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We examine two external shocks that trigger inflationary pressures in Argentina. The first corresponds to a shock in international prices of agricultural commodities exported by this country. The s...

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Trade and Cooperation Agreement broadly sets out the nature of the relationship contemplated between UK and EU competition law and policy following Brexit. The question is whether the UK will capitalize on its newfound discretion to deviate its competition policy from the EU in the future. This article considers some of the potential new directions that might be taken within the UK's competition law landscape, specifically in relation to merger control, antitrust and subsidy control. It explores some of the problems and opportunities created in the wake of Brexit, as well as the legal and practical ramifications of future divergences between UK and EU competition policy. Furthermore, it considers how the Competition and Markets Authority may fare in enforcing new policy, as well as its potential interactions with regimes both within and outside the EU.

Digital advertising, both display advertising and search advertising, represents a very important part of the overall advertising market in the United Kingdom. Google and Facebook have a high degree of market power in search and display advertising, respectively. On 1 July 2020, the Competition and Markets Authority published its Final Report on its market study into online platforms and digital advertising, in which it looked in some depth at digital advertising markets, assessing whether a lack of transparency, conflicts of interest, and the leveraging of market power undermine competition in digital advertising. This article examines the issues considered by, and the findings of, the CMA in its Market Study and set out in its Final Report, and describes the policy options identified in the Market Study for promoting competition and other policy goals, such as data protection and privacy and ensuring the viability of news publishers, in digital advertising markets.

There has been a data revolution: the combination of sensors, processing power and mobile communications means that there is more of it, and it is having a greater impact on our lives than ever before. Across the world, there have recently been many new initiatives and legislative proposals for opening up access to some of that data. This is often driven by two different motivations: the desire to create new positive outcomes with existing resources, and the desire to correct negative impacts on competition in markets. To regulate data access properly, it is necessary to understand what makes data different and what its value is. If data access is going to be mandated, how can one value the data that a business holds, and set fair and reasonable charges for access to it? Economic tools that analyse the cost of creating the data, and the benefits derived from it, provide critical insight into this question.

This article explores the impact of the General Court's judgment in CK Telecoms and the Commission decision in T-Mobile NL/Tele2 on the assessment of four-to-three mobile mergers. The unconditional clearance in the Dutch case energized some telecoms executives, but the Commission stressed that it was largely due to the very specific circumstances of the case. Then, in CK Telecoms, the General Court delivered a blow to the framework developed by the Commission to assess mobile mergers. The Court's interpretation of the concepts of ‘important competitive force’ and ‘closeness of competition’ raises the threshold for the Commission to challenge mergers and implements the principle that there is no ‘magic number’ of mobile network operators. Though some commentators compared CK Telecoms to the Airtours case, CK Telecoms has not provoked similar soul-searching at DG Competition. Some senior Commission officials criticized the judgment and indicated that the Commission will continue applying the same framework. On appeal, the Commission has challenged all key aspects of the judgment. The Dutch case, however, confirms that the Commission may entertain unconditional clearance in some four-to-three mobile mergers and, while CK Telecoms might not bring an overhaul of the current framework, we can expect some refinements.

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.

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.

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.

Since its establishment, the World Trade Organization has suffered numerous blows. Today, however, it is going through a perfect storm: from a paralysis in its lawmaking function to the demise of the Appellate Body. Powerful economies such as the United States, China and the European Union are moving away from multilateralism, in different ways, in order to shape novel approaches. Non-transparent practices like informal trade instruments, geoeconomics, and the domestication of international trade rules are appearing as new tools of global economic governance. How to make sense of these practices and approaches from a legal perspective? The common thread in all these factors is the relative decline of the rule of law. This article explores and critically assesses these developments and calls for urgent action in order to remedy and strengthen the multilateral rules-based trade order.

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.

“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...

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.

Since 1 January 2021, the ‘one-stop shop’ principle under the EU Merger Regulation (EUMR) no longer applies to the UK, and UK turnover is no longer relevant for determining whether a merger satisfies the EUMR jurisdictional thresholds. Merger control analysis will now need to factor in possible interactions with both the European Commission (Commission) and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The two regimes have different procedures, timelines and substantive tests, which will impact on deal planning and strategy. Dual reviews by both authorities will likely lead to an additional burden on merging parties as well as a risk of a deal being cleared by the Commission but blocked by the CMA, or vice-versa. This article assesses the procedural and practical implications of these changes and highlights some of the key risks businesses may face in merger control looking ahead.

