Heterodox Economics Newsletter

Issue 193 February 29, 2016 web pdf Heterodox Economics Directory

As you might have recognized, the size of this Newsletter has grown significantly within the last year. While some of this growth can be attributed to a change in editorial policies - e.g. the introduction of a more inclusive and more careful approach to representing heterodox journals - the large bulk of this change is due to increased activities within the heterodox economic community. I think this development is a vibrant signal for the rising interest and intensity in heterodox economic research, which seems to prevail even in the face of continued institutional constriction.

Against this backdrop, it comes as no surprise that this Newsletter hosts a series of interesting entries. Especially the Call for Papers section contains quite a few highlights, including the 20th anniversary of the traditional FMM-conference in Berlin, the AFEE-call for the next ASSA, a pointer to the 7th IIPPE-conference as well as a call for a major interdisciplinary conference on the intellectual heritage and continued importance of Karl Polanyi hosted, among others, by your favorite Newsletter's editor. Hope you'll spot some opportunities in this issue!

All the best,

Jakob

© public domain

Table of contents

Call for Papers

1st New Developmentalism's Workshop: Theory and Policy for Developing Countries (Sao Paulo, 2016)

25-26 July, 2016 | Sao Paulo, Brazil

Hosted by the Centre of New Developmentalism of the São Paulo School of Economics – Getulio Vargas Foundation

The Centre of New Developmentalism of EESP/FGV is pleased to invite interested candidates in participating in the 1st New Developmentalism’s Workshop – “Theory and Policies for Developing Countries", which will be held in São Paulo, Brazil, from 25 to 26 of July 2016.

The content of the first day of the Workshop are lectures on the New Developmentalism Theory. The key economic models and the political economy of New Developmentalism will be discussed. There will be lectures on economic development and structural change, the developmental macroeconomics, exchange rate theory, the tendency to the cyclical and chronic overvaluation of the exchange rate, the determination of the industrial equilibrium and on the political economy of either, the developmental state and the maintenance of high interest rates.

The Finance Minister of Brazil, Dr. Nelson Barbosa, will make the keynote speech relating new developmentalism with the present crisis. Prof. Robert Boyer will be the distinguished foreign guest. He will discuss the relation between the theory of Regulation School and the New Developmentalism (both to be confirmed).

The second day will be reserved for the discussion of academic papers dully submitted to the Workshop; they may be either following the line or critical of the New Developmentalism.

There will also be a discussion between the theorists of new developmentalism and the foreign guest about the ideas and proposes presented during the course.

Registration

The participants will be the ones that submit papers and, if approved, will be the panelists, or just the ones that will register for attendance.

For the panelists the deadline to submit papers is March 31, 2016.

The applicants shall add a short (one page) curriculum vitae, containing maximum academic degree, the institution of maximum academic degree and research interests and most relevant publications (not mandatory). Notification of acceptance will be by April 7, 2016. The Centre is demanding support to provide accommodation for the panelists. The paper should be sent in word and pdf format and must contain in the front page: name, filiation and title of the article.

The best articles will be published in the Brazilian Journal of Political Economy.

For the attendants only the deadlinefor enrollment will be May 31, 2016.

Panelists and attendants should send e-mails confirming interest to lucas.dib@fgv.br and cnd@fgv.br

There will be a symbolic registration fee of US$25.00 or R$100,00 for all. The Centre will provide lunch for all participants.

Keynote speakers:

20th FMM Conference "Towards Pluralism in Macroeconomics?" (Berlin, 2016)

20-22 October, 2016 | Berlin, Germany

Twenty years ago, the Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM) was founded as a platform for analysis, research and discussion of macroeconomic issues. At the time macroeconomic theory and policy were dominated by neoclassical approaches. In contrast, the network was established to promote alternative, heterodox concepts of macroeconomic theory and refocus economic policy on the goals of high employment, environmentally sustainable growth, price stability, reduced inequality and poverty. At our 20th conference, we will assess the current state of macroeconomics. What has changed in the two decades since the foundation of the network? Is there greater pluralism in theoretical approaches? What are the improvements in modelling the economy in orthodox and heterodox approaches? What is the explanatory power and empirical content of macroeconomics today?

The submission of papers in the following areas is encouraged:

We particularly welcome submissions of papers for graduate student sessions. Graduate students who already presented a paper in previous FMM conferences are encouraged to submit to the regular sessions to improve chances for newcomers. There will also be a day of introductory lectures for graduate students prior to the opening panel on 20 October. Hotel costs will be covered for graduate student presenters (max. four nights from 19 to 23 October).

Proposals have to be submitted electronically via this web application.

The deadline for paper proposals (abstract of max. 400 words) is 30 June, 2016. Proposals for organized sessions with abstracts of three or four papers are welcome and can also be submitted through the web application. Decisions will be made in early August and will be based on clarity, relevance and originality of abstracts outlining the research question, method and (preliminary) results. In case of acceptance, full papers, including an abstract of max. 200 words are due by 6 October and will be posted on this page. Selected papers will be published after the conference in a special Papers & Proceedings issue of the European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention (EJEEP). The conference language is English.

Registration details for the conference and the introductory lectures will be available on this page by mid-August. Please note that acceptance to present a paper does not imply automatic registration.

Contact: Sabine Nemitz

More details are available here: Call for Papers (pdf)

3rd International Conference on Labor Theory of Value and the Social Sciences (Brasilia, 2016)

20-21 October, 2016 | University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil

We invite submissions that raise (or answer) questions on Marxian Labor Theory of Value and its role in Social Sciences. Papers should address the following topics:

  1. Labor Theory of Value and Social Sciences
  2. Marxist methodology
  3. Gender, race and class
  4. Imperialism, Dependency and Latin America
  5. Labor and Crisis

Deadline for proposal submission is June 30, 2016

Decisions on acceptance will be informed by July 25, 2016

Guidelines for Submissions

Please email your extended abstract in English, Portuguese or Spanish, in MS Word format, with i) Title; ii) Author(s)’ name and affiliation; iii) Three key-words; iv) a 400-word text; and v) Author(s)’ contact information: mail address, country of residence, telephones and email., to unb.gept@gmail.com

Papers should include of no more than 10,000 words, and i) Paper’s title; ii) Author(s)’ name and affiliation; iii) Three key-words; iv) a 150-word abstract; and v) Author(s)’ contact information: mail address, country of residence, telephones and email.

Speakers will be asked to make short 10-15 minute presentations addressing the main topics of their papers.Registration for accepted communications will be paid at the registration desk. For general questions and further information, contact the organization committee through the email unb.gept@gmail.com or visit http://unbgept.blogspot.com.br

3rd WINIR Conference: "Institutions & Human Behaviour" (Boston, 2016)

2-5 September, 2016 | Seaport Boston Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

It is now widely accepted that institutions, broadly defined as systems of established social rules, play a major role in explaining human behaviour. Although scholars generally agree that institutions coordinate human behaviourandto a certain extent mould it into recognizable patterns, there is much less consensus regarding the precise mechanisms involved. We also have yet to fully understand the ways in which alternative rule systems and behavioural patterns emerge, persist and evolve to create our complex social systems.

Theoretical and empirical research into these important topics needs to draw on insights from multiple academic disciplines, including anthropology, economics, ethnology, history, human geography, law, linguistics, management, philosophy, politics, psychology and sociology.

The Third WINIR Conference will provide a forum for leading scholars to advance the ongoing conversation about these and other key issues in the growing area of institutional research.

Keynotes lectures, representing five academic disciplines, will be given by:

Abstract submissions about institutions (or organisations), and/or institutional thought from any discipline or theoretical approach are welcome (300 words max.).

Unconfined to any single academic discipline or any particular methodology, WINIR accepts contributions from any approach that can help us understand the nature and role of institutions. WINIR aims to promote creative conversations across disciplinary boundaries in order to build an adaptable and interdisciplinary theoretical consensus concerning core issues, which can be a basis for cumulative learning and scientific progress in the exciting and rapidly-expanding area of institutional research.

Submit an abstract here.

Submissions will be evaluated by the WINIR Scientific Quality Committee: Peter Boettke (George Mason University, economics), Simon Deakin (University of Cambridge, law), Geoff Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire, economics), Timur Kuran (Duke University, economics), Uskali Mäki (University of Helsinki, philosophy), Katharina Pistor (Columbia University, law), Sven Steinmo (European University Institute, politics), Wolfgang Streeck (Max Planck Institute Cologne, sociology).

Please note the following important dates:

For more information about WINIR please visit www.winir.org or follow WINIR on Twitter @winir2013.

7th IIPPE Annual Conference in Political Economy: "International Trends and National Differences" (Lisbon, 2016)

7-9 September, 2016 | School of Economics & Management, University of Lisbon, Portugal

The economic crisis that has been unfolding since 2007 has had a severely asymmetric impact both within and between countries. There can be no dispute that the cost of the crisis has been especially high for the peripheral countries and for the world’s poor, women, the old, the young, and the disabled: the crisis itself, and the recovery strategies implemented in most countries, have tended to reinforce the hierarchies of privilege under neoliberal capitalism.

The main schools of political economy have examined the crisis and its implications in detail. Those studies have offered valuable insights supporting further academic analyses and, most importantly, informing political action to undermine the reproduction of neoliberalism.

The Seventh Annual Conference in Political Economy will review the development of political economy in response to the crisis, and the emergence and renewal of political economy in different countries and regions. In doing this, this Conference will:

Proposals for presentations on all aspects of political economy are welcome. Those focusing on activism, and on the contributions of different traditions, regions and countries, are especially encouraged.

IIPPE welcomes the submission of (a) proposals for individual papers (which IIPPE will group into panels), (b) proposals for panels, (c) proposals for streams of panels, or (d) proposals on activism.

To submit a proposal, please go to the following Electronic Proposal Form, and carefully follow the complete instructions there. All deadline dates are included on this Electronic Proposal Form.

For more general information about IIPPE, the working groups and the conference, please visit our website.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Call for Papers: Neoliberalism Working Group

Since 2008 neoliberalism has been in crisis across the globe. Signs of this ongoing crisis are evident in the recurrent volatility of global markets, stagnant economic growth and the growing popularity of explicitly anti-neoliberal politicians, parties and movements, all while governments continue to fall back upon traditional staples of neoliberal policies even as they turn to increasingly elaborate measures to reflate the economy. It is in this context that we welcome papers that reflect upon:

Papers and proposals can be submitted on iippe.org by 1 April 2016. Alternatively, please contact the Neoliberalism Working Group convenors:

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Call for Papers: Financialisation Working Group (FWG)

The discussions on the processes behind the growing importance of finance and financial motives as well as sustainability of the financial systems have been located in the critical political economy debate of financialisation and neoliberalism. Despite the disputes on the causes and features of the financialisation phenomenon, there is common acknowledgement that over the last three decades the influence of finance has increasingly been felt in every sphere of economic and social life.

Financialisation has been associated with several issues; among which are tepid economic growth, indebtedness of households, changing structure of financial as well as non-financial sectors, and state fiscal imbalances. Additionally, the concept of financialisation has been applied to the understanding of different case studies that, in turn, reveal the varied dimensions in which finance has assumed a prominent role. Thus, ‘financialisation of this’ and ‘financialisation of that’ has been the popular axis of contextualising, and sometimes even defining the phenomenon. However, there is still room for advancing the debate to shed light on the common and peculiar characteristics of these structural transformations under the ever increasing influence of finance.

In this light, the FWG calls for papers strongly encourages contributions addressing the understanding of financialisation, the origin of this concept, its history, influences and similarities within the political economy framework. This is in consideration that the seventh Annual Conference in Political Economy aims at fostering a reflection on the development of political economy in response to the crisis, and the emergence and renewal of political economy. Regional and country studies, especially the literature emerging in the Global South as well as its empirical ramifications around the globe are invited.

In accordance with the general call for papers, contributions may include, but not limited to, the following headlines:

Please send abstracts with 300 to 500 words covering the title, subject and main arguments of the paper. The deadline for abstract submission is set for the 1st of April 2016. Please note that participants can only present ONE paper at the conference. Therefore, if you have joint papers, please specify who will be the presenter.

To submit a proposal, please go to the website and fill the following form in: https://docs.google.com/a/soas.ac.uk/forms/d/1BZJ3BfQ_x-J0kl5KH4ixc__tmC1szZ-myVOTXEsb_HY/viewform

We accept submission of proposals for individual papers or complete panels to the Working Group. We would particularly like to encourage the submission of panel proposals (3-4 presentations) which collectively present the work of institutions or other academic groups and provide an excellent opportunity to showcase work in a greater depth.

For any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at the iippefinancialisationwg@gmail.com.

AFEE Session and Paper Proposals for the ASSA 2017 (Chicago, 2017)

6-8 January, 2017 | ASSA, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Call for Papers & Panels at ASSA, Chicago, Illinois, USA

The Vested Interests and the Common People:Power, Policy and Institutions in the 21 Century

This year’s theme takes its cue from Veblen’s 1920 essay “The Vested Interests and the Common Man.” In it, he argues, the ownership of property in large holdings now controls the nation’s industry, and therefore it controls the conditions of life for those who are or who wish to be engaged in industry; at the same time the same ownership of large wealth controls the markets and thereby controls the conditions of life for those who have to resort to the markets to sell or to buy (Thorstein, Veblen, The Vested Interests and the Common Man, 1920, pp. 159-160).

He goes on to refer to “massive interests that move obscurely in the background of the market” (175), while for the common man, “[a] pious regard for the received code of right and honest living holds him to a submissive quietism, a make-believe of self-help and fair dealings” (177).

It is clear that, in 2016, the global economy continues to face similar issues. The concentration of wealth and power in the last decade has reached levels not seen in almost a century, and the financialization of the economy and of politics seems to be limiting the ability of countervailing powers to reign in the excesses of the vested interests. Meanwhile, much of the population turns to escapism rather than working to confront the forces arrayed against them.

