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This is a short note on the limits of Varieties of Capitalism and the potential of the Keynes-Kalecki approach proposed by Baccaro and Pontusson for overcoming them. It identifies the main problem as a failure to define capitalism itself. This effectively reduces the approach to a comparison of the U.S. and German economies at the end of the 20th century. It is in particular unable to recognize let alone explain the very different U.S. economic system in the immediate postwar decades or how the more recent emphasis on the market emerged to take its place. The promise of the Keynes-Kalecki approach is that it will overcome these limits, but the promise has not yet been realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-orthodox economists generally share the Keynesian Hypothesis of the independence of investment from capacity savings, in the long run no less than in the short run. This hypothesis marks an essential point of difference from neoclassical theory. Keynes showed that within the limits of the existing capacity utilisation, investment determines savings rather than the other way around. How best to extend this conclusion to the long run is the object of the current paper. The paper assesses the controversy on demand-led growth that has taken place since the mid-1980s between neo-Kaleckian and Sraffian authors. The Sraffian front may be divided into a first and a second Sraffian position, the latter being the Sraffian supermultiplier approach. I shall argue that this second approach is the most promising framework for analysing economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a seminal paper on Marxian business cycle theory, Goodwin (1967) presented a model which assumed that a higher wage share leads to lower investment and thus a general economic slowdown. In contrast Kalecki (1971) was arguing that a higher wage share would have an expansionary effect because the consumption propensity out of wage income is higher than that out of profit income. Based on a general model that allows for wage-led as well as profit-led demand regimes, this paper estimates the effects of a change in the wage share on aggregate private domestic demand with quarterly data for 12 OECD countries.JEL classification: E11, E12, E20, E22, E25 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]