Interesting interview with professor Steve Keen, where he explains the role of debt in GDP (not currently included in economic models). He models the effects on lending acceleration and repayment options (slow vs. fast) in economic cycles and explains how he was able to successfully predict the 2008 economic crisis. Contrary to traditional Western fiscal … More Modern Economic Theory for the Digital Economy
The informal sector plays a very important role in economic development in both complex and simple economies alike. Informality embodies the spirit of entrepreneurship and it is the way people ensure their livelihoods even when excluded from the informal sector (Allen). Development literature puts most emphasis on the establishment of democratic capitalism as the only path to economic development in low and middle-income countries. This research largely ignores the fact that some rich countries with high HDI still have a large informal sector that fuels the economy; such as it is the case of Italy (with 33%) and Sweden (15%) of their economic activity coming from the informal sector. … More Should the Informal Sector be Regulated?
On March 11, 2020 the WHO declared the Coronavirus a global pandemic. Although the first case was detected in the US on 01/20/20, president Trump skeptically dismissed the threat and waited patiently to take action, naively thinking that it would simply go away. It was not until March 13 that the federal government decided to declare a state of … More Shifting Public Discourse About #COVID-19
This paper explores the social implications of the postindustrial era and its effects in neoliberal economic models currently used in Western democracies. The changing nature of work (Landry, 2005), increases in global aging population, rapid environmental degradation and “the upcoming rise in consumer demand fueled by 1.7BN Chinese citizens that will be joining the middle class in the next decade” (Dobbs, 2015), underscore the urgent need to revise certain economic modeling assumptions in order to maintain the stability of democracies. The mathematical limitations imposed by technological innovation in the creation of wage based employment combined with a flawed framework of unlimited economic growth, point to an increased frequency in systemic risk and armed conflict as the future norm of the current socioeconomic system. Adapting institutional practices and economic frameworks to benefit from rapid change can help avoid further deterioration of established and emerging democracies and increase wealth creation in the short and long term. This paper will explore some of the existing challenges to creating a more efficient economic model adapted to support the digital economy, the construction of such a model, and outline the main institutional and monetary reforms that need to take place in order to enable this framework. … More The Antifragile Economic Model: Formalizing the Use of Complementary Currencies as a Method to Offset Systemic Risk
n recent weeks market turmoil has put negative interest rates firmly on to the centrals banks’ agenda. The Bank of Japan sprang a surprise by following the European Central Bank in moving into negative territory, and there is even talk that the US Federal Reserve might be forced to reverse course and follow suit. … More Savers are Negative on Negative Rates
From the recent ILO (International Labour Organization) World Employment and Social Outlook – the changing nature of jobs publication. The part on labour and the increasing importance of international supply chains is a ‘must read’ – the economic history of today. Where are workers less likely to have a permanent contract? Increasing poverty for households … More World employment and social outlook 2015. The changing nature of jobs
Britain’s Conservative government recently released its much-awaited (or much-dreaded) ‘green paper’ on higher education (HE), a consultation document that sets out broad ideas for the sector’s future. Masochistically, I have read this document – so you don’t have to. This first post describes and evaluates the centrepiece of the green paper, the Teaching Excellence Framework … More The HE Green Paper: (Don’t) Read it and Weep – Part 1: The TEF & Social Mobility
New evidence suggests that the global economic slow down may have been present before the great recession of 2008. … More Conference: Making Sense of the Productivity Slowdown, Panel 1
Net employment has been increasing at a brisk pace in the UK and, since the third quarter of 2013, in Spain. Eurostat (kudo’s) has new data about this: labour market flows. This statistic shows how many employed people became unemployed, how many unemployed people became employed, how many ‘inactive’ people became ‘active'(i.e. became employed or started looking for a job) and how many ‘active’ people became ‘inactive’.
… More Labour market flows and the musical chairs economy
They try to explain business cycles solely as problems of information, such as asymmetries and imperfections in the information agents have. Those assumptions are just as arbitrary as the institutional rigidities and inertia they find objectionable in other theories of business fluctuations … I try to point out how incapable the new equilibrium business cycles … More Why Real Business Cycle models can’t be taken seriously
Just three days before he passed away, a notable Columbia University professor of economics William Vickrey was awarded 1996 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for fundamental contribution to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information. VickreyThroughout his prolific career, Vickrey developed methods of analyzing the problems of incomplete information and also specialized on welfare, … More Get free from the dogmas of the apostles of austerity: Fifteen Fatal Fallacies of Financial Fundamentalism
We need a new way of modeling macro economics instead of assuming that aggregate action leads to generalized welfare #SmartEconomy #finance #Money #Innovation #RealWorldEconomics … More Economic models — increasingly sophisticated and totally useless
Discover how seemingly contradicting theories can be combined to create a Smart Economy that minimizes systemic risk and fosters innovation. … More Political Paradigms and the Smart Economy
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