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446 results

Why has heterodox economics not been more successful in making inroads into the mainstream? And why has “pluralist economics,” the most prominent alternative paradigm to mainstream economics, not been more successful in changing the curriculum?
Level: advanced
The Project of Pluralism
In the second video of the series Investigating International Finance, an alternative view on capital controls is given contrasting with the paradigm of classical trade theory which suggests that the removal of trade and capital barriers is associated with higher market efficiency. After explaining the conceptual mechanisms underlying capital controls, examples are introduced where countries actually apply capital controls and how these controls have been associated with a lesser exposure to international financial crises spillovers.
2011
Level: beginner
Tax Havens - Investigating International Finance
In the second video of the series Investigating International Finance, an alternative view on capital controls is given contrasting with the paradigm of classical trade theory suggesting that the removal of trade and capital barriers is associated with higher market efficiency. After explaining the conceptual mechanisms underlying capital controls, examples are introduced where countries actually apply capital controls and how these controls have been associated with a lesser exposure to international financial crises spillovers.
2012
Level: beginner
Capital controls - Investigating International Finance, Episode 2
Sheila Dow discusses the concept of radical uncertainty and the failure of neoclassical economics to integrate it into its analysis. As to the implications for financial regulation that arise from the presence of radical uncertainty she argues for institutional overhaul, where the banks see themselves as a licensed partner of the central bank and where rules, values, and conventions would be subject to a cultural shift. Also, Sheila Dow advocates for a renewed focus on retail banking.
2015
Level: advanced
The Economics of Uncertainty
In this radio interview, Andrew Sayer first outlines some features of neoliberalism and policies that are associated with it. Then a difference between wealth creation via investment and wealth extraction by means of lending money to those deprived of it or by acquiring property such as real estate or financial assets on the secondary market as absentee owner is established. In this context reference is made to J.A. Hobson's concept of "improperty." Finally, there are some words on the power dynamics associated with capitalism and its relation to climate change.
2015
Level: beginner
Why We Can’t Afford the Rich
In order to describe the global structure of the monetary and financial system and its effects on the global economy, most economics textbooks rely on unappropriated theories that provide nothing but outdated descriptions. In this talk, key speakers in economics, economic history and banking try to make this complex system a little more understandable by relying on real-world insights.
2016
Level: advanced
Global Money: Past, Present, Future
Mariana Mazzucato explains how we lost sight of what value means and why we need to rethink our current financial systems so capitalism can be steered toward a bold, innovative and sustainable future that works for all of us.
2019
Level: beginner
What is economic value, and who creates it?
The world is coping with a global disaster, as the new Coronavirus takes a toll on many lost lives and a severe impact on economic activity. To provide a long-run perspective, this column documents the international response to a variety of disasters since 1790. Based on a new comprehensive database on loans extended by governments and central banks, official (sovereign-to-sovereign) international lending is much larger than generally known. Official lending spikes in times of global turmoil, such as wars, financial crises or natural disasters. Indeed, in these periods, official capital flows have repeatedly surpassed total private capital flows in the past two centuries. Wars, in particular, were accompanied by large surges in the volume of official cross-border lending.
2020
Level: advanced
Coping with disasters: Lessons from two centuries of international response
In this short podcast, Naomi Fowler, the Tax Justice Network's creative strategist, discusses how the laws made by those who profited from slavery and the empire and, the extractive business models of the major financial sector continue to impoverish some of the poorest nations.
2020
Level: beginner
Systemic racism, reparations and tax justice
Nathan Tankus created this series to introduce people outside of the inner financial circles of professionals, journalists and policymakers to the basic mechanisms and dynamics of monetary policy.
2020
Level: advanced
Monetary Policy 101
This short video visualizes the destabilizing effects financial markets can have on food prices, based on a paper by Jayati Ghosh. It introduces and explains the idea of future contracts and how those are used to speculate with basic food stuffs. After establishing the concepts, the video sketches out how the increase in those practices resulted in a substantial rise and later collapse of food prices around 2008 with severe consequences for many developing countries and their people.
2021
Level: beginner
Food and Finance
After a brief illustration of sovereign green bonds’ features, this paper describes the market evolution and identifies the main benefits and costs for sovereign issuers. The financial performance of these securities is then analysed.
2021
Level: advanced
Green Bonds: the Sovereign Issuers’ Perspective
This paper investigates how the concept of public purpose is used in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). As a common denominator among political scientists, the idea of public purpose is that economic actions should aim at benefiting the majority of the society. However, the concept is to be considered as an ideal of a vague nature, which is highly dependent on societal context and, hence, subject to change over time. MMT stresses that government spending plans should be designed to pursue a certain socio-economic mandate and not to meet any particular financial outcome. The concept of public purpose is heavily used in this theoretical body of thought and often referred to in the context of policy proposals as the ideas of universal job guarantee and banking reform proposals show. MMT scholars use the concept as a pragmatic benchmark against which policies can be assessed. With regards to the definition of public propose, MMT scholars agree that it is dependent on the social-cultural context. Nevertheless, MMT scholars view universal access to material means of survival as universally applicable and in that sense as the lowest possible common denominator.
2020
Level: advanced
Modern Monetary Theory and the public purpose
The webinar covers three different topics that relate to reconciling with the Indigenous people in Australia: financial resilience, childcare/child development and economic participation through business procurement. Despite showing significant strength and resilience in the face of colonial injustices, Australian Indigenous people and their families continue to be affected by past trauma.
2021
Level: beginner
How can economics contribute to Indigenous Reconciliation?
Mark Carney explains how we have come to esteem financial value over human value and how we have gone from market economies to market societies, how economic theory foundation affect the society as a whole, how we understand our world today and ultimately how this affects our lives.
2020
Level: beginner
How We Get What We Value
The authors analyse the role and effects of the US dollar as factual global reserve currency. They demonstrate that a flight into the dollar creates adverse effects for the global economy as it represents a tightening of financial conditions.
2021
Level: advanced
Dollar dominance and the international adjustment to global risk
In this teaching pack, we take a look at satellite crop monitoring and how it is used for both real and financial economic activities. By looking at commodity futures, we give students a sense of what financialization can mean. In the active exercise students learn to discuss these matters and reflect upon them.
2022
Level: beginner
Space & Agriculture
The current international financial system has created a huge gap between the wealthy and the rest. Grounded and straightforward in his approach, Brahm calls for a turn away from economic systems dangerously steeped in ideology and stymied by politics, outlining a new global consensus based on pragmatism, common sense, and grass-roots realities.
2014
Level: advanced
Fusion Economics
Examine what would happen if we were to deploy blockchain technology at the sovereign level and use it to create a decentralized cashless economy. This book explains how finance and economics work today, and how the convergence of various technologies related to the financial sector can help us find solutions to problems, such as excessive debt creation, banks getting too big to fail, and shadow banking.
2017
Level: advanced
The Blockchain Alternative
In a changing world that has been shaken by economic, social, financial, and ecological crises, it becomes increasingly clear that new approaches to economics are needed for both theoretical and empirical research; for applied economics as well as policy advice.
2018
Level: advanced
Policy Implications of Recent Advances in Evolutionary and Institutional Economics
Once in a while the world astonishes itself. Anxious incredulity replaces intellectual torpor and a puzzled public strains its antennae in every possible direction, desperately seeking explanations for the causes and nature of what just hit it. 2008 was such a moment. Not only did the financial system collapse, and send the real economy into a tailspin, but it also revealed the great gulf separating economics from a very real capitalism.
2011
Level: advanced
Modern Political Economics
Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk, authors of "Uncertain Times", explore the extent to which flaws, blind spots and more importantly bias created by macroeconomics models, based on forecasts and statistical devices, shape crisis and the market economy in which we live.
2018
Level: beginner
Economics for Uncertain Times
In this interview, the political activist, author and lecturer Dr. Vandana Shiva explains the linkage between ecology, feminism and economics along the lines of current effects and implications of the Corona-Crisis in India and around the world.
2020
Level: beginner
Ecology, feminism and economics in times of Covid-19 pandemic
The British historian, Adam Tooze, highlights how the climate crisis is not just an environmental or ecological problem but also a political economy challenge.
2021
Level: beginner
Climate, carbon and class
In Trouble in Paradise, Slavoj Žižek, one of our most famous, most combative philosophers, explains how by drawing on the ideas of communism, we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism.
2015
Level: advanced
Trouble in Paradise

