Food and Finance

Professor Jennifer Clapp explains the dynamics of financialization of land and agricultural commodities in Subsaharan Africa. She points to the historical roots of accelerated land speculation and their connection to financial institutions, both generating and reinforcing the process of financialization of African land. Besides talking about roots and dynamics of speculation with land on financial markets, she puts the perspective of scholarly investigation onto the investor's side in discussing guidelines of responsible investment and regulation in the front instead of focussing on the receiving countries.

What motivates big businesses to reject full employment policies? Michal Kalecki adressed this question in 1943 by analysing the political ideology that govern the private sector.

Global Value Chains (GVCs) started to play an increasing and key role in the global economy from the 1990s on. The market mechanism in GVCs supports industrialisation in the Global South and under certain conditions product and process upgrading. But GVCs do not lead to the catching-up of countries in the sense of them approaching real GDP per capita levels comparable with developed countries. These arguments are supported by a critical interpretation of the traditional trade theory, the New Trade Theory and specific approaches to explain GVCs, especially different governance structures and power relationships. Several case studies support these arguments. For catching-up, countries need comprehensive horizontal and vertical industrial policy and policies for social coherence. The small number of countries which managed to catch up did this in different variations.

This website belongs to PolyluxMarx and provides open-access material for use while reading Karl Marx' Capital.  For several years now, people have been starting to dust off Marx and return to his analysis of society. This is mainly due to the social turmoil in global capitalism, weaknesses in prevailing explanations …

This lecture of the anthropologist David Graeber gives a brief introduction to the thoughts of his 2011 published book Debt: The First 5000 Years.

This is an introductory lecture to Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) modelling. Antoine Godin presents this family of macroeconomic models, which is based on a rigorous accounting framework and guarantees a correct and comprehensive integration of all the flows and the stocks of an economy. SFC models focus especially on interactions between …