How countries achieve long-term GDP growth is up there with the most important topics in economics. As Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas put it “the consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.” Ricardo Hausmann et al take a refreshing approach to this question in their Atlas of Economic Complexity. They argue a country’s growth depends on the complexity of its economy: it must have a diverse economy which produces a wide variety of products, including ones that cannot be produced much elsewhere. The Atlas goes into detail on exactly what complexity means, how it fits the data, and what this implies for development. Below I will offer a summary of their arguments, including some cool data visualisations.

Economic sociology is an entire subfield and one could write an series on it, so I’m going to stick to probably the most prominent economic sociologist and the founder of ‘new economic sociology’, Mark Granovetter.

Dans cet entretien mené pour la revue Regards Croisés sur l'Économie, Christine Delphy donne des clés pour analyser le travail gratuit des femmes, rendu invisible dans la sphère économique. Le rôle des politiques publiques dans la perpétuation de cette organisation économique est également mis en lumière, ainsi que la difficulté pour les sciences économiques à capturer cette dimension genrée du travail.

Cet interview donne la parole à Jean-François Ponsot, l'un des coordinateurs de l'ouvrage "L'économie post-keynésienne. Histoire, théories et politiques" (Seuil, 2018), première synthèse française du post-keynésianisme. J.-F. Ponsot revient sur le contenu du chapitre 21 dont il est l'auteur et qui traite du projet de système monétaire international soumis par Keynes après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale pour sortir du chaos provoqué par la crise et la guerre. Après un descriptif des principales caractéristiques de ce projet, qui n'a pas été retenu par la communauté internationale, J.-F. Ponsot présente les avantages qu'il aurait à être appliqué aujourd'hui, mais aussi les difficultés pratiques qui empêchent sa mise en oeuvre dans le contexte monétaire et financier actuel.

This infographic gives a summary of the 2018 Trade Wars. This simple, compiled overview is suitable for those without a strong political or economic background. The infographic explains briefly basic concepts related to trade and provides a short timeline of events. It furthermore checks Trump administration's arguments to launch the the trade war against facts and estimates of how the 2018 trade war can affect the global and North-American economy.

The article is a formal response to the debate between the economists Diane Coyle and Howard Reed, whose articles were published online by Prospect magazine in 2018. Then, it was taken by Rethinking Economics as representative for the vision of the global network which advocates for changing economics curricula. In fact, it clearly solves some issues within the debate around pluralism by explaining its common misunderstandings among academics and its true - often mislead - meaning.

The most successful multialternative theories of decision making assume that people consider individual aspects of a choice and proceed via a process of elimination. Amos Tversky was one of the pioneers of this field, but modern decision theorists – most notably Neil Stewart – have moved things forward. At the current stage the theories are able to explain a number of strictly ‘irrational’ but reasonable quirks of human decision making, including various heuristics and biases. Not only this, but eye movements of participants strongly imply that the decision-making process depicted in the theories is an accurate one.

In both economics textbooks and public perceptions central banks are a fact of life. On the wall of my A-level economics classroom there was the Will Rogers quote “there have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking”, summarising how many economists view the institution. There is a widespread belief that there is something different about money which calls for a central authority to manage its operation, a view shared even by staunch free marketeers such as Milton Friedman. This belief is not without justification, since money underpins every transaction in a way that apples do not, but we should always be careful not to take existing institutions for granted and central banking is no exception. In this post I will look at the idea of private or free banking, where banks compete (and cooperate) to issue their own currency.

Since Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Price in Economic Sciences in 2002, a new branch of economics gained academic and popular interest. That is, the so-called area of behavioural economics. However, some scholars claim that this new area of economics is not changing much of the mainstream paradigm. Why?

Faut-il donner un prix à la nature pour la protéger des impacts de l’activité humaine ? L'économiste écologique Aurore Lalucq revient sur cette question fondamentale et distingue monétarisation, marchandisation et financiarisation. Selon elle, ces trois concepts prennent place dans des situations totalement différentes et ne suivent pas les mêmes logiques.

Dans cet épisode, nous nous posons la question du rôle de la monnaie dans une économie capitaliste. Pour cela, nous comparons le fonctionnement de deux économies en apparence identique, à ceci près que la première fonctionne sans monnaie, comme une économie de troc, et la seconde est monétaire. Nous nous apercevons alors que le caractère monétaire ou non d’une économie modifie radicalement ses propriétés. La détermination des profits sera ainsi très différente dans ces deux économies, les relations de causalité entre dépôts et crédits, épargne et investissement s’inversent, une crise de surproduction est possible dans un cas mais pas dans l’autre, et le chômage peut également avoir des origines très différentes, et même opposées, selon que l’on considère une économie monétaire ou non. Les propriétés de l’économie de troc recouvrent celles de la théorie économique standard (théorie néoclassique) qui s’est historiquement construite sans prendre en considération la monnaie, celle-ci étant considérée comme neutre sur l’économie. Les propriétés de l’économie monétaire rappellent quant à elles celles des modèles postkeynésiens, bien moins connus, et qui trouvent leurs origines dans les travaux et écrits de Keynes, qui affirmait dans son ouvrage le plus célèbre (la théorie générale de l’emploi de l’intérêt et de la monnaie) que « lorsqu’on s’attaque à la recherche des facteurs qui déterminent les volumes globaux de la production et de l’emploi, la Théorie complète d’une Economie Monétaire devient indispensable » (1936, p. 297). Pour approfondir le fonctionnement d’une économie monétaire, vous pouvez lire le livre de Laurent Cordonnