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  Policy Notes No. 5

  Debt Management and the Fiscal Balance

  In this policy note, Jan Toporowski provides an analysis of government debt management using fiscal principles derived from the work of Michał Kalecki. Dividing the government’s budget into a “functional” and “financial” budget, Toporowski demonstrates how a financial budget balance—servicing government debt from taxes on wealth and profits that do not affect incomes and expenditures […]
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  Working Paper No. 960

  Fiscal Policy in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

  Fiscal policy is useful as a government instrument for supporting the economy, contributing to an increase in employment, and reducing inequality through more egalitarian income distribution. Over the past 30 years, developing countries have failed to increase their real wages due to the lack of domestic value-added in the era of globalization, where global supply […]
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  Book Series

  The Case for a Job Guarantee

  One of the most enduring ideas in economics is that unemployment is both unavoidable and necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy. This assumption has provided cover for the devastating social and economic costs of job insecurity. It is also false. In this book, leading expert Pavlina R. Tcherneva challenges us to imagine a world where the phantom of […]
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  Working Paper No. 959

  Distribution and Gender Effects on the Path of Economic Growth

  This paper applies a robust empirical methodology, which considers issues relating to cross-country heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence, to inspect the contributions of gender equality and factor income distribution to an economy’s growth path. A dynamic model of aggregate demand is estimated on a unique panel dataset from 46 countries that are further grouped into developed […]
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  Blog

  The Reserve Bank’s Pandemic Predicament

  by Lekha Chakraborty and Harikrishnan S As the Reserve Bank of India Governor Shri Shaktikanta Das puts it upfront, these are extraordinary times, and we need to respond with “whatever it takes” to deal with the pandemic. Over the past few days, our hope for systematically “flattening the curve” by containing the COVID-19 pandemic and [...]
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  Public Policy Brief No. 151

  Crisis, Austerity, and Fiscal Expenditure in Greece

  This policy brief provides a discussion of the relationships between austerity, Greece’s macroeconomic performance, debt sustainability, and the provision of healthcare and other social services over the last decade. It explains that austerity was imposed in the name of debt sustainability. However, there was a vicious cycle of recession and austerity: each round of austerity […]
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  Working Paper No. 958

  A Stock-Flow Consistent Quarterly Model of the Italian Economy

  Macroeconomists and political officers need rigorous, albeit realistic, quantitative models to forecast the future paths and dynamics of some variables of interest while being able to evaluate the effects of alternative scenarios. At the heart of all these models lies a standard macroeconomic module that, depending on the degree of sophistication and the research questions […]
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  Summary No. 2

  Summary Spring 2020

  This issue of the Summary features two Strategic Analyses. The first assesses the trends impacting the US economy’s sectoral balances in the context of overvalued asset markets and overleveraged corporate balance sheets; the second, for Greece, identifies the necessary conditions for achieving the government’s campaign promise of 4 percent GDP growth in 2020 and 2021, […]
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  Blog

  Eulogy for Carlos Lessa

  I have translated this eulogy on behalf of the Economics Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where I have spent many of my years of economic formation. Carlos Lessa is part of a generation of brilliant Brazilian economists that have shaped the public debate and the discipline in Brazil. This is an [...]
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  Working Paper No. 957

  Notes on Intersectional Political Economy

  This paper presents a critique of Karl Marx’s labor theory of value and his theory of falling profit rates from an intersectional political economy perspective. Specifically, I rely on social reproduction theory to propose that Marx-biased technical change disrupts the social order and leads to competition between workers. The bargaining power of workers cannot be […]
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  Blog

  Higher Education in Brazil: Interrupted Inclusion?

  by Ana Luíza Matos de Oliveira Brazil is a highly unequal country — so is the access to its higher education system. However, in the beginning of the 21st century (2001-2015), there was a convergence between the profile of Brazilian higher education students and the Brazilian population in terms of income, race, and region, although [...]
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  Public Policy Brief No. 150

  The Impact of Technological Innovations on Money and Financial Markets

  According to Senior Scholar Jan Kregel and Paolo Savona, attempting to maintain the status quo in the face of the introduction of some recent technological innovations—chiefly cryptocurrencies and associated instruments based on distributed ledger technology, the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the use of data science in financial markets—will create risks that increase instability and […]