Best-selling books such as Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist have paved the way for the flourishing economics-made-fun genre. While books like these present economics as a strong and explanatory science, the ongoing economic crisis has exposed the shortcomings of economics to the general public.

2015
Level: advanced
Economics Made Fun
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay, capitalists and governors, Indian and British alike, used moments of crisis to justify interventions that delimited the city as a distinct object and progressively excluded laborers and migrants from it.
2019
Level: advanced
Making the Modern Slum
Feminist economics focuses on the interdependencies of gender relations and the economy. Care work and the partly non-market mediated reproduction sphere are particularly emphasised by feminist economics.
Feminist Economics
This essay draws on several analyses on the gender impact of the recession and of austerity policies, in which authors acknowledge a threat to women’s labour market integration and a potential backlash to traditional gender labour structures. We contribute to that literature by asking whether recession and austerity convey a gender effect on educational attainment. Our aim in this essay is to portray the likely effects of austerity measures on gender equality with a focus on women’s participation in tertiary education and to hypothesize the implications of these scenarios for labour market effects, to be tested in future empirical research.
2017
Level: beginner
The impact of Austerity on Gender in Tertiary Education: A Theoretical Analysis
Fabian Georgi analyses how migration and borders are connected to capitalism.
2024
Level: advanced
Recruiting skilled labour, while closing borders? The connection between migration, border regimes and capitalism
Have you ever thought about the role of civil society and the evolution of economy in one breath? This one hour long interview of Daron Acemoğlu (MIT) and Martin Wolf (Financial Times) by Rethinking Economy NL gives you much inspiration for it.
2021
Level: beginner
Socioeconomics of Disruptive Tech
This is a new online course at bachelor level. It presents an introduction into macroeconomics with a specific focus on the euro area. The theoretical part provides a critical presentation of the two key macroeconomic models: the (neo)classical approach and the Keynesian approach. This allows a comparative analysis of important macroeconomic topics: unemployment inflation government debt and Modern Monetary Theory banks and financial crises. The policy-oriented part discusses the monetary policy of the ECB and the specific challenges for fiscal policy in the euro area. The course also presents other euro area specific topics: Optimum currency area, euro crises, Next Generation EU and Green New Deal.
2021
Level: advanced
European Macroeconomics

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