Institutional economists have always excelled at engaging in a nuanced critique of the status quo, and in offering pragmatic strategies and polices to effect institutional change consistent with instrumental values. This call for papers invites those who are engaged in producing work in this vein, utilizing sophisticated institutionalist methods to address contemporary issues.

All proposals for papers and panels utilizing the methods represented by the Association For Evolutionary Economics will be given serious consideration. Preference will be given to those papers and panels that directly address this year’s theme.

Deadline for Submissions: April 15, 2016

Full Sessions

I will accept submissions for full sessions (4-5 papers plus discussants), using the procedure below. If I cannot accept the whole session “as is”, I may be able to place one or two papers on the program. I will also likely assign a 5th paper to a session with 4 papers. People proposing full sessions are encouraged to include at least one or two younger scholars among the papers.

There will be one or more joint sessions with other heterodox associations. Details will be announced once plans for those joint sessions have been finalized.

Important Dates and Details

The submission deadline is April 15, 2016. No late submissions will be considered. Authors will be informed whether their proposals have been accepted by the end of May 2016. Please remember that the constraints imposed by the Allied Social Science Association severely limit the number of sessions allocated to AFEE; AFEE deeply regrets the necessity to turn down many good proposals.

I encourage anyone whose paper or panel is turned down to submit their materials to the ICAPE conference, which will be held at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago the day before the ASSA meetings (January 5, 2017). Roosevelt is within walking distance of the conference hotels. See http://icape.org/ConferenceAnnouncement.html for details. While the ICAPE call for papers is still being finalized, the deadline for ICAPE submissions will be in late summer, well after people are informed of the status of their AFEE submission.

At least one of the authors (and preferably all authors) of any paper for an AFEE panel must be a member of AFEE by the submission deadline. For membership information, please, visit http://www.afee.net/ or contact erhake@catawba.edu.

By submitting a paper or panel proposal it is understood that, should your proposal be accepted, you are making a commitment to attend the conference and go to as many sessions as possible. The number of AFEE’s sessions in the future will depend on how many people attend our sessions in Chicago. The ASSA monitors attendance at sessions and those associations with low attendance risk session cuts at future ASSA conferences.

Submission Procedures

Please follow the instructions below, as the AEA has specific requirements for Program Chairs when they are submitting sessions for the program and the AEA app for tablets and cell phones:

1. Proposals for papers, panel discussions, and full sessions of multiple papers must be electronically submitted as a MS Word or RTF file to the Program Chair, Geoff Schneider, at Geoff.Schneider@Bucknell.edu.

2. Name your file attachment [Your Last Name] AFEE at ASSA Chicago 2017 submission. Also use this same name as the subject line of your email.

3. The following information must be submitted in your MS Word or RTF file. If you are submitting a whole session, include the information for each paper and participant. Do not use any formatting (e.g. indents, borders, tables or rules, section breaks, numbering). Just follow this order for each paper:

Declare your willingness to serve as a session chair and/or discussant (please add fields or areas)

Conference Proceedings

Papers presented at the AFEE San Francisco meeting are eligible for publication in the June 2017 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues. To be considered for publication, the text of your paper cannot exceed 2,850 words, with no more than four pages (total) of double-spaced endnotes, references, tables, and figures. The deadline for submission to the JEI is December 16, 2016. JEI submission details will be provided to authors whose proposals are accepted for the conference. All criteria for the submission of papers, including deadlines, will be strictly enforced by the JEI editor, Christopher Brown. At least one of the authors of any paper must be a member of AFEE. Papers should be sent by email attachment to jei@astate.edu.

I look forward to seeing your proposals.

Geoff Schneider (AFEE President-Elect and Program Chair)
Professor of Economics
Bucknell University
Geoff.Schneider@Bucknell.edu

American Review of Political Economy calls for submissions

The editors at the American Review of Political Economy are now accepting manuscripts! We welcome high-quality submissions from all perspectives of the discipline. We are especially open to submissions from all branches of heterodox economics, including Post Keynesian, Institutionalist, Marxian, Sraffian, Austrian, and Classical Political Economy. In addition to the general Call for Papers, we will also be accepting papers presented at the Fourth Conference of the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics, January 5, 2017, at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago. Please indicate this at the time of submission.

The American Review of Political Economy is a double-blind, peer-reviewed, open access academic journal. Our Editorial Board is comprised of internationally recognized scholars. The journal is abstracted in EconLit, and has been a part of ProQuest family journals since 2008.

Please visit arpejournal.com to learn more and submit today!

Brazilian Keynesian Review calls for contributions

We are pleased to announce that Brazilian Keynesian Association (AKB) launched the inaugural issue of the Brazilian Keynesian Review (BKR) on May 2015 and the second issue on December 2015. The papers are available online at www.akb.org.br/revista

We are inviting you to contribute with an original paper for the next issues. The journal aims at publishing and disclosing theoretical and empirical studies that deal with Keynesian economics. Its editorial guidance is based on pluralism, which means that the journal accepts contributions with diverse research orientations. The Brazilian Keynesian Review is going to be available online in every semester. We publish original papers in English or Portuguese. The journal is divided in two parts. In the first one, papers should not exceed 52,000 characters with spaces, including references, tables, graphs and footnotes. Papers should include an abstract, keywords and JEL classification. The second part of the journal will focus on papers that deal with Brazil´s or the World´s current economic situation. Papers for this part should not exceed 18,000 characters with spaces, including references, tables, graphs and footnotes. These papers should also include an abstract, keywords and JEL classification.

The AKB would appreciate if you could contribute with a paper for the BKR. You may choose whether your paper is more suitable to be published in the first or in the second part of the journal.

Best regards,

Marco Flavio Cunha Resende - Editor of the BKR
Anderson T. M. Cavalcante - Co Editor of the BKR

Call for Papers for a book chapter proposal: "The Internal Impact and External Influence of the Greek Financial Crisis"

The Greek Financial Crisis (GRFC) which unfolded in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis had both internal and external economic and social consequences, as Greece is a member of the Eurozone, the European Union and international organizations such as the IMF. The current literature of the GRFC focuses mostly on the causes of the crisis, without adequate attention being paid to the economic and social impact on the domestic economy. Externally, the GRFC initiated the establishment of new EU institutions to deal with the crisis, which have not been assessed for their effectiveness. The external reaction to the crisis by the IMF, EU, European Central Bank and Eurozone governments has played a central role in determining the current situation. An edited book with a collection of papers with the scope of exploring the changes that the GRFC initiated not only in the domestic domain but also in the external sphere will add to our concise understanding of both the internal and the international impact of the crisis.

The papers should examine and explicitly deal with issues that have been ignored by the dominant socio-economic theory and practice. Researchers should aim to use alternative perspectives in ways that go beyond traditional dominant socio-economic theories. The papers should examine and question the prevailing consensus and as such illustrate alternative responses to the crisis for the benefit of the people. The methodology adopted should preferably be holistic, historical, dynamic and comparative in nature.

After the collection of the suitable abstracts, the editor will submit a book proposal to reputable international publishers for publication. The book will also be translated into Greek and will be made available in the Greek market in both the Greek and English version.

The edited book will include one Graduate Student Research Paper. The book editor invites graduate students to submit research papers. Proof of graduate student status should be provided with the submission. While the students’ papers will go through the regular review process and be held to the same standards for acceptance as other submissions, the panel of reviewers will serve a mentoring role to advise the student to strengthen the paper. The best student paper will be published.

Those interested should submit an extended abstract of 300-350 words by 31 of March 2016as a word attachment.

For queries and submissions contact:

ESA RN18 Mid-Term Conference: "Rethinking Power in Communicative Capitalism Critical Perspectives on Media, Culture and Society" (Lisbon, 2016)

8-10 September, 2016 | ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal

European Sociological Association (ESA) - Research Network 18: Sociology of Communications and Media Research in cooperation with:

Keynote Speakers

Important dates:

Call for Papers: Topics

Abstract submission

Submission deadline for abstracts: May, 15, 2016.

Please send your 250-500 words abstract to Romina Surugiu (University of Bucharest) rominasurugiu@yahoo.com, Roy Panagiotopoulou (University of Athens) rpanag@media.uoa.gr, and Marisol Sandoval (City University London) marisol.sandoval.1@city.ac.uk

Abstracts should be sent as e-mail attachment (250-500 words abstract, title, author name(s), email address, institutional affiliations). Please insert the words “ESARN18 submission” in the subject.

Conference fee:

You can become a member of ESA RN18 by joining the ESA and subscribing to the network. The network needs material support, so we encourage you to join or renew your membership. The network subscription fee is only 10 Euros: europeansociology.org/member

Participation support for 4 PhD students, early career scholars and independent researchers will be available. This will not cover all costs, but part of them (accommodation and full conference fee). Preference will be given to applicants, whose presentations most suit the overall conference topic.

If you and want to apply for participation support, then please indicate this in your abstract submission by adding the sentence “I want to apply for participation support”. The notifications about participation support will be sent out together with the notifications of acceptance or rejection of presentations.

International Conference on "A Great Transformation? Global Perspectives on Contemporary Capitalisms" (Linz, 2017)

10-13 January, 2017 | Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Concept, questions, speakers, and issues of the conference

Ever since the global economic area opened up in the 1990s – and most recently, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis – Karl Polanyi’s economic and cultural history of capitalism, published as The Great Transformation in 1944, has been attracting renewed attention. Given his deft analysis of the liberal creed or how he refers to labor, land, and money as fictitious commodities, Polanyi’s critique of capitalism has never disappeared from the discussion. However, the unleashing of the market – and more specifically, of financial markets – has resulted in his ideas being widely received among sociologists, political scientists, and economists from all over the world. Polanyi’s analyses of the relationship between economy and society, and between economy/market and politics/state – along with his perspectives on civil society movements – all seem to be custom-made for capturing the crises, changes, and transformations of contemporary capitalisms. Meanwhile, Polanyi’s ideas and models have been profusely revised, pursued, developed, and checked for appropriateness when analyzing developments in the Global North and South. Moreover, a wealth of answers has emerged to the question of how his particular analysis of society may have inspired sociology, political science, and economics.

The conference A Great Transformation? Global Perspectives on Contemporary Capitalisms seeks to continue this discussion, identify new salient points and study the following questions: How do developments in contemporary capitalisms in the Global North and South constitute a great transformation, i.e. an epochal change in which the relationship between politics/state and economy/market undergoes fundamental changes at the global, international, transnational, and national levels? Have there been parallel, contradictory or interwoven developments and what form do these take? How are they shaped by social inequalities arising from gender, ethnicity and class, by power and dominance, and by conflict and resistance? How can all these developments be considered in light of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation? How do other analyses of and theories on capitalism rooted in sociology, political science, and economics contribute to social analysis and criticism? Where do they interlink with Polanyi’s perspective and where do they take different paths? All these questions will be thoroughly discussed at this interdisciplinary international conference.

The conference will start with an opening speech by Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley/USA, and conclude with his on-stage conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt, McGill University, Montreal/Canada. Keynote speakers will be José Luis Coraggio, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires/Argentina and Beverly Silver, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore/USA.

With this call for papers, we are inviting potential participants to submit proposals related to Karl Polanyi’s work, under one of the following three headings:

Beginning with Polanyi

Under this heading, we will use Polanyi’s models and analyses as starting points for discussing the question of how to theoretically, epistemologically, and empirically utilize them when analyzing contemporary capitalisms. We welcome proposals that address one or more of the following issues:

Meeting Polanyi

Under this heading, we will discuss Polanyi’s theory in conjunction with other approaches. As all these concepts are embedded in specific scientific, historical and regional contexts, we will examine their validity as theoretical perspectives and tools for analyzing contemporary capitalisms. We welcome proposals that address one or more of the following issues:

After Polanyi

Under this heading, we will take a look at social problems that call for a contemporary analysis of capitalism. We will show how these challenges can be accepted and how Polanyi’s work contributes to meeting said challenges. We welcome proposals that address one or more of the following issues:

Addressees and conference language

With this call for papers, we are inviting scholars from all parts of the world and all branches of sociology, political science, and economics – including those working in such transdisciplinary research areas as feminist or intersectionality studies – to submit proposals under the three headings outlined above. The conference will be held in English.

Schedules for submitting abstracts and full papers

We welcome abstracts limited to a maximum of 500 words (including the title, outline of the contents, at least three but no more than five keywords, author’s name, affiliation, and full address). We are endeavoring to provide financial support to applicants whose universities, research institutes, etc. are unable to fund travel costs and who have no opportunity to apply for funds elsewhere. Applicants who wish to make use of this offer are asked to state this in their abstract.

Important

Organizers and hosts of the conference

More details are available at the conference website.

International Conference on "Megatrends of world development and economic prospects for Ukraine" (Kyiv, 2016)

30 June 2016 | Institute of International Relations, Kyiv, Ukraine

Ukrainian Association of International Economics, Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko national university of Kyiv, Department of World Economy and International Economic Relations are organizing the International Conference “Megatrends of world development and economic prospects for Ukraine”.

Keynote Speakers: Professor V. Sidenko (Research Centre of Razumkov) and Professor O. Sharov (Ukrainian Institute of Strategic Research).

The conference welcomes proposals for sessions and presentations of any of the following themes:

We welcome individual paper proposals and panel/round table proposals as well.

Abstract should be in English and up to 500 words (word or pdf-document). They should be single spaced and use 14 point Times New Roman font.They should consist the author or authors’ fullname, affiliation and e-mail address. A proposal for session/round table must include the following information: Title of the session (round table), name and affiliation of the session organizer, name and affiliation of the person who will chair the session. Titles of the papers, name, affiliation and contact information of the authors.

