only unproductive confrontation between this kind of proponent of professional economic ethics and (the many) economists who defend a restricted, technical conception of the profession. Alternative support for his thesis can be found, however, in the shape of Iris Marion Young's social connection theory of personal responsibility. Applied to economics, Young demands that economists adopt a perspective that incorporates an appreciation of the role of their discipline in shaping societal outcomes. It requires economists to take an extra-disciplinary perspective that takes into account its societal consequences. In this way, Young’s thesis offers a way to ground DeMartino’s arguments that avoids mere intellectual standoff. Her thesis also has important implications for the place of pluralist or meta-methodological thinking in economics. While many argue for the benefits of a pluralist perspective, Young's thesis offers a way to see it as a professional responsibility.

This chapter reviews socio-economic research on the environment and sustainability. The chapter first explores core aspects of socio-economics, examines how socio-economics has related to the agenda of research on the environment, and assesses how socio-economic research on the environment became institutionalized. We consider that the environment has not been high on the agenda of the socio-economic research community but that there is a substantial amount of socio-economic research on the environment in the ecological economics and other research communities. The chapter then examines the research on institutional sources of environmental problems on monetary valuation and environmental decision-making as two areas where socio-economics has had a particularly strong influence. The chapter concludes that the acknowledgement in these areas of research of ecological and social embeddedness has given rise to a research agenda for ‘socio-ecological economics’. Sustainable consumption and global environmental change are already important areas of research for it. But ecological macroeconomics is also needed to formulate coordinated responses to multiple crises such as economic downturn, climate change and loss of biodiversity. There are signs that it is emerging in debates on steady-state economy, de-growth, and institutional changes in the labor market and the financial sector.