On 11 November 2020, the UK Government published the National Security and Investment Bill (NSI Bill), which, if approved by Parliament, would allow the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Secretary of State) to screen and prohibit ‘potentially hostile’ investments that threatened UK national security. The proposed system would represent the most significant change in the UK regulatory environment since the Government ceded the power to approve or prohibit mergers on competition grounds to an independent agency in 2002. The envisaged regime would be among the most wide-ranging and onerous in the world, adding a new layer of mandatory review and imposing non-trivial costs on investments in any company with UK activity. This article describes the UK's existing public interest intervention regime, explains the background to the Government's proposed new regime, including similar initiatives elsewhere in the world, summarizes the principal features of the proposed new UK regime, and considers its potential implications for investments in the UK.

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.

Economics plays a central role in effective merger enforcement, as it provides the conceptual framework to assess merger effects. Additionally, effective merger enforcement relies on the merger assessment being firmly rooted in evidence. Economic analysis is often key in interpreting this evidence. This article discusses the role of economists and economic analysis in merger investigations by the Competition and Markets Authority, in particular in relation to the approach to economic analysis and evidence gathering, and the wider contribution of economists at the CMA in developing the toolkit used for assessing mergers.

‘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.

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.

The objective of this review is to discuss the formation of knowledge proposed by Keynes on his Treatise on Probability, and the economic agents’ behavior in an uncertainty scenario presented on his General Theory, by the Narrative Economics’ and Behavioral Economics perspectives. The hypothesis that will be analyzed is that in a keynesian uncertainty scenario, economic agents tend to act according to their context (social, geographic, historic, cultural) spreading narratives by which they identify themselves and orient decisions that cause sensible movements on the economic aggregates. Revisiting the literature, we could conclude that by bringing together the behavioral economy and the narrative economy theory, we could, from the Keynes’ insights on his writings, perceive strong empirical evidence that can be analytically important on the assessment of the economic fluctuations. RESUMO O objetivo desta resenha é discutir a formação do conhecimento proposto por Keynes em seu Tratado sobre Probabilidade e o comportamento dos agentes econômicos em um cenário de incerteza apresentado em sua Teoria Geral, pelas perspectivas da Economia da Narrativa e Economia Comportamental. A hipótese a ser analisada é que, em um cenário de incerteza keynesiano, os agentes econômicos tendem a agir de acordo com seu contexto (social, geográfico, histórico, cultural), divulgando narrativas pelas quais se identificam, e orientam decisões que causam movimentos sensíveis nos agregados econômicos. Revisitando a literatura, podemos concluir que, reunindo a economia comportamental e a teoria da economia narrativa, a partir dos insights de Keynes sobre seus escritos, podemos perceber fortes evidências empíricas que podem ser analiticamente importantes na avaliação das flutuações econômicas.

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.

This study presents a monetary disequilibrium growth model and conducts numerical simulations to investigate how dynamic paths are affected by the initial conditions and the parameters of expectation formation. The main results are as follows. First, dynamic properties such as stable convergence and cyclical fluctuations depend on the type of expectation formation rather than on the initial regimes. Stable convergence takes an excessively long time when expectation formation is too rational and cyclical fluctuations appear when it is too adaptive. Second, when the economy converges to the steady state (i.e., the Walrasian equilibrium), persistent Keynesian unemployment is likely to appear along the dynamic path. Third, the dynamics of inflation expectation that contain the price dynamics in the feedback loop might play an important role in convergence to the steady state.

This comment came to refute and correct the idea of Charles (2007) about the negatively implications in the income distribution when the government expand the consumption in favour to households. We prove that the political choice, to both cases (increasing consumption or increasing profit), impact positively the income distribution and does not affect the essential nature of the Kaldor neo-Pasinetti dynamic equilibrium results and the “Cambridge Equation”. The stability of the model is guarantee by applying the Olech’s Theorem to the case. RESUMO Este comentário refuta e corrige as ideias propostas por Charles (2007) sobre as implicações negativas na distribuição de renda, quando impactadas pela expansão do consumo com base em atividades governamentais, em favor das famílias. Nós provamos que as escolhas políticas, para ambos os casos (aumento do consumo ou lucro), impactam positivamente a distribuição e não afetam a essência do resultado da dinâmica e equilíbrio do modelo Kaldor neo-Pasinetti e “Equação de Cambridge”. A estabilidade do modelo é garantida aplicando o Teorema de Olech para o caso.