The deadline to submit Papers and Sessions (Round tables) is 5th of June 2016. The Journal Actual Problems of International Relations will publish a special issue with a selection of papers presented at the conference. The selection of the papers will be made by the Scientific Committee of the Conference.

For more information, do not hesitate to contact with Ms. Maryna Khmara or Mr. Oleg Plaxij by following email: ugouaem@ukr.net

International Conference: "Economics in the Era of Natural Computationalism and Big Data" (Durham, 2016)

11-13 November, 2016 | Durham, North Carolina, USA

Conference Theme: Economics in the Era of Natural Computationalism and Big Data

A Conference in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata" (by John von Neumann)

Venue: Hilton Garden Inn Durham Southpoint, Durham, North Carolina, USA

Since publication of his magnum opus, The Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, von Neumann's influence over the entire scientific world in terms of computing and computation has been monumental for more than half a century. This includes economics. In addition to von Neumann's ideas dominating the development of computing machines during the last half a century, his attempt to develop a general theory of automata has also motivated and facilitated active interdisciplinary conversations among sciences, social sciences, computer sciences, and recently, humanities. The latter phenomenon is known as natural computationalism.

In year 2002, through Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams, von Neumann's influence on the theory of automata became better known to economists. Twelve years after Machine Dreams, two MIT Sloan School economists, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee published The Second Machine Age (the second industrial revolution). The digital society has been understood as an outcome as well as a process of the second industrial revolution. It is frequently characterized by its production of big data. However, big data is no longer just about data. The fact that now users can supply their own contents, which is the essential idea of Web 2.0, has fundamentally changed what we know as "data", the pooling and use of data, and what we understand as "knowledge". The trend that big data is accepted as a standard type of data in economics and social sciences has made social sciences naturally more computational and, in a sense, more behavioral.

The theme of Duke Forest Conference 2016 is Economics in the Era of Natural Computationalism and Big Data. Within the ambient of the forest of data, the conference aims to discover the answer for the following questions. First, how economics, specifically behavioral and computational economics, can help data analytics in mining information and knowledge from big data; second, how big-data phenomena can present economists challenging research questions, new research opportunities, and methodological innovations. For the latter, we further ask how computer simulation, laboratory experiments, field study, questionnaires may evolve or co-evolve with the presence of big data.

With the above core issues, studies in each of the aforementioned fields, but not limited to, empirical economics, behavioral economics, experimental economics, on-line gaming experiments, neuroeconomics, computational economics, agent-based simulation, econometrics, history of economics, data science, and other related disciplines, such as artificial intelligence, psychology, cognitive sciences, digital physics, computational social sciences, and digital humanities are also welcome.

Keynote Speakers

Important Dates:

Paper Submission:

The paper submission system is available at easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dfc20160

More details are available at the conference website.

New School Economic Reviews invites contributions

The NSER is a peer-reviewed, student-run economics journal that publishes original and high-quality articles.

We encourage diversity of subject matter and writing style covering a wide range of topics in economics. Submissions can be in the form of but not limited to, scholarly articles, commentaries, book reviews, guest editorials, and announcements. The papers will be reviewed by a committee of New School alumni. The NSER welcomes submissions from academics, practitioners and students of all levels seeking to broaden and strengthen the foundational structure of the study of economic systems.

The NSER editorial board reserves the right to suggest both minor and substantive revisions to accepted works. Finally, following the standard practices of North American scholarly journals, the NSER is not in a position to offer payments for accepted and published manuscripts.

In preparing your submissions, we ask that follow the journal’s procedures and editorial practices. Papers should be submitted in PDF as well as either MS Word or LaTeX. We will accept submissions of a variety of lengths, however, please no longer than 25 pages. All papers should be in line with The Chicago Manual of Style.

All submission should be sent to submit@newschooljournal.com. There is no submission or publication fee.

Submission Deadline: March 15th 2016

Redefining economics: beyond neoclassical approach (Warsaw, 2016)

20-21 May, 2016 | University of Warsaw, Poland

Economics in Poland shows a very strong neoclassical bias, both as a science and as a tool for shaping economic policy. The transition from the socialist to the market economy, experienced in Poland at the turn of the 80s and 90s, was designed and administered by strong proponents of the Washington Consensus. Economic theories that shaped Poland’s economic transition are still very influential and leave little room for plurality, both in academia and in public discourse. Therefore, the goal of the conference is to support plurality in public and economic debates in Poland, and to serve as a forum for the exchange of alternative ideas.

This event is organised by Kalecki Foundation, Warsaw-based economic and social policy think tank, with the support of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw and the College of Liberal Arts. Conference is sponsored by a Young Scholar Event Grant of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Postgraduate and postdoctoral students, researchers in economics or other social sciences using tools outside of the neoclassical approach are warmly invited to participation in the conference.

Please submit your abstracts in one of the areas/topics indicated below:

Please submit your 500-words abstracts together with your personal data including name, surname, academic degree; information about affiliation and short bio via e-mail to: cfp@kalecki.org.

The deadline for submission is March 31, 2016.

For more information please visit the conference website.

Research in Political Economy: "Return of Marxian Macro-dynamics in East Asia"

Research in Political Economy is an annual hardback book series established in 1977, with volumes advancing a critical analysis of political economy. It is a refereed publication that can consider longer contributions. The website for the series is at www.buffalo.edu/~zarembka, or at www.emeraldinsight.com/books.htm?issn=0161-7230,.

Research in Political Economy invites submissions of papers for the Volume 32 (publication date: 2017) under the theme of ‘Return of Marxian Macro-dynamics in East Asia’.

The economic growth in East Asia has been believed to be the model case of the triumph of capitalism. Some progressive economists, for example, the developmental state theorists, also praised the East Asian model as the progressive alternatives to neoliberal market fundamentalism, arguing that they are the outcomes of state-led development.

However, with the sudden advent of ‘Lost Decade of Japan’ in the 1990s, and the ensuing ‘IMF Crisis’ of South Korea in 1997, and now the imminent ‘hard landing’ of the Chinese economy, the East Asian ‘miracle’ story seems to be a thing of the past. East Asia now became an epicenter of the contradictions and crisis of global capitalism. Today, deepening economic crisis, exacerbation of social polarization, rising popular discontents, and escalating geopolitical tensions are common to China, Japan and Korea. Moreover, East Asia (especially China) has been at the center of global ecological contradictions. Indeed, East Asia now became the typical place of Marxian macro-dynamics. Although ‘miracle’ stories of East Asia are still on sale by the developmental state theorists as well as mainstream ideologues, it is obvious that their audience substantially shrank. Instead, critiques of and resistances to capitalism rapidly proliferate in East Asia.

With the deepening contradictions of capitalism, interests in anti-capitalism and Marxism began to revive in East Asia after long period of marginalization under ‘miracle’ regimes. Also, as it became clear that the export-led or investment-led growth model, which has sustained the ‘miracles’ in East Asia, no longer functions, some progressive economists are now trying to find new alternative in the Keynesian wage-led or income-led growth model, triggering the new interesting debates with Marxists.

The Volume 32 of Research in Political Economy attempts to intervene in above conjunctures, centering on the theme of ‘Return of Marxian Macro-dynamics in East Asia’.

Papers which investigate the following topics are especially welcome:

Papers are to be sent to Seongjin Jeong, Co-Editor of Volume 32, at seongjin.jeong@gmail.com by 30 June 2016. One month before, we would appreciate notice of your intention to submit on a certain topic. Submitted papers will be subject to a double-blind review process.

The citations, footnotes and references, used in the papers, are suggested to follow ‘Harvard’ style, i.e., papers do not have footnotes for anything but substantive matters and cite within the text, e.g., Marx (1867, p. 3) with a reference list which includes the full information.

Co-Editors of the Volume 32: Masao Ishikura (Professor of Economics at Hitotsubashi University), Seongjin Jeong (Professor of Economics at Gyeongsang National University), Minqi Li (Professor of Economics at University of Utah)

Editor of Research in Political Economy: Paul Zarembka (Professor of Economics at the State University of New York at Buffalo)

SustBusy Workshop: "Agent-based modelling in Ecological Economics" (Berlin, 2016)

20-21 May, 2016 | ESCP Europe in Berlin, Germany

Agent-based models (ABM) have acquired a place among other modelling tools in economics, but not an uncontested one. For some it is a useful tool to depict heterogeneous agents and their bounded rational decisions. For others it is a bunch of ad hoc descriptions, the results of which cannot be generalized.

When founded in the late 1980s, Ecological Economics has been among the first branches of economics to criticize the standard assumption of perfect rationality and full information. Faced with a complex natural system it became all too obvious that optimization models for emissions or the exploitation of natural resources draw an over-optimistic picture of the role of the economy within nature. Ecological Economics pointed out our lack of understanding for nature´s complexity. ABM could be a tool to depict the limitations of our knowledge as well as a more complex ecosystem. They could help analyzing the consequences of non-optimal behavior, of learning, and of belated understanding of necessary adaptions. Some Ecological Economists took up the challenge and developed ABM on resource exploitation, land use, water conflicts or climate change. But the method is still not widespread.

The workshop shall investigate the potential of ABM for Ecological Economics. Are they worth investing in and learn how to program? Are the results helpful or just ad hoc outcomes of toy models? Can ABM be useful in the context of Ecological Economics or are they unsuitable to portray the link to nature?

We would like to discuss these and further questions with you in a workshop format with high-profile keynote talks, oral presentations with discussants, and time for debate. We explicitly encourage PhD students as well as advanced scientists to apply.

Applicants are invited to submit abstracts of 300 to 500 words by March 15th 2016 via email to sustbusy@escpeurope.eu together with the application form available here.

Active participation is required by agreeing to serve as a discussant for another paper.

Important Dates:

Please feel free to spread the Call for Papers within your network!

Keynote speakers

Venue:

The workshop will take place at ESCP Europe Business School conveniently located in Berlin-Charlottenburg/City West. Public transportation is provided via frequent S-Bahn (Station Westend) and Bus connections (Station Schlosspark-Klinik). Berlin is easy accessible from all over Europe via all kinds of transport. Find your connection via www.bahn.de, www.blablacar.de or www.busliniensuche.de. We encourage travelling to the workshop by train or bus. If you need to fly, the city has two airports nearby.

Registration

In order to register for the conference after acceptance please complete and submit the following application form (available shortly) via email to sustbusy@escpeurope.eu by April 10th 2016.

The participation fee of €60, covering all meals and materials, becomes due upon registration. Transfer details will be given.

For any assistance or help regarding the workshop participation do not hesitate to contact our Coordination office via email to sustbusy@escpeurope.eu.

The Global Studies Association of North America: "Crossing borders: people, culture and capital" (Austin, 2016)

9-11 June, 2016 | University of Texas, Austin, US

Co-sponsor: International Relations and Global Studies Program

Call for Papers: Accepting papers on all topics that include aspects of global studies.

Send 100 word abstracts to: Jerry Harris at gharris234@comcast.net. Deadline May 1st.

For more information go to our web site at: http://www.net4dem.org/mayglobal

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Saskia Sassen, Columbia University

World renown sociologist, Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, and Chair of The Committee on Global Thought. Her books are translated into over 20 languages. She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions. Most recently she was awarded the Principe de Asturias 2013 Prize in the Social Sciences, and made a member of the Royal Academy of the Sciences of Netherland. Among her book are:

Guest and Aliens; Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy; and Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.

Dr. David Montejano, UC Berkeley

Historian and sociologist Dr. Montejano is Professor of Ethnic Studies. He is former Chair of the Center for Latino Policy Research, and previously Director of the Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Texas. He is a Resident Scholar of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and recipient of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award. He is author of:

Anglos and Mexican in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986; and Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century.

Susan Gzesh, University of Chicago

Susan Gzesh is Executive Director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago. She was Director of the Mexico-US Network and co-founded the Regional Network of Civil Organizations for Migration. From 1997-1999 she was the legal advisor to the Mexican Foreign Ministry on US immigration law and policy. More recently Gzesh was appointed to the Illinois New Americans Immigrant Policy Council, and the United Food & Commercial Workers Union Task Force on Investigating Misconduct by Immigration Agents. She has served on the Chicago Council on Global Affair's Task Force on Immigration Policy in the Midwest, and is a Fellow of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington D.C. She is an active member of the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights and the Chicago Committee for Human Rights Watch. Gzesh has also been a member of civil society delegation to the United Nations High Level Dialogue on Migration & Development, and the global Forum on Migration and Development.

Dr. Alfonso Gonzales, University of Texas

Dr. Gonzales’ is an expert in Latino and Latin American politics, migration control, and migrant social movements in the United States, Mexico, and Central America. He is particularly interested in the politics of migration control, which includes policing, asylum, detention, deportation, democracy, human rights, and justice. Dr. Gonzales is a renowned public speaker and has lectured at major universities and conferences in the United States, Mexico, and Spain. He is author of: Reform Without Justice: The Homeland Security State and Latino Migrant Politics.

WEA Online Conference on "Capital Accumulation, Production and Employment"

15 May – 15 June, 2016 | World Wide Web

Conference Theme: Capital Accumulation, Production and Employment: Can We Bend the Arc of Global Capital Toward Justice?

