Summary Fall 2020

This issue of the Summary features a Strategic Analysis focused on Greece’s economy in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two public policy briefs also highlight pandemic-related issues, with the first focusing on the impact in Greece in light of deep cuts in healthcare expenditures and the second dealing with the implications with respect to inequality in the United States. The other brief featured in this issue addresses the threats and opportunities represented by cryptocurrencies and related technological innovations. Policy notes also focus on the pandemic’s impact, the first from a Minskyan perspective, another through the lens of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, and a third supporting the job guarantee as a policy for restarting the economy in the post-pandemic era. A final policy note explores the reform of fiscal federalism in the United States, proposing intergovernmental automatic stabilizers for avoiding procyclical cuts at the state and local levels.
 
Working papers in this issue discuss a stock-flow consistent quarterly model for Italy, detailing the over two-hundred equations that address the missing links between the real and financial sectors; the short-term interest rate’s impact on the long-term rate, with one paper focusing on a general model and another on an empirical model for Brazil; the impact of various institutional factors on educational outcomes in the West Bank; the role of James Dusenberry’s relative income hypothesis and the “keeping-up-with-the-Jonses-effect” in the rise in debt-driven consumption in Turkey; income distribution’s effect on aggregate demand and growth by class and gender, and the role power dynamics between labor and capital play in their determination; the noneconomic sphere’s role in creating the necessary conditions for a properly functioning economic sphere from a feminist-Marxist standpoint; and some theoretical and empirical issues on the accumulation and utilization of capital, highlighting utilization’s role in bridging the gap between mainstream and alternative theories of growth and distribution.