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Working Paper No. 636
November 11, 2010
Bernanke’s Paradox: Can He Reconcile His Position on the Federal Budget with His Recent Charge to Prevent Deflation?
AbstractThis paper examines Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s recipe for deflation fighting and the specific policy actions he took in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Both in his academic and in his policy work, Bernanke has made the case that monetary policy is able to stem deflationary forces largely because of its “fiscal […]
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Policy Notes No. 4
November 11, 2010
A New “Teachable” Moment?
AbstractA common refrain heard from those trying to justify the results of the recent midterm elections is that the government’s fiscal stimulus to save the US economy from depression undermined growth, and that fiscal restraint is the key to economic expansion. Research Associate Marshall Auerback maintains that this refrain stems from a failure to understand […]
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One-Pager No. 5
November 11, 2010
Preventing Another Crisis
AbstractThere is no justification for the belief that cutting spending or raising taxes by any amount will reduce the federal deficit, let alone permit solid growth. The worst fears about recent stimulative policies and rapid money-supply growth are proving to be incorrect once again. We must find the will to reinvigorate government and to maintain […]
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One-Pager No. 4
November 10, 2010
Είναι καταδικασμένη η ευρωζώνη;
AbstractΤο ενός τρισεκατομυρρίων δολαρίων πακέτο διάσωσης που προώθησαν οι ευρωπαίοι ηγέτες τον Μαη του 2010 και που στοχεύει στην αντιμετώπιση της αυξανόμενης κρίση χρέους της ηπείρου, θα μπορούσε κάλλιστα να φέρει το κωδικό όνομα Πανάκεια. Ανέβηκαν οι μετοχές σε όλη την επικράτεια και έπεσαν ακόμη και τα επιτόκια για τα ελληνικά ομόλογα. Η ανάπαυλα όμως […]
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Working Paper No. 635
November 10, 2010
International Trade Theory and Policy
AbstractThis paper provides a survey of the literature on trade theory, from the classical example of comparative advantage to the New Trade theories currently used by many advanced countries to direct industrial policy and trade. An account is provided of the neo-classical brand of reciprocal demand and resource endowment theories, along with their usual empirical […]
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One-Pager No. 4
November 10, 2010
Is the Eurozone Doomed?
AbstractThe trillion-dollar rescue package European leaders aimed at the continent’s growing debt crisis in May might well have been code-named Panacea. Stocks rose throughout the region, but the reprieve was short-lived: markets fell on the realization that the bailout would not improve government finances going forward. The entire rescue plan rests on the assumption that […]
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Working Paper No. 634
November 03, 2010
How Brazil Can Defend Against Financialization and Keep Its Economic Surplus for Itself
AbstractThe post-1945 mode of global integration has outlived its early promise. It has become exploitative rather than supportive of capital investment, public infrastructure, and living standards. In the sphere of trade, countries need to rebuild their self-sufficiency in food grains and other basic needs. In the financial sphere, the ability of banks to create credit […]
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Working Paper No. 633
November 02, 2010
Immigrant Parents’ Attributes versus Discrimination
AbstractThere is much interest in explaining the persistent ethnic gaps in education among Israeli Jews; specifically, the much lower attainments of those from Asian and African countries compared to the rest—Mizrahim vs. Ashkenazim, respectively. Some explanations (especially early ones) have stressed premigration immigrant characteristics, particularly the relatively lower level of educational attainment among Mizrahim. More […]
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Working Paper No. 632
November 01, 2010
The Household Sector Financial Balance, Financing Gap, Financial Markets, and Economic Cycles in the US Economy
AbstractThis paper investigates private net saving in the US economy—divided into its principal components, households and (nonfinancial) corporate financial balances—and its impact on the GDP cycle from the 1980s to the present. Furthermore, we investigate whether the financial markets (stock prices, BAA spread, and long-term interest rates) have a role in explaining the cyclical pattern […]
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Working Paper No. 631
October 31, 2010
Exploring the Philippine Economic Landscape and Structural Change Using the Input-Output Framework
AbstractThis paper explores the degree of structural change of the Philippine economy using the input-output framework. It examines how linkages among economic sectors evolved over 1979–2000, and identifies which economic sectors exhibited the highest intersectoral linkages. We find that manufacturing is consistently the key sector in the Philippine economy. Specifically, resource-intensive and scale-intensive manufacturing industries […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 116
October 28, 2010
An Alternative Perspective on Global Imbalances and International Reserve Currencies
AbstractThe stability of the international reserve currency’s purchasing power is less a question of what serves as that currency and more a question of the international adjustment mechanism, as well as the compatibility of export-led development strategies with international payment balances. According to Senior Scholar Jan Kregel, export-led growth and free capital flows are the […]
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Working Paper No. 630
October 26, 2010
Managing Finance in Emerging Economies
AbstractIndia has been experiencing rising inflows of overseas capital since the deregulation of its financial sector. Often looked upon as a success story among other emerging economies, the country has been subject to pitfalls and trilemmas that deserve attention. It has been officially recognized by the Governors of RBI that the financial crisis in India […]