This conference will focus on various aspects of global accumulation, production and employment from a broader perspective of examining their interlinkages with other economic, social, and political processes. Concerns with social inclusion extend well beyond purely economic account of justice and fairness, since the degree of economic inequality also affects social cohesion and political stability, and can also have negative implications for economic growth and democratic institutions. Considering the current social and economic challenges, Peter Radford has suggested the need to constrain capital and make it work for all people. In his own words: ‘We can bend the arc of capitalism to our will if we wish”.In truth, this conference calls for a deep examination of current power, politics and economics in a social context where democratic institutions are being threatened. This attempt also involves critical thinking of theories of justice in light of applied challenges: What kind of justice should we bend the arc of global capital to? What are justice conditions and criteria, given the concern about capital accumulation, employment, and production?The broad themes to be covered are noted below; in addition, specific issues that could be taken up in both theoretical and empirical papers are mentioned, but these should be seen only as indicative suggestions. Papers falling within the broad topic of the conference, but on issues not specifically mentioned, are most welcome. We welcome contributions from social science and humanities researchers, policy makers, and students.We invite papers on themes and topics including, but not limited to:

1. Finance, investment and production

2. Investment trends and the competition among countries for business

3. Challenges to working conditions

4. Economics and democracy

Submissions:

Deadline for submissions is 1st May, 2016

When submitting the paper, please also include the name(s), email addresse(s), and affiliated institutions or organizations. Please send your submissions to: wea1conference2016@gmail.com

More information is available here: capital2016.weaconferences.net

Workshop and network on "Global Debt Dynamics" (Brighton, 2016)

26 May, 2016 | University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Organised by Sussex Centre for Global Political Economy (CGPE) in co-operation with IDS Centre for Rising Powers and Global Development (CRPD)

Global Debt Dynamics: Rethinking resilience, vulnerabilities and interdependencies between advanced and emerging economies

Bringing together experts from different academic disciplines, professional sectors and international organisations, the workshop aims both to advance the state-of-the-art in global debt analysis and to lead to the creation of a new international research network on global debt dynamics, with special attention to the relationship between advanced and emerging economies.

Overview

The 2008/09 global economic crisis exposed and exacerbated a wide number of debt-related pathologies associated with the growth model of advanced economies. Nine years after the crisis, the majority of advanced economies remain into uncharted economic waters defined by high levels of leverage and debt. Now, debt concerns return to emerging economies too, while the global economy faces a series of new debt-related challenges (e.g. falling commodity prices, the economic slowdown in China and Emerging Markets, monetary normalisation in the US, further quantitative easing in Europe and Japan, geopolitical uncertainties). Most importantly, these trends take place in a global economic environment defined by a considerable shift of global economic weight from advanced to emerging and developing economies, especially in terms of contribution to global GDP. Accounting for the ways in which this shift impacts on global growth patterns and traditional economic dependencies and vulnerabilities remain a major challenge.

Main Themes

The aim of the workshop is to piece together the different debt-dynamics currently underway in the global economy, and examine their potential implications for the global economic system. Has the vulnerability/resilience nexus that defined the interaction between emerging and advanced economies in the post-WWII era changed? If yes, how, and how does it matter for the involved economies, and the post-1990s economic globalisation order. How has the economic crisis affected global debt dynamics, and what has been the impact of these changes on the relationship between advanced economies and emerging powers? What is the impact of the rise and fall of quantitative easing on emerging and advanced economies? How monetary tightening in the US will affect the other advanced economies and the emerging powers? How prepared is the emerging and developing world to face conditions of monetary tightening in the core and an appreciation of the US dollar? How do the increasing use of renminbi and existing currency swap arrangements impact on traditional debt vulnerabilities in emerging economies? Is de-dollarisation possible and desirable for emerging economies? How do growth dynamics in the advanced economies relate to growth dynamics in emerging powers, and how does this relationship affect their debt policies and strategies?
______________________________

Keynote participants have already confirmed their participation (e.g. Prof. Stephany Griffith-Jones, Prof. Ugo Panizza, Dr Stephanie Blankenburg, the head of UNCTAD Debt & Development Finance Branch, et al).

If you are interested in participating in the workshop and the creation of this new international network on global debt dynamics, please send the following information by e-mail to Dr Andreas Antoniades at A.A.Antoniades@sussex.ac.uk.
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GLOBAL DEBT DYNAMICS WORKSHOP
APPLICATION DETAILS
1. NAME:
2. POSITION / AFFILIATION:
3. PARTICIPATION TYPE: Presentation [ ] Attendance only (disregard 4 and 5) [ ]
4. PRESENTATION TYPES: Research Paper [ ] Policy Brief [ ]
5. Please include a provisional title and brief abstract (100-200 words)
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The deadline for applications is MARCH 21 (notification by March 24). Please note that places are limited, and there will also be ‘poster presentations’. Participation will be free of charge (i.e. there is no workshop fee) and will include a workshop lunch and coffee breaks.

For any questions or further information please contact the workshop convenor Dr Andreas Antoniades at A.A.Antoniades@sussex.ac.uk.

More information is available here: sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/34224

Call for Participants

2nd IMK-Workshop "Pluralism in Economics" (Berlin, 2016)

8-10 August, 2016 | Berlin, Germany

After the global financial and economic crises a controversial debate about the emphasis of the curriculum in the economic teaching started in the German-speaking world. Especially student university groups founded initiatives to entrench a more plural education at universities. This workshop offers insights in different economic theories and methods and space to discuss a reformation of the economic education. Furthermore it supports the networking of university groups and dedicated teaching stuff.

The workshop language will be German.

Please apply until 17 April, 2016 at this webpage and for more information click here.

IIPPE Training Workshops: "Replacing UK Austerity: Towards Progressive Policies" (London, 2016)

21-22 March, 2016 | SOAS University of London, UK

IIPPE Training Workshops, Open Economics Forum (OEF) and the Department of Economics (SOAS University of London) present a two-day workshop: Replacing UK Austerity: Towards Progressive Policies

The workshop will take place on the 21 and 22 of March 2016 in V111 (Vernon Square Campus of SOAS). Confirmed speakers include Ourania Dimakou, Sue Himmelweit, Photis Lysandrou, Jo Michell and Simon Mohun. The workshop seeks to unpick the causes of the financial crisis and the way in which the financial crisis transformed into a recession; examines the nature of regulation of the financial markets; offers a feminist appraisal of the economic record of the coalition and conservative governments and assesses the scope for alternative economic policies offered through the Labour leadership. We are seeking an audience of engaged participants, including undergraduate, postgraduate students, junior academics and activists with an interest in alternative economic policies.

If you wish to register for this workshop, please contact: Pedro Mendes Loureiro: pm_loureiro@soas.ac.uk

International Conference on "Decent Jobs and Wage-led Growth in the UK and Europe" (Greenwich, 2016)

28 April, 2016 | University of Greenwich, UK

The University of Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre, FEPS and TASC welcome you to a conference on “Decent Jobs and Wage-led Growth in the UK and Europe,” with John McDonnell MP, Professor Ozlem Onaran, Professor Engelbert Stockhammer, Professor James Wickham, Dr. Alicja Bobek, Dr. Geoff Tily, Professor Francis Green, Dr. Ernst Stetter and Mr. David Begg. The conference will present the findings of two new research projects on “Wage-Led Growth in Europe? Effects of Changes in Income Distribution and Financialization on Growth ” and “Workers' Experience of New Employment Strategies”. Please see the full programme below.

To book a place for the conference please reserve here.

PROGRAM

14:45 -15:00 Registration; Coffee and tea

15:00- 16:30 Session 1: Decent Jobs in Europeand the UK

16:30-17:00 Coffee and tea break

17:00-19:30 Session 2: Policies for wage-led growth in the UK and Europe

19:30-20:00 Wine reception

Co-organized by the Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre (GPERC), Foundation of European Progressive Studies (FEPS), Think-tank for Action on Social Change (TASC), Kingston University Political Economy Research Group

Venue: University of Greenwich, King William Court Room KW303, Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, London, SE10 9LS

Detailed information on getting to University of Greenwich.

Please visit our website for the Greenwich Papers in Political Economy, GPERC Policy Briefs, other publications, and forthcoming events.

Modern Marxism Research Group: "Is There No Alternative? The European Union, Global Crisis, And Authoritarian Neoliberalism" (London, 2016)

11-12 March, 2016 | King’s College London, UK

Organized by Department of European and International Studies: Modern Marxism Research Group

Recent developments – notably the European 'refugee crisis' and the upcoming referendum on ‘Brexit’ – underline the profound impasse in which the European Union finds itself. The selloffs in European bank shares are a stark reminder than the eurozone crisis js far from over. And the plight of the Syriza government in Greece and the advance of Podemos in the Spanish state highlight the conflict between popular opposition to austerity and an EU that simultaneously subjects member states to detailed surveillance and immunizes itself from any form of democratic accountability.

This conference – held at King’s College London on 11-12 March – brings together scholars working on the EU from a variety of critical perspectives to address a series of questions: How to understand the combination of neoliberalism and authoritarianism increasingly characteristic of the EU’s mode of operations? What is the relationship between the eurozone’s evolution and global patterns of competition and crisis? What is British capitalism’s relationship to the EU? Is leaving the eurozone a precondition for a EU member-state being able to pursue alternative policies to austerity? And what do the experiences of Syriza and Podemos tell us about the development of such alternatives?

This is a small research conference so participation is by invitation only. Space is limited so please email alex.callinicos@kcl.ac.uk to confirm your participation.

Programme

King’s College London, WBW3.7, Waterloo Bridge Building, Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NH

Friday, 11 March, 1-3pm: Authoritarian Neoliberalism

Friday, 11 March, 4-6pm: The EU and Global Crisis

Saturday, 12 March 10am-12 noon: Beyond the Eurozone Crisis

Saturday, 12 March, 1-3pm: Political Alternatives

Summer School in Applied Stock-Flow consistent Macro-modelling (London, 2016)

1-8 August | Kingston University, UK

Applied Stock-Flow consistent Macro-modelling

If you are a highly motivated student of economics at Master’s or Ph.D. level, or you are working with a research centre or a public institution and want to spend one week studying, researching, discussing, and exchanging experiences in the open and diverse atmosphere of a pluralist economics department with a vibrant research group in political economy (Kingston University Political Economy Research Group –PERG), this event is for you. The summer school offers you:

Lecturers will include: Marc Lavoie, Stephen Kinsella, Antoine Godin, Jo Michell and many others.

The organisers of the summer school are grateful to the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative, Université Paris 13 – Sorbonne Paris Cité and Kingston University for their generous financial support.

Full details and application instructions can be found in the call for applications.

Applications should be sent to severin.reissl@gmail.com by 20th March 2016.

Summer School in Repoliticising capitalism: contradictions, critique and alternatives (Roskilde, 2016)

1-12 August, 2016 | Roskilde University, Denmark

Main topic: Repoliticising capitalism: contradictions, critique and alternatives

Course outline

The summer school brings together a faculty of international scholars (including Bob Jessop and Catia Gregoratti) and staff from Roskilde University (including Jesper Jespersen, Peter Nielsen and Laura Horn) for an in-depth course on heterodox and critical political economic perspectives. It offers a unique opportunity to directly engage with original economic texts/source material and to explore core dimensions of the critique of (neo)classical economic theory and contemporary perspectives on global capitalism. The focus of the course is explicitly pluralist, encouraging students to widen their horizon for critical thinking and methodological reflection

The first part of the course ‘Economic Thought from Oikos to Economics’ traces the history of economic ideas with an emphasis on critical and heterodox approaches. The individual sessions will introduce students to carefully selected primary literature from classical, critical and heterodox strands of economic thought. The objective is to understand the varied historical effect of these theories on both the object of study and the discipline itself. This will provide the foundation for further elaboration on contemporary issues such as debt, unemployment, inequality, and growth.

The second part of the course ‘Contemporary Challenges, Critiques and Alternatives’ addresses present and pressing issues, through the lens of critical and heterodox political economy. This theoretical and applied pluralism will provide insights on issues such as e.g. the development crisis, financialisation, austerity politics and climate change. Through the employment of recent critiques, the second section of the course hence offers potential pathways towards different conceptualisations and alternatives to “the economy” as we know it.

Why do this summer school at Roskilde University?

The ‘Repoliticizing Capitalism’ course at Roskilde University is the only one of its kind in Scandinavia. It offers a rare opportunity to engage with primary economic texts as well as leading scholars within heterodox economics and critical political economy. The course will contribute substantially to students’ understanding of economics, its history and usages. Moreover the specific focus on alternatives and critiques enables students to move beyond orthodox conceptualizations of the economy.

RUC is a critical university, with an explicit focus on creating experimental and innovative learning experiences and knowledge. It has a unique history of student activism and legacy of critical thought that still leaves an impression on university environment. The summer school at RUC not only provides an opportunity to take part in a vibrant academic community, but you will also be presented with the possibility of directly engaging with professors, lecturers and researchers leading within their fields. RUC’s dedication to student participation, problem solving and innovative learning approaches will positively add to the credentials of any student.

Located at the city of Roskilde and a 25-min train-ride from Copenhagen, the cultural, social, economic and political happenings are inside the reach of its green surroundings.

Read testimonials from participants from last year's summer school!

Course format

The course takes place over a two week period and comprises a range of activities. Each week there are four days of teaching (seminars and workshops), and one day of self-study.

The seminars will present a variety of critical approaches, drawing on the readings and the lecturers’ own work. The core element of the summer school is active learning-oriented workshops, in which the participants discuss the theoretical, methodological and empirical issues raised in the lectures. There will also be opportunities for participants to present their own work to the group. Self-study periods, facilitated by the enabling learning environment Roskilde university campus provides, which offer an opportunity for students to improve their knowledge and understanding; the logbook will ensure that learning is sustained and reflexive. There will also be time for one-to-one consultations with the lecturers during the course.

Admission

RUC Students from the international programmes International Development Studies, EU-studies and Global Studies, and students from the Danish programmes Politik og Administration and Forvaltning, will be admitted directly. Other students must apply for pre-approval from their respective study boards.

For students from other universities in Denmark, as well as international students, please follow the application procedure indicated at this link.

Deadline for applications is 15 May 2016.

Fees

For international students (EU/EEA) €420. Students enrolled at a Danish university do not have to pay fees, but need to provide a forhåndsgodkendelse/pre-approval from their university.

Please note: The course is offered both as 7,5 ECTS and as 10 ECTS (The price for 10 ETCS is € 560)

Accommodation is available on campus, prices and further details are available upon request.

