New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century

What is money and how is it used? After answering these questions, Dirk Bezemer analyses how finance can be dysfunctional for the real economy.

Özlem Onaran analyses the current problems of secular stagnation from a global perspective. At the core of global economic problems is insufficient demand caused by falling wage shares, because most individual countries, and the world as a whole are “wage-led”. Hence a strategy for global growth is to aim at increasing wages and thus the wage share, and the abandonment of policies focusing purely on national competitiveness. Financialization has broken the link between corporate profitability and investment. Reregulation of finance and higher public investment is required in order to crowd in private investment, in this way, reversing the declining trend of potential output growth.

Health Economics traditionally involves two distinct strands. One focuses on the application of core  neoclassical economic theories of the firm, the consumer and the market to health-seeking behaviour  and other health issues. It suggests a role for government intervention only in the case of specific  market failures (for example externalities, asymmetric information, moral hazard, and public goods)  that distort market outcomes. The second strand is evaluation techniques, used to assess the cost effectiveness of competing health interventions.

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.