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Working Paper No. 629
October 25, 2010
The Impact of Geography and Natural Resource Abundance on Growth in Central Asia
AbstractThis paper examines the growth experience of the Central Asian economies after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In particular, it evaluates the impact of being landlocked and resource rich. The main conclusions are: (1) Over the period 1994–2006, the landlocked resource-scarce developing countries of Central Asia grew at a slower pace than other landlocked […]
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Policy Notes No. 3
October 22, 2010
Why the IMF Meetings Failed, and the Coming Capital Controls
AbstractThe global financial breakdown is part of the price to be paid for the refusal of the Federal Reserve and Treasury to accept a prime axiom of banking: debts that cannot be paid, won’t be. These agencies tried to “save” the banking system from debt writedowns by keeping the debt overhead in place, while reinflating […]
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Working Paper No. 628
October 21, 2010
The Role of Trade Facilitation in Central Asia
AbstractWith a decrease in formal trade barriers, trade facilitation has come into prominence as a policy tool for promoting trade. In this paper, we use a gravity model to examine the relationship between bilateral trade flows and trade facilitation. We also estimate the gains in trade derived from improvements in trade facilitation for the Central […]
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Working Paper No. 627
October 19, 2010
The Transition from Industrial Capitalism to a Financialized Bubble Economy
AbstractFor the past decade, the US economy has been driven not by industrial investment but by a real estate bubble. Although the United States may seem to be the leading example of industrial capitalism, its economy is no longer based mainly on investing in capital goods to employ labor to produce output to sell at […]
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Working Paper No. 626
October 11, 2010
Technical Change in India’s Organized Manufacturing Sector
AbstractWe use the real wage–profit rate schedule to examine the direction of technical change in India’s organized manufacturing sector during 1980–2007. We find that technical change was Marx biased (i.e., declining capital productivity with increasing labor productivity) through the 1980s and 1990s; and Hicks neutral (increasing both capital and labor productivity) post-2000. The historical experience […]
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Working Paper No. 625
October 10, 2010
A Post Keynesian Perspective on the Rise of Central Bank Independence
AbstractThis paper critically assesses the rise of central bank independence (CBI) as an apparent success story in modern monetary economics. As to the observed rise in CBI since the late 1980s, we single out the role of peculiar German traditions in spreading CBI across continental Europe, while its global spread may be largely attributable to […]
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Working Paper No. 624
September 30, 2010
A Reassessment of the Use of Unit Labor Costs as a Tool for Competitiveness and Policy Analyses in India
AbstractWe reinterpret unit labor costs (ULC) as the product of the labor share in value added, times a price adjustment factor. This allows us to discuss the functional distribution of income. We use data from India’s organized manufacturing sector and show that while India’s ULC displays a clear upward trend since 1980 (with a decline […]
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Working Paper No. 623
September 28, 2010
The Meltdown of the Global Economy
AbstractThe enormity and pervasiveness of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 makes it relevant to analyze the circumstances that can explain this catastrophe. This will also provide clues to the appropriate remedial measures needed to prevent future occurrences of similar developments. The paper begins with some theoretical concerns relating to factors that could […]
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Working Paper No. 622
September 27, 2010
Innocent Frauds Meet Goodhart’s Law in Monetary Policy
AbstractThis paper discusses recent UK monetary policies as instances of John Kenneth Galbraith’s “innocent fraud,” including the idea that money is a thing rather than a relationship, the fallacy of composition (i.e., that what is possible for one bank is possible for all banks), and the belief that the money supply can be controlled by […]
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Working Paper No. 621
September 25, 2010
Gendered Aspects of Globalization
AbstractWe need to go beyond the accepted notions relating to the role of women in the economy and society, especially in terms of what is recognized in mainstream theory and policy as “work” done by women. Thus, the traditional gender roles, with the man as the breadwinner and the woman in the role of housekeeper, […]
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Book Series
September 23, 2010
The Elgar Companion to Hyman Minsky
AbstractHyman Minsky’s analysis, in the early 1990s, of the capitalist economy’s transformation in the postwar period accurately predicted the global financial meltdown that began in late 2007. With the republication in 2008 of his seminal books John Maynard Keynes (1975) and Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (1986), his ideas have seen an unprecedented resurgence, and the […]
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Working Paper No. 620
September 20, 2010
Measuring Poverty Using Both Income and Wealth
AbstractThis paper presents a comparative analysis of the approaches to poverty based on income and wealth that have been proposed in the literature. Two types of approaches are considered: those that look at income and wealth separately when defining the poverty frontier, and those in which these two dimensions are integrated into a single index […]
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