Literature and course overview

To be made available in due time, for an outline see www.kursus.ruc.dk/summer.

Questions?

If you have questions regarding the course programme and academic content, you can contact Associate Professor Laura Horn at lhorn@ruc.dk.

If you have questions regarding admission and other practical issues, please contact the study administration at Department of Social Sciences and Business at ise-kand@ruc.dk.

Summer School in Social Economics (Bilbao, 2016)

21-22 June, 2016 | University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain

The Association of Social Economics (ASE) will organize a two-day summer school in social economics in Spain. The summer school will be free, and ASE is able to provide some support (up to 500 USD) for travel cost. The summer school will be followed by the annual conference of the economics department of the University of the Basque Country (23-24 June), which presents a wide variety of economic perspectives and includes ASE summer school coordinator Irene van Staveren as keynote speaker.

Summer school

The summer school provides an overview of recent social economic research by prominent ASE scholars, major social economics concepts and themes, and information about both ASE scholarly journals Review of Social Economy and Forum for Social Economics. There will be two days of lectures with Q&A, informal meetings between participants and lecturers, and a set of reading materials for preparation.

Conference

The conference provides an opportunity for summer school participants to present their work in special PhD student sessions, giving participants the opportunity to network with PhD students from all over the world, working in different schools of thought, and to receive feedback on their papers.

How to apply for the summer school: please fill in the application form and send it to Irene van Staveren (staveren@iss.nl) before 15th of April 2016. You will be notified of your participation (and of possible travel support if you have requested this) before 1st May 2016.

ASE Summer School Application Form

How to apply for the conference: please check out the conference website and indicate that you are an ASE summer school participant (to obtain the discount for the conference fee): http://www.conferencedevelopments.com/section/Presentation

Or contact the local organizer: jesus.ferreiro@ehu.eus

Costs:

More information

Irene van Staveren, email: staveren@iss.nl

YSI-Workshop on "Complexity in Economic Theory and Practice" (Toronto, 2016)

26-28 April, 2016 | Fields University, Toronto, Canada

Complexity and Economics Workshop

We live in a complex world with complex economic and financial relations. This YSI workshop introduces theoretical and applied approaches to economic problems to enable graduate and PhD students with new and innovative ideas and methods for their own economics related research.

The Fields Institute and the YSI Complexity Economics Working Group are pleased to announce their workshop “Complexity and Economics”, and would like to invite all interested young researchers from the fields of economics and related fields to apply. The workshop is targeted mainly, but not exclusively, at graduate and PhD students with an interest in complexity theory and its application to economic problems.

The program of the workshop consists of two main parts. The first part, held by David C. Colander (Middlebury College, USA), introduces participants into complexity as a concept, and provides them with a base understanding of how it differs from more traditional economic modelling and thinking. The second part, held by Igor Nikolic (TU Delft, Netherlands), consists of applied coursework with a focus on agent-based modelling.

A limited number of participants will have the opportunity to present their own research in young scholar presentations during the workshop. Applications to take part in the workshop can be submitted here. All candidates should be prepared to submit their Curriculum Vitae, a brief statement of their research interest and motivation, and – if applicable – an abstract of the paper they would like to present by March 3rd. Successful candidates will be notified by March 14th.

The participation fee for the workshop is USD 25. Unfortunately, The Fields Institute and YSI cannot offer funding opportunities for travel and lodging.

Keynote speakers:

Abstract Deadline: March 3rd

More information can be found at the INET website.

Awards

Annual Amartya Sen Prize Competition

The third Amartya Sen Prize is soliciting papers on the non-revenue impact of curbing illicit financial flows.

Submission Deadline: August 29, 2016

Poor populations are hurt when rich individuals and multinational corporations surreptitiously shift trillions of dollars in wealth and profits out of less developed countries. One harm arises from the loss of tax revenues incurred by their governments. By concealing their profits or wealth, MNCs and individuals evade taxes on profits, dividends, interest and/or capital gains—taxes that could fund social spending or tax reductions for ordinary citizens.

This year’s submissions are to focus on the other harm from illicit financial outflows: the loss of capital to a poor country’s economy, which may well substantially exceed the revenue loss. Such capital loss occurs when, often to dodge taxes or tariffs, individuals and companies of all sizes move wealth and profits offshore illicitly, e.g. through trade misinvoicing. Authors might choose to discuss the potential economic impact of reducing such capital losses: the impact on savings, investment, trade, interest rates, consumption, employment, economic growth, and/or culture and the arts, for example. In this context, it would be interesting to explore what policies domestic and international authorities might adopt in order to discourage the export of private sector capital and to amplify the beneficial effects of curbing illicit financial outflows. The latter exploration raises the partly moral question of how to value these effects from the standpoint of a less developed country’s poor majority.

Authors might also tackle the challenge of estimating the magnitude of such capital losses. Is some of the capital now illicitly removed brought back openly as new investment? Would some of the capital now illicitly removed be exported anyway, openly, even if there were no opportunity to shift it out in tax-dodging ways? Would some of the MNCs now illicitly shifting profits out have refrained from entering the country in the first place without the prospect of tax-dodging profits, and would such failures to enter be counterproductive to the interests of the developing countries?

The above lines of thought are meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. We hope for a creative diversity of submissions that provide a rich and well-grounded picture of what our world could look like—especially from the perspective of the poor—if illicit financial outflows from the less developed countries could be substantially curtailed.

Please email your entry to ian@academicsstand.org by Monday, August 29 at 5pm ET.

More information is avaiable here.

Pierangelo Garegnani Research Prize 2016

The Centro di Ricerche e Documentazione “Piero Sraffa”, in accordance with the wishes of the family and with their financial support, establishes for the third year a Prize in memory of Pierangelo Garegnani of the amount of € 3,000 (before tax), aimed at young scholars who are engaged or plan to engage in research in economic analysis along the lines of the work of Pierangelo Garegnani.

The Prize is awarded to researchers in the field of Economics who are attending a PhD course, or have defended since 2012 their PhD thesis, in Italian or foreign Universities.

The applications must be submitted no later than May 31, 2016, either in electronic version (centro.sraffa@uniroma3.it) or in paper, to Centro Sraffa.

Please find all details on the Centro Sraffa website at http://www.centrosraffa.org/prizeandscholarshipdetails.aspx?id=6

Journals

Cambridge Journal of Economics, 40 (2)

John Eatwell: Tribute to Ajit Singh

Barry Z. Cynamon and Steven M. Fazzari: Inequality, the Great Recession and slow recovery

Sophie Harnay and Laurence Scialom: The influence of the economic approaches to regulation on banking regulations: a short history of banking regulations

Sébastien Charles: Is Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis valid?

Michalis Nikiforos: On the ‘utilisation controversy’: a theoretical and empirical discussion of the Kaleckian model of growth and distribution

Hiroaki Sasaki: Profit sharing and its effect on income distribution and output: a Kaleckian approach

Laura Carvalho and Armon Rezai: Personal income inequality and aggregate demand

Carlos A. Ibarra and Robert A. Blecker: Structural change, the real exchange rate and the balance of payments in Mexico, 1960–2012

Arslan Razmi: North-south interactions in the presence of trade in environmental permits: a structuralist investigation

Aleksandr Buzgalin and Andrey Kolganov: Critical political economy: the ‘market-centric’ model of economic theory must remain in the past—notes of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism

Saverio M. Fratini: Rent as a share of product and Sraffa’s price equations

Heinz D. Kurz: Adam Smith on markets, competition and violations of natural liberty

Antonella Stirati: Real wages in the business cycle and the theory of income distribution: an unresolved conflict between theory and facts in mainstream macroeconomics

Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy & Society, 9 (1)

Editorial Statement

Juan R. Cuadrado-Roura, Ron Martin, and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: The economic crisis in Europe: urban and regional consequences

Riccardo Crescenzi, Davide Luca, and Simona Milio: The geography of the economic crisis in Europe: national macroeconomic conditions, regional structural factors and short-term economic performance

Ugo Fratesi and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: The crisis and regional employment in Europe: what role for sheltered economies? [open access]

Luca Agnello, Giorgio Fazio, and Ricardo M. Sousa: National fiscal consolidations and regional inequality in Europe

Roberta Capello and Andrea Caragliu: After crisis scenarios for Europe: alternative evolutions of structural adjustments

Annie Tubadji, Peter Nijkamp, and Vassilis Angelis: Cultural hysteresis, entrepreneurship and economic crisis: An analysis of buffers to unemployment after economic shocks

George Petrakos and Yannis Psycharis: The spatial aspects of economic crisis in Greece

Juan R. Cuadrado-Roura and Andrés Maroto: Unbalanced regional resilience to the economic crisis in Spain: a tale of specialisation and productivity

Irena Đokić, Zlatan Fröhlich, and Ivana Rašić Bakarić: The impact of the economic crisis on regional disparities in Croatia

David N. F. Bell and David Eiser: Migration and fiscal policy as factors explaining the labour-market resilience of UK regions to the Great Recession

Ayda Eraydin: The role of regional policies along with the external and endogenous factors in the resilience of regions

Jean Dubé and Mario Polèse: The view from a lucky country: explaining the localised unemployment impacts of the Great Recession in Canada

Capital & Class, 40 (1)

Alex Prichard and Owen Worth: Left-wing convergence: An introduction

Teivo Teivainen: Occupy representation and democratise prefiguration: Speaking for others in global justice movements

Bice Maiguashca, Jonathan Dean, and Dan Keith: Pulling together in a crisis? Anarchism, feminism and the limits of left-wing convergence in austerity Britain

Judith Vey: Crisis protests in Germany, Occupy Wall Street, and Mietshäuser Syndikat: Antinomies of current Marxist- and anarchist-inspired movements and their convergence

Nicholas Kiersey and Wanda Vrasti: A convergent genealogy? Space, time and the promise of horizontal politics today

Simon Choat: Marxism and anarchism in an age of neoliberal crisis

Stuart Ingham: Analytical anarchism? A critique of Alan Carter’s anarchist theory of history

Angela Wigger: Anarchism as emancipatory theory and praxis: Implications for critical Marxist research

Denis O’Hearn and Andrej Grubačić: Capitalism, mutual aid, and material life: Understanding exilic spaces

Ecological Economics, 123

Jordan W. Smith, Erin Seekamp, Allie McCreary, Mae Davenport, Mark Kanazawa, Kerry Holmberg, Bruce Wilson, John Nieber: Shifting demand for winter outdoor recreation along the North Shore of Lake Superior under variable rates of climate change: A finite-mixture modeling approach

Marianne Zandersen, Sisse Liv Jørgensen, Doan Nainggolan, Steen Gyldenkærne, Anne Winding, Mogens Humlekrog Greve, Mette Termansen: Potential and economic efficiency of using reduced tillage to mitigate climate effects in Danish agriculture

Evelyne Nyathira Kihiu: Basic capability effect: Collective management of pastoral resources in southwestern Kenya

Mathias Kirchner, Martin Schönhart, Erwin Schmid: Spatial impacts of the CAP post-2013 and climate change scenarios on agricultural intensification and environment in Austria

Marc Völker, Nele Lienhoop: Exploring group dynamics in deliberative choice experiments

Robert Costanza, Richard B. Howarth, Ida Kubiszewski, Shuang Liu, Chunbo Ma, Gaël Plumecocq, David I. Stern: Influential publications in ecological economics revisited

Juan Diego Pérez Cebada: Mining corporations and air pollution science before the Age of Ecology

Alessio D’Amato, Susanna Mancinelli, Mariangela Zoli: Complementarity vs substitutability in waste management behaviors

Brent D. Matthies, Lauri T. Valsta: Optimal forest species mixture with carbon storage and albedo effect for climate change mitigation

Econ Journal Watch, 13 (1)

David O. Cushman: A Unit Root in Postwar U.S. Real GDP Still Cannot Be Rejected, and Yes, It Matters

Mitchell Langbert: The Left Orientation of Industrial Relations

Benny Carlson: Eli Heckscher’s Ideological Migration Toward Market Liberalism

Symposium: Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country

Young Back Choi and Yong J. Yoon: Liberalism in Korea

Pavel Kuchař: Liberalism in Mexican Economic Thought, Past and Present

European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention, 12 (1)

Forum

Marc Lavoie: Interview with Lance Taylor: ‘Wage repression and secular stagnation are rather close in kind’

Articles

Emiliano Brancaccio and Nadia Garbellini: Currency regime crises, real wages, functional income distribution and production

Panayotis G. Michaelides, John G. Milios, Konstantinos N. Konstantakis and Panayiotis Tarnaras: Quantity-of-money fluctuations and economic instability: empirical evidence for the USA (1958–2006)

Robert Vergeer, Steven Dhondt, Alfred Kleinknecht and Karolus Kraan: Will ‘structural reforms’ of labour markets reduce productivity growth? A firm-level investigation

Milka Kazandziska: Macroeconomic policy regimes in emerging markets: the case of Latvia

International Journal of Political Economy, 44 (4)

Mario Seccareccia: Editor’s Introduction

Antonella Picchio: A Feminist Political-Economy Narrative Against Austerity

Eugenia Correa: Budgetary Impact of Social Security Privatization: Women Doubly Unprotected

Shakuntala Das: Growing Informality, Gender Equality and the Role of Fiscal Policy in the Face of the Current Economic Crisis: Evidence from the Indian Economy

Joëlle Leclaire: Women and Investment: The Role of Fiscal Policy

Perry Mehrling: Elasticity and Discipline in the Global Swap Network

Lino Sau: Do the International Monetary and Financial Systems Need More Than Short-Term Cosmetic Reforms?

Problemas del Desarollo, 47 (184)

EDITORIAL

Alicia Girón: Sowing Ideas: Contributions of a Development Theory from The South

Adolfo Sánchez Almanza: The City System and Urban Networks in Mexican Economic Models

Sergio Ordóñez and Daniel Navarrete: The Telecommunications Services Industry and Regulatory Reform in Mexico

Ernesto Zepeda, Juan Antonio Leos, and Félix Carvallo: Social Capital and Financial Credit Markets: Credit Demand in Mexico, 2010

René Rivera-Huerta, Nidia López, and Alejandra Mendoza: Policies to Boost the Productivity of Micro-Enterprises in the Informal Sector: Where is Mexico?

Baldemar Hernández Márquez, Judith Pérez Castro, and Efraín Pérez Cruz: Integration Centers: A Territorial Planning Experience in the State of Tabasco

Luis Quintana and Uberto Salgado: Internal Migration in Mexico from 1990-2010: A New Economic Geography Approach

Susana Nudelsman: Is It Possible to Improve Sovereign Debt Restructuring?

Review of Radical Political Economics, 48 (1)

Brigitte Bechtold: Introduction: Beyond Hardin and Ostrom: New Heterodox Research on the Commons

Franklin Obeng-Odoom: Property in the Commons: Origins and Paradigms

Giles Austen, Sarah M. Jennings, and Jeffrey M. Dambacher: Species Commodification: A Dialectical Perspective on Fisheries Policy

Molly Scott Cato and Peter North: Rethinking the Factors of Production for a World of Common Ownership and Sustainability: Europe and Latin America Compared

Daniel Newman: The Car and the Commons

Danijela Dolenec and Mislav Žitko: Exploring Commons Theory for Principles of a Socialist Governmentality

Christopher Gunn: Acequias as Commons: Lessons for a Post-capitalist World

Johannes Euler: Commons-creating Society: On the Radical German Commons Discourse

William M. Dugger: Technology and Property: Knowledge and the Commons

Antoine Dolcerocca and Benjamin Coriat: Commons and the Public Domain: A Review Article and a Tentative Research Agenda

Alfredo Macias Vazquez and Pablo Alonso Gonzalez: Knowledge Economy and the Commons: A Theoretical and Political Approach to Post-neoliberal Common Governance

Yi Zhou: The Tragedy of the Anticommons in Knowledge

Zoe Sherman: Primitive Accumulation in the Cultural Commons

Socio-Economic Review, 14 (1)

Klaus Armingeon, Kai Guthmann, and David Weisstanner: How the Euro divides the union: the effect of economic adjustment on support for democracy in Europe

Theresa Kuhn, Erika van Elsas, Armen Hakhverdian, and Wouter van der Brug: An ever wider gap in an ever closer union: Rising inequalities and euroscepticism in 12 West European democracies, 1975–2009

Detlef Jahn: Changing of the guard: trends in corporatist arrangements in 42 highly industrialized societies from 1960 to 2010

Sophia Seung-Yoon Lee: Institutional legacy of state corporatism in de-industrial labour markets: a comparative study of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan

Paul Marx: The insider-outsider divide and economic voting: Testing a new theory with German electoral data

Alexander W. Schmidt-Catran: Economic inequality and public demand for redistribution: combining cross-sectional and longitudinal evidenceAndreas Nölke: Economic causes of the Eurozone crisis: the analytical contribution of Comparative Capitalism

Wolfgang Streeck, Craig Calhoun, Polly Toynbee, Amitai Etzioni, Wolfgang Streeck, Craig Calhoun, Polly Toynbee, and Amitai Etzioni: Does capitalism have a future? / On the dismal future of capitalism / The future of capitalism / Unfettered capitalism eats itself / The next industrial revolution calls for a different economic system

Glenn Morgan: New actors and old solidarities: institutional change and inequality under a neo-liberal international order

The Review of Austrian Economics, 29 (1)

William J. Luther: Mises and the moderns on the inessentiality of money in equilibrium

Pablo Paniagua: The robust political economy of central banking and free banking

Nikolay Nenovsky, Pencho Penchev: Money without a State: Currencies of the Orthodox Christians in the Balkan Provinces of the Ottoman Empire (17th –19th centuries)

Alexander William Salter, Solomon Stein: Endogenous currency formation in an online environment: The case of Diablo II

Gabriel A. Giménez Roche, Jason Lermyte: Securitization and regulatory arbitrage within the ABCT framework

Martin Komrska, Marek Hudík: Hayek’s monetary theory and policy: A note on alleged inconsistency

World Economic Review, 6: Contemporary Policy Issues

Sheila Dow: Ontology and Theory for a Redesign of European Monetary Union

Stefano Lucarelli, Roberto Romano: The Italian Crisis within the European Crisis. The Relevance of the Technological Foreign Constraint

Malcolm Sawyer: The Economic and Monetary Union: Past and Present Failures and some Future Possibilities

Irene Sotiropoulou: Solidarity, Grassroots Initiatives and Power Relations

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche: Mediterranean Death Trip – The Mare Internum as the Graveyard of International Obligations

Timothy A. Wunder: Setting a Principle to Interest Cap on the Issuance of Home Mortgages: a Proposed Change to Mortgage Underwriting Rules Designed to Control Housing Price Inflation

Books and Book Series

China and the 21st Century Crisis

By Minqi Li | 2016, Pluto Press

The USA is widely seen as the country at the centre of the recent economic crash. But will this be the case the next time the system goes into shock? By looking at the big questions of class struggle, global economic imbalances, peak oil, climate change and political power play, Minqi Li argues that by the time of the next crisis, China will be at the epicentre of these contradictions.

Unlike previous books, China and the 21st Century Crisis analyses how the political and economic imbalances in China will exacerbate system collapse, and how this could happen much sooner than we imagine, possibly within a decade. Li writes from a Marxist and ecological perspective, and points out that the limits to capital are fast approaching.

China is the last large region (and source of cheap labour) into which capital could expand: the system is at its limits. By combining this argument with issues surrounding the planet’s ecological limits and the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party, Li commands a narrative of China at a pivotal, and possibly apocalyptic stage.

Link to the book is available here.

Debt or Democracy: Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice

By Mary Mellor | 2015, Pluto Press

Debt or Democracy explodes the myths behind modern money. It challenges the neoliberal obsession with public debt and deficit, arguing that a much more serious problem is the privatised creation of money through bank debt that leads to boom and bust.

Far from being a burden on the taxpayer, Mary Mellor argues that public money and public expenditure is necessary for economic well-being. Arguing that money is a public resource that should be under democratic control, Debt or Democracy directly challenges conventional economic thinking and presents a radical alternative for socially just and ecologically sustainable provisioning.

Link to the book is available here.

Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

By Andreas Malm | 2016, Verso Books

How capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam powerThe more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?

In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy—but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.

Link to the book is available here.

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity

By William I. Robinson | 2016, Cambridge University Press

This exciting new study provides an original and provocative exposé of the crisis of global capitalism in its multiple dimensions – economic, political, social, ecological, military, and cultural. Building on his earlier works on globalization, William I. Robinson discusses the nature of the new global capitalism, the rise of a globalized production and financial system, a transnational capitalist class, and a transnational state and warns of the rise of a global police state to contain the explosive contradictions of a global capitalist system that is crisis-ridden and out of control. Robinson concludes with an exploration of how diverse social and political forces are responding to the crisis and alternative scenarios for the future.

Link to the book is available here.

Green Growth: Ideology, political economy and policy alternatives

Edited by Gareth Dale, Manu V. Mathai and Jose A. Puppim de Oliveira | 2016, Zed Books

The discourse of ‘green growth’ has recently gained ground in environmental governance deliberations and policy proposals. It is presented as a fresh and innovative agenda centred on the deployment of engineering sophistication, managerial acumen and market mechanisms to redress the environmental and social derelictions of the existing development model.

But the green growth project is deeply inadequate, whether assessed against criteria of social justice or the achievement of sustainable economic life upon a materially finite planet. This volume outlines three main lines of critique.

First, it traces the development of the green growth discourse qua ideology. It asks: what explains modern society’s investment in it, why has it emerged as a master concept in the contemporary conjuncture, and what social forces does it serve? Second, it unpicks and explains the contradictions within a series of prominent green growth projects. Finally, it weighs up the merits and demerits of alternative strategies and policies, asking the vital question: ‘if not green growth, then what?’

Link to the book is available here.

Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis

By John Smith | 2016, Monthly Review

Winner of the first Paul A. Baran–Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization. Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities—the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone—and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. From there, Smith draws on his empirical findings to powerfully theorize the current shape of imperialism. He argues that the core capitalist countries need no longer rely on military force and colonialism (although these still occur) but increasingly are able to extract profits from workers in the Global South through market mechanisms and, by aggressively favoring places with lower wages, the phenomenon of labor arbitrage.

Link to the book is available here.

Intellectual Path Dependence in Economics: Why economists do not reject refuted theories

By Altug Yalcintas | 2016, Routledge

Is economics always self-corrective? Do erroneous theorems permanently disappear from the market of economic ideas? Intellectual Path Dependence in Economics argues that errors in economics are not always corrected. Although economists are often critical and open-minded, unfit explanations are nonetheless able to reproduce themselves. The problem is that theorems sometimes survive the intellectual challenges in the market of economic ideas even when they are falsified or invalidated by criticism and an abundance of counter-evidence.

A key question which often gets little or no attention is: why do economists not reject theories when they have been refuted by evidence and falsified by philosophical reasoning? This book explores the answer to this question by examining the phenomenon of intellectual path dependence in the history of economic thought. It argues that the key reason why economists do not reject refuted theories is the epistemic costs of starting to use new theories. Epistemic costs are primarily the costs of scarcity of the most valued element in academic production: time. Epistemic scarcity overwhelmingly dominates the evolution of scientific research in such a way that when researchers start off a new research project, they allocate time between replicable and un-replicable researc

Link to the book is available here.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

By Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams

Neoliberalism isn’t working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite.

Inventing the Future is a bold new manifest0 for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.

Link to the book is available here.

Latin America after the Financial Crisis: Economic Ramifications from Heterodox Perspectives

Edited by Juan Santarcángelo, Orlando Justo, and Paul Cooney | 2015, Palgrave MacMillan

Several economic analyses have emerged that attempting to account for the main features of the global crisis, highlighting the contribution made by different heterodox schools of thought. These approaches, among which we can underline the Post- Keynesians, and various Marxian interpretations, not only provide strong criticisms of the dominant neoclassical theory, but also they propose conclusive analyses to understand the complexities of the current social reality. One of the regions that has a longstanding tradition of heterodox economics and has been less affected by the global financial crisis is Latin America. The countries of this region were able to achieve annual growth rates of around 4% for the period 2003–2012, a 48% higher than the average annual GDP growth rate registered in the period 1990–2002. The aim of the book is to explain how the global financial crisis affected Latin America, analyze the main transmission channels that helped the crisis to spread in the region, and understand why this one was not as severe as other crises have been in the past. The purpose of this book is to combine different heterodox traditions with analysis of how the global crisis affected Latin America. To do that, we have selected a comprehensive group of countries including - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela-, which accounts for 80% of the GDP of the region. The goal is to understand the impact of the crisis on the accumulation path of the region without losing sight of the particularities that each country has, and the own way in which their different administrations have dealt with the crisis. Therefore, financial and trade mechanisms are studied, as well as the application of any counter-cyclical policy toward maintaining the standards of living that have been achieved. The analysis of each country were performed by leading scholars and heterodox researchers who have vast experience in the field and have been debating over the regions prospects and challenges since the outbreak of the crisis.

Link to the book is available here.

Modern Classical Economics and Reality: A Spectral Analysis of the Theory of Value and Distribution

By Theodore Mariolis and Lefteris Tsoulfidis | 2016, Springer

This book presents an in-depth, novel, and mathematically rigorous treatment of the modern classical theory of value based on the spectral analysis of the price–profit–wage rate system. The classical theory is also subjected to empirical testing to show its logical consistency and explanatory content with respect to observed phenomena and key economic policy issues related to various multiplier processes. In this context, there is an examination of the trajectories of relative prices when the distributive variables change, both theoretically and empirically, using actual input–output data from a number of quite diverse economies. It is suggested that the actual economies do not behave like the parable of a one-commodity world of the traditional neoclassical theory, which theorizes the relative scarcities of “goods and production factors” as the fundamental determinants of relative prices and their movement. By contrast, the results of the empirical analysis are fully consistent with the modern classical theory, which makes the intersectoral structure of production and the way in which net output is distributed amongst its claimants the fundamental determinants of price magnitudes. At the same time, however, these results indicate that only a few vertically integrated industries (“industry core” or “hyper-basic industries”) are enough to shape the behaviour of the entire economy in the case of a disturbance. This fact is reduced to the skew distribution of the eigenvalues of the matrices of vertically integrated technical coefficients and reveals that, across countries and over time, the effective dimensions of actual economies are surprisingly low.

Link to the book is available here.

Money and Totality A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx's Logic in Capital and the End of the 'Transformation Problem'

By Fred Moseley| 2016, Brill

This ambitious book presents a comprehensive new 'macro-monetary' interpretation of Marx’s logical method in Capital, based on substantial textual evidence, which emphasises two main points: (1) Marx’s theory is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole; and (2) Marx’s theory is a monetary theory from beginning to end and the circuit of money capital – M - C - M’ – is the logical framework of Marx’s theory. It follows from this 'macro-monetary' interpretation that, contrary to the prevailing view, there is no 'transformation problem' in Marx’s theory; i.e., Marx did not 'fail to transform the inputs of constant capital and variable capital' in his theory of prices of production in Part 2 of Volume III.

Link to the book is available here.

Paradigms in Political Economy

By Kavous Ardalan | 2016, Routledge

Any explanation of a given phenomenon is based on a worldview. The premise of this book is that any worldview can be associated with one of the four key paradigms. Each chapter of the book takes an important phenomenon (i.e., the state, justice, freedom, democracy, liberal democracy, media, and the great recession) and discusses it from the four different viewpoints. It emphasizes that the four views expressed are equally scientific and informative. They look at the phenomenon from their certain paradigmatic perspective and together provide a more balanced understanding of the phenomenon under consideration.

The diversity of economics research possibilities referred to in this book is vast. While each paradigm advocates a research strategy that is logically coherent, in terms of underlying assumptions, these vary from paradigm to paradigm. The phenomenon to be researched can be conceptualized and studied in many different ways, each generating distinctive kinds of insight and understanding. This book is for those who study political economy as well as economic theory and philosophy.

Link to the book is available here.

Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises

Edited by Aida A. Hozić and Jacqui True | 2016, Oxford University Press

Link to the book is available here (for a 30% discount, use code "ASFLYQ6").

The Petro-Developmental State in Africa: Making Oil Work in Angola, Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea

By Jesse Salah Ovadia | 2016, Hurst Publisher

Focusing on local content in the oil and oil service sectors and the changing accumulation strategies of the domestic elite, this book questions what kinds of development are possible through natural resource extraction and argues that a new form of developmental state—the ‘petro-developmental state’—may now be emerging in the Gulf of Guinea, allowing states to capitalise on a resource that has traditionally been thought of as a ‘curse’. In a new moment for the extraction of oil created by a changed domestic context in Angola and Nigeria and changed geopolitical realities, new possibilities exist for state-led economic and social development and capitalist transformation.

Ovadia contends that ultimately whether development or underdevelopment results from the transformation depends not only on historical conditions, but also on power relations and struggles at the level of civil society. Local content is perhaps the single most important innovation in energy policy in the Global South in recent decades. Expanding debates about state-led development and the developmental state, the concept of a petro-developmental state offers an explanation for how some of the most strategically significant countries in Africa can achieve meaningful economic and social progress.

Link to the book is available here (Link to special discounted offer, with taxes and worldwide shipping included, is available here).

Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt

By Joel Beinin | 2015, Combined Academic Publishers

Since the 1990s, the Middle East has experienced an upsurge of wildcat strikes, sit-ins, and workers' demonstrations. Well before people gathered in Tahrir Square to demand the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, workers had formed one of the largest oppositional movements to authoritarian rule in Egypt. In Tunisia, years prior to the 2011 Arab uprisings, the unemployed chanted in protest, "A job is a right, you pack of thieves!"

Despite this history, most observers have failed to acknowledge the importance of workers in the social ferment preceding the removal of Egyptian and Tunisian autocrats and in the political realignments after their demise. In Workers and Thieves, Joel Beinin corrects this by surveying the efforts and impacts of the workers' movements in Egypt and Tunisia since the 1970s. He argues that the 2011 uprisings in these countries—and, importantly, their vastly different outcomes—are best understood within the context of these repeated mobilizations of workers and the unemployed over recent decades.

Link to the book is available here (for a 20% discount, use code "CSL16WORK").

Book Reviews

Full Employment Revisited: Essays on the Economy, People, and Fairness

Full Employment Revisited: Essays on the Economy, People, and Fairness, edited by Tanweer Ali and Diamond Ashiagbor. London, UK: Work Forum Publishing, 2015. ISBN: 978-0992975609. 126 pages.

Reviewed by Bryan Gould, former Vice-Chancellor, University of Waikato, New Zealand

Link to the review is available here.

Heterodox Graduate Programs, Scholarships and Grants

AFEE 2017 James H. Street Scholarship

Call for Applications 2017 - James H. Street Latin American Scholarship

The Association for Evolutionary Economics invites persons residing in Latin America and working within the tradition of original institutional economics to apply for the 2017 James H. Street Latin American Scholarship. The James H. Street scholar will have the opportunity to present his or her work at the Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, IL, January 6-8, 2017. The scholarship will include round trip transportation and hotel. The James H. Street scholar will also have the opportunity to have his or her work published in the Association’s journal, Journal of Economic Issues.

Specific presentation and publication guidelines will be provided to the winner of the scholarship. A complete application will include a letter of interest, the applicant’s current curriculum vita, and a 200 word abstract of his or her paper. Junior scholars are encouraged to apply. The final paper should be about 5,000 words in length and must be written and presented in English. To learn more about James H. Street (1915-1988) and his work please see the following papers.

Street, James H. “The Institutionalist Theory of Economic Development.” Journal of Economic Issues v22 n4 (December 1987): 1243-47.

James, Dilmus D. “In Memoriam: James H. Street, 1915-1988.” Journal of Economic Issues v23 n1 (March 1989): 1-6.

The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) is an international organization of economists and other social scientists devoted to analysis of economics as evolving, socially constructed, and politically governed systems. The intellectual heritage of AFEE is that of the Original Institutional Economics (OIE) created and developed by early twentieth-century economists such as Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Wesley Mitchell. Over recent decades, this legacy has evolved to address such contemporary issues as: The role of diverse cultures in economic performance. Domestic and international inequalities of income. The roles of social, economic and political power in shaping economic outcomes. Globalization and the increasing weight of multinational corporations in the international economy. The need for expanding use of modern technologies to relieve want. The urgent need for awareness of the impact of new technology on the biosphere. The ways in which economic thought is affected by and affects always changing economy. See the AFEE website for more information - http://www.afee.net/

Please send application materials to: Richard V. Adkisson Department of Economics Box 30001, MSC 3CQ New Mexico State University Las Cruces, NM 88005, USA e-mail: radkisso@nmsu.edu

Application deadline is May 1, 2016.

Fully Funded MA in Sociology at the University of Calgary

Applications are invited for a fully funded MA in Sociology related to a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded research project on financial and environmental risk. The successful applicant will be expected to undertake research on the themes of the SSHRC project under the supervision of the Principal Investigator, Dean Curran.

The funded position will include: a part-time research assistant role on the SSHRC project related to financial and environmental risk and contemporary inequalities; MA course work; and the pursuit of an MA Research Dissertation on an issue related to environmental and financial risks. Possible areas for the research dissertation include: issues of sustainability, energy politics, the globalization of risks, financial regulation, and/or financial risk-taking.

For further information on the position, please contact Dean Curran at dcurran@ucalgary.ca

James H. Street Latin American Scholarship 2017

The Association for Evolutionary Economics invites persons residing in Latin America and working within the tradition of original institutional economics to apply for the 2017 James H. Street Latin American Scholarship. The James H. Street scholar will have the opportunity to present his or her work at the Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, IL, January 6-8, 2017. The scholarship will include round trip transportation and hotel. The James H. Street scholar will also have the opportunity to have his or her work published in the Association’s journal, Journal of Economic Issues. Specific presentation and publication guidelines will be provided to the winner of the scholarship. A complete application will include a letter of interest, the applicant’s current curriculum vita, and a 200 word abstract of his or her paper. Junior scholars are encouraged to apply. The final paper should be about 5,000 words in length and must be written and presented in English.

To learn more about James H. Street (1915-1988) and his work please see the following papers.

The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) is an international organization of economists and other social scientists devoted to analysis of economics as evolving, socially constructed, and politically governed systems. The intellectual heritage of AFEE is that of the Original Institutional Economics (OIE) created and developed by early twentieth-century economists such as Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Wesley Mitchell. Over recent decades, this legacy has evolved to address such contemporary issues as:

See the AFEE website for more information - http://www.afee.net/

Please send application materials to:

Application deadline is May 1, 2016.

PhD studentships at King's College London

The School of Management & Business at King's College London invites applications for a series of funded, full-time PhD studentships to start in the 2016-17 academic year.

The School is one of the leading management and business schools in the UK and has an outstanding reputation for the quality of its research and teaching. It is ranked 10 out of 118 management departments in the Guardian League Tables 2016 and is listed in the top 10 for research output in Business & Management in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework.

Funding

The studentship is for three years and will cover tuition fees at the Home/EU rate, as well as an annual stipend of £16,296 to contribute to living costs. In order to prepare students for academic careers, individuals receiving a studentship will be expected to undertake some teaching and/or marking activities in the School. Any teaching undertaken will attract payment in addition to the stipend.

Eligibility

All full-time students applying for 2016/17 entry (September or January entry point) are eligible. Please note that international (non-EU) students are eligible, but will need to fund the difference in fees between the 'Home/EU' and 'international' rate themselves.

Application process

The closing date for application is: 21 March 2016.

Decisions will be announced in April 2016.

Applicants are strongly advised to contact a member of academic staff to discuss the research proposal prior to making an application.

Applications are submitted online. Applicants must specify a PhD in Management Studies with a start date of September 2016 or January 2017 to be included in the process.

In the 'Funding' section of the Online Application Form, applicants should indicate that they are applying for a School of Management and Business Doctoral Research Studentship.

Applicants should use the 'Research Proposal' section of the application form (approx 500 words) to set out their doctoral thesis and project in summary. They should use the 'Personal Statement' section (approx 500 words) of the application form to set out their academic background and interests and their reasons for wanting to pursue postgraduate research study in the School.

Criteria

The criteria that will be used to assess studentship applications are:

  1. Evidence of the candidate's individual research potential. E.g. how strong are the academic references; academic transcripts, and other credentials such as prizes, academic awards or publications; and, where appropriate, professional qualifications and/or relevant experience? (50% weighting)
  2. The quality and fit of the proposed research. E.g. are the research topic and questions well formulated? is there a feasible plan of action? does the work offer genuine scope for doctoral research? how well does the research fit with themes within the research group, the School and the wider College or, alternatively, does it make a contribution to developing an emerging programme of research in the School? does the work offer opportunities that will lead to societal or economic impact? (50% weighting)

Further Information

Please direct general enquiries to: Flores Anderson, PhD Administrator flores.anderson@kcl.ac.uk

For further details regarding entry requirements, please see the Online Prospectus, here.

Further information about the studentships: kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/management/study/research.aspx

PhD studentships in Political Economy at the Open University

A political economy of finance and its economic consequences

Supervisors: Dr Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos (The Open University Business School), Dr Andrew Trigg (Department of Economics, The Open University, Dr Constantinos Repapis (IMS, Goldsmiths, University of London)

In a recent special report of the Economist newspaper on financial risk, it was argued that ‘the idea that markets can be left to police themselves turned out to be the world’s most expensive mistake.’ This remark reflects the fundamental inability of mainstream economic approaches to understand and interpret crucial aspects of capitalist reality. The recent global financial and economic crisis has undermined the presumptions of mainstream research, and increased the theoretical importance and credibility of heterodox approaches in the explanation of economic trends in capitalism.

There is a growing interest in mainstream research to address financial instability and some of the negative economic consequences of financialization (such as the recent phenomenal increases in income inequality). Heterodox theoretical traditions of political economy (Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Veblen, Keynes, Hayek, Kalecki, Minsky, etc.) can, however, provide more thorough insights into the workings of contemporary capitalism because their theoretical foundations give central importance to money and offer an interdisciplinary understanding of finance emphasizing the social relations that support the organization of financial practises (including financial innovation and risk management).

We welcome PhD applications that focus on the centrality of money and finance in contemporary capitalism. Issues of interest may include how ‘moral hazard’, a modern staple of economic theorising, has transformed public debates in a number of areas, from deposit insurance to the current Eurozone crisis; and the concept of the ‘common reader of economics’: how economic and financial concepts get codified and accepted in the profession and then get more widely popularised fixing thus the public debate. Applications are also welcome that examine: economic structures and behaviour, growth and financial stability, structural change and sectoral relationships between finance and other economic sectors, income distribution, and history of financial innovation. Approaches should be considered from a political economy viewpoint and may be historical, theoretical and/or empirical.

Research and study opportunities at the University of Johannesburg

Research and study opportunities are available with the South African Research Chair in Industrial Development. This research programme is based at the Department of Economics at the University of Johannesburg and is led by Prof. Fiona Tregenna. There is a dynamic group of researchers working in related fields at the University of Johannesburg, including those at the Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) and faculty associated with the MPhil. Industrial Policy.

Proposals are welcomed on any topics related to industrial development, including but not limited to the following: industrialisation; deindustrialisation; industrial policy; regional industrial development; the green economy as it relates to industrial development; sectoral structure of the economy; sector studies; the manufacturing sector; the services sector; industrial development and income distribution; industrial development and employment or unemployment; gender issues related to industrial development; financialisation. Heterodox perspectives are very welcome.

The following opportunities are currently open:

1. Senior Researcher. At Associate Professor or Senior Lecturer level. This is a full-time research position. It carries the standard benefits of a full-time senior academic position, as well as generous funding for research, travel etc.

2. Postdoctoral Fellowships. These are fully funded including a basic salary for living expenses, generous funding for research, travel etc. Available for 1 or 2 years.

3. Doctoral Full Scholarships. Scholarships cover living expenses, tuition, research costs, travel to conferences or training courses, laptop and other equipment, etc. For up to 3 years.

For further inquiries please contact Prof. Fiona Tregenna on ftregenna@uj.ac.za.

Newsletters

Global Labour Column

Sonia Languille: Corporate-backed private school chains for the poor: The South African experience

Calls for Support

Crisis at JNU New Delhi – Letter of protest

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing at the urgent request of Professor Jayati Ghosh of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. We need some help from the UK! As you may have heard, JNU is facing a very serious crisis due to a shameful act of the Indian government against academic freedom, decency and democracy. Basic rights are being violated and one JNU student leader has already been unlawfully arrested. The situation is threatening to escalate further. At the bottom of the email you will find further information (newpaper reports etc) on what has happened. Here is a link to a GUARDIAN article: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/15/jawaharlal-nehru-university-kanhaiya-kumar-student-arrest-india

Jayati Ghosh is now organizing an international protest by academics so as to put outside pressure on the (Delhi and national) BJP government to stop further escalation and undo the unlawful acts. Please see the letter (posted below).

If you want, please sign the letter by sending an email to Jayati Ghosh at jayatijnu@gmail.com

All help will be crucial. If you can, PLEASE SPREAD THIS LETTER and MESSAGE throughout your network. If you want to sign, please sign the letter as soon as possible because Jayati intends to publish the letter and signatories list this evening (Indian time). Thank you very much for your help, Servaas Storm

______________________________________________________________

Here is the LETTER if you want to sign and if you can get other signatures

We have learnt of the shameful act of the Indian government which, invoking sedition laws formulated by India’s colonial rulers, ordered the police to enter the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus and unlawfully arrest a student leader, Mr. Kanhaiya Kumar, on charges of inciting violence --without any proof whatever of such wrongdoing on his part. From the reports of a large number of witnesses and the most highly respected journalists in the country, these are the known facts that no impartial observer denies: In a student meeting, acting well within the rights he possesses by the law of the land, Mr.

Kumar spoke critically of the BJP government’s policies. On the previous day, at some other event which he had no part in organizing and at which he did not speak, a handful of other students, not even identifiable as students of the university, were shouting slogans about the rights of Kashmiris to independence from Indian military oppression over the last many decades. Mr. Kumar, whose speech (widely available on a video) cannot in any way be connected with the slogans uttered on the previous day, was nonetheless arrested for ‘anti-national’ behaviour and for violating the sedition laws against the incitement to violence. Since there is no evidence to establish these charges, we can only conclude that this arrest is further evidence of the present government’s deeply authoritarian nature, intolerant of any dissent, setting aside India’s longstanding commitment to toleration and plurality of opinion, replicating the dark times of an oppressive colonial period and briefly of the Emergency in the mid-1970s.

These actions of the police have brought great dishonor to the government; and the failure of the Vice-Chancellor to speak out against these actions and moreover to allow the suspension of seven other students on charges that have not been established by a fair and transparent inquiry, will bring great dishonor to the most prominent university in the country in the eyes of the academy all over the world.

We, the undersigned, take a stand of heartfelt solidarity with the students and faculty of Jawaharlal Nehru University in their efforts to resist these developments on its campus and, in the name of the liberties that India and Indian universities until recently could take for granted, we not only condemn the culture of authoritarian menace that the present government in India has generated, but urge all those genuinely concerned about the future of India and Indian universities to protest in wide mobilization against it.

Signed by:

Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT
Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Laureate
Jonathan Cole, Former Provost of Columbia University
Judith Butler, Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
Robert Wade, Professor of International Development, London School of Economics
Mira Nair, Film Director,
Sheldon Pollock, Professor of Sanskrit, Columbia University
Barbara Harriss-White, Emerita Professor of Development Studies, Oxford University
Partha Chatterjee, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University.
Arjun Appadurai, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University.
Alicia Puyana Mutis, Professor of Economics, Flacso, Mexico,
Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics, University of Amherst at Massachusetts,
Akeel Bilgrami, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
Juan Carlos Moreno Brid, Professor of Economics, Universidad National de Mexico
Gerald Epstein, Professor of Economics, University of Amherst at Massachusetts
Kanti Rai, leading leukemia specialist, USA
Gauri Vishwanathan, Professor of English, Columbia University

INFORMATION about the CRISIS at JNU:

Things are REALLY bad here at JNU with a concerted state-sponsored attack on the university, we now have fascism fully in our midst. PLEASE spread the word and try to get some international pressure We need all the international support we can get because this government is out to smash us, arresting one student on completely trumped up charges and the puppet admin with a new VC following their bidding by suspending 8 others (all student leaders associated with Left parties) on the basis of a ridiculous one day enquiry whose methodology is not revealed to anyone. Meanwhile the university is under siege, and our faculty and student have been physically attacked in the court as the police looked on, as you will see from the press statement attached.

I am providing some links with info and commentary fyi.

I am also attaching the JNU Teachers' Association earlier press release and an open letter to the VC drafted by some teachers.

Many thanks, Jayati Ghosh

http://thewire.in/2016/02/13/arrest-anti-india-elements-says-rajnath-so-police-pin-sedition-on-jnusu-head-21455/

http://thewire.in/2016/02/14/as-rajnath-sees-lashkar-hand-support-for-arrested-jnusu-president-mounts-21604/

http://www.indiaresists.com/what-acually-happend-in-jnu/http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorials/why-the-jnu-crackdown-will-be-the-bjp-s-undoing/story-O71HsNH7z2aeC7B1OdzlZO.html

Nivedita Menon in the Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/why-our-universities-are-in-ferment/article8237580.ece

Mukul Kesavan in Telegraph: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160215/jsp/opinion/story_69258.jsp#.VtRE-xjJ1TY

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express. http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jnu-sedition-case-kanhaiya-kumar-arrest-afzal-guru-event/

The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) is searching for members

AFEE is an international organization that views economies as evolving, socially-constructed and politically-governed systems. It encourages theoretical and methodological pluralism.

The association provides free memberships to students enrolled in Masters and PhD programs. Membership includes access to the print and on-line versions of the Journal of Economic Issues and notifications for call for papers, meetings and other activities. Other membership fees are based upon a sliding scale.

More information is available here.

For Your Information

Call for book or chapter proposals: Vernon Press launches a series in "Economic Methodology"

Vernon Press invites book proposals on economic methods, broadly construed. All economics-based schools of thought are encouraged to submit. Other disciplines are encouraged to submit, as long as the methods described are applicable to contemporary research in economics.

The past decade has seen many exciting developments in economic methods. The methodological toolbox of economists has both deepened and diversified. Improved methods for handling time series, cross-section, panel and multilevel or hierarchical data are now available. Experimental methods have taken a foothold and contributed to the renaissance of behavioral economics. Input-output analysis has revealed global value chains and has provided a fresh perspective on economic development. IT developments, including a multitude of free, open source software tools have democratized the use of advanced methods. The pervasiveness of the web, the proliferation of sensors and a greater proclivity towards openness and sharing provide many opportunities for novel empirical applications, including vast administrative records, e-commerce transactions, social networks, scientific and technical information and other forms of “Big Data”. As a result, computer programming and database management are skills increasingly used and demanded in current economics research.

However, many of the latest developments have yet to be committed to authoritative reference works. Even for older methods, the key contributions are often scattered in disparate outlets, or remain in a form that is inaccessible to beginners. Our ambition is to develop a book series which reflects the current dynamism and creativity in the field and documents and explains cutting-edge economic methods for postgraduates, academic researchers and professional economists.

We invite proposals across the range of analytical methods, principally quantitative, but also qualitative, discursive and historical drawing from fieldwork, interviews, content analysis or any attempt to document and explain the contemporary “tools of the trade” in economics. While we would expect authors to be applied economists with hands on experience in the application of the described tools, the intended audience may expand well beyond trained economists.

Possible contributions may include (non-comprehensive list):

How to submit your proposal

Please submit one-page proposals at submissions@vernonpress.com including an annotated summary, a short biographical note and (if available) a list of similar titles.

About the publisher

Vernon Press is an independent publisher of scholarly books in the social sciences and humanities. Our mission is to serve the community of academic and professional scholars by providing a visible, quality platform for the dissemination of emergent ideas. We work closely with authors, academic associations, distributors and library information specialists to identify and develop high quality, high impact titles. For more information, visit www.vernonpress.com

Galbraith Response to CEA's on Friedman's Sandernomics Impact Estimates

Jamie Galbraith has written an excellent to the three paragraph letter by four former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton and Obama, copied below and attached:

The Honorable Alan Krueger
The Honorable Austan Goolbee
The Honorable Christina Romer
The Honorable Laura D'Andrea Tyson

Dear Alan, Austan, Christina and Laura,

I was highly interested to see your letter of yesterday's date to Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman. I respond here as a former Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee – the congressional counterpart to the CEA.

You write that you have applied rigor to your analyses of economic proposals by Democrats and Republicans. On reading this sentence I looked to the bottom of the page, to find a reference or link to your rigorous review of Professor Friedman's study. I found nothing there.

You go on to state that Professor Friedman makes “extreme claims” that “cannot be supported by the economic evidence.” You object to the projection of “huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact oftheir tax cut proposals.”

Matthew Yglesias makes an important point about your letter: “It's noteworthy that the former CEA chairs criticizing Friedman didn't bother to run through a detailed explanation of their problems with the paper. To them, the 5.3 percent figure was simply absurd on its face, and it was good enough for them to say so, relying on their authority to generate media coverage.”

So, let's first ask whether an economic growth rate, as projected, of 5.3 percent per year is, as youclaim, “grandiose.” There are not many ambitious experiments in economic policy with which tocompare it, so let's go back to the Reagan years. What was the actual average real growth rate in 1983,1984, and 1985, following the enactment of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981? Just under 5.4 percent. That's a point of history, like it or not.

You write that “no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes.” Buthow did Professor Friedman make his estimates? The answer is in his paper. What Professor Friedmandid, was to use the standard impact assumptions and forecasting methods of the mainstream economistsand institutions. For example, Professor Friedman starts with a fiscal multiplier of 1.25, and shades itdown to the range of 0.8 by the mid 2020s. Is this “not credible”? If that's your claim, it's an indictment of the methods of (for instance) the CBO, the OMB, and the CEA.To be sure, skepticism about standard forecasting methods is perfectly reasonable. I'm a skeptic myself.My 2014 book The End of Normal is all about problems with mainstream forecasting.In the specific case of this paper, one can quibble with the out-year multipliers, or with the productivityassumptions, or with the presumed impact of a higher minimum wage. One can invoke the trade deficitor the exchange rate. Professor Friedman makes all of these points himself. But those issues are wellwithin mainstream norms.

There is no “magic asterisk,” no strange theory involved here. And the main effect of adjusting theassumptions, which would a perfectly reasonable thing to do, would be to curtail the growth rate after afew years – not at the beginning, when it would matter most.It is not fair or honest to claim that Professor Friedman's methods are extreme. On the contrary, withrespect to forecasting method, they are largely mainstream. Nor is it fair or honest to imply that youhave given Professor Friedman's paper a rigorous review. You have not.

What you have done, is to light a fire under Paul Krugman, who is now using his high perch to airilydismiss the Friedman paper as “nonsense.” Paul is an immensely powerful figure, and many peoplerely on him for careful assessments. It seems clear that he has made no such assessment in this case.Instead, Paul relies on you to impugn an economist with far less reach, whose work is far more careful,in point of fact, than your casual dismissal of it. He and you also imply that Professor Friedman did hiswork for an unprofessional motive. But let me point out, in case you missed it, that Professor Friedmanis a political supporter of Secretary Clinton. His motives are, on the face of it, not political.For the record, in case you're curious, I'm not tied to Professor Friedman in any way. But the powerful– such as Paul and yourselves – should be careful where you step.

Let's turn, finally, to the serious question. What does the Friedman paper really show? The answer isquite simple, and the exercise is – while not perfect – almost entirely ordinary.What the Friedman paper shows, is that under conventional assumptions, the projected impact of Senator Sanders' proposals stems from their scale and ambition. When you dare to do big things, bigresults should be expected. The Sanders program is big, and when you run it through a standard model,you get a big result.

That, by the way, is the lesson of the Reagan era – like it or not. It is a lesson that, among today'spolitical leaders, only Senator Sanders has learned.

Yours,
James K. Galbraith
Executive Director, Joint Economic Committee, 1981-2

For the letter the paragraph letter that has received enormous attention in mainstream media, see: https://lettertosanders.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/open-letter-to-senator-sanders-and-professor-gerald-friedman-from-past-cea-chairs/

More articles on this topic:

Huffington Post: Sanders' Economic Plan Torn Apart By Former Clinton, Obama Economists

Dollar&Sense: What would Sanders do? Estimating the economic impact of Sanders programs. (Gerald Friedman)

New online course in Political Economy

Tim Thornton has developed a fully online political economy subject that will be taught in first semester 2016. It might suit some postgrads and honours students to pick it up as a cross-institutional subject. It is also available for people to study as a stand-alone subject. The subject description is below. There is also a link to a 2 minute You Tube video where Tim Thornton talks a little more about the subject.

POL5CPE Political Economy

This subject provides an overview of contemporary political economy. The major schools of political economy are examined with the student then choosing one of the schools as a means to better understand a particular case study that is relevant to their particular interests and disciplinary specialisation(s). Schools examined include the institutional, Post-Keynesian, Marxian, ecological, feminist, Austrian, neoclassical, behavioural and complexity schools. The subject offers a pluralist introduction to the study of economic phenomena from a social science perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzO3bhUUv1M&feature=youtu.be

Palgrave Studies in Latin American Heterodox Economics

Series Editors: Juan E. Santarcángelo and Guido Perrone

The aim of the series is to analyse the economic, social, and political evolution of countries in Latin America from a heterodox perspective. Despite the region has historically been subject of many studies and debates, most of existing analysis have been root on orthodox traditions, especially after the rise of neoliberalism as the predominant theoretical framework on the early 1970s. The series seeks to recover highly topical theoretical debates, many of which have often been disdained or abandoned even when they have had great relevance in the characteristics that has acquired the process of economic development and the shaping of Latin America as a region. From this perspective, this type of controversies and debates are key to understand the present status of the economies in the region. The authors in the series are serious heterodox economics scholars who want to shine light on the current features and the main challenges that Latin America is facing at the beginning of the 21th century. Each book in the series focuses on a single topic (crisis, economic growth, income distribution, agricultural and manufacturing sector, outsorcing, etc.), either from the perspective of a single country or a group of them. The goal is not only to provide an heterodox analysis of the economic situation and perspectives for the region but also this series makes an unusual contribution to economics by studying a region as a whole without losing sight of the particularities of each country as a part.

For more information on the book series please visit palgrave website and if you would like to participate in the series or recieve information about the next books of the series please contact the series editor Juan Santarcángelo by email at jsantar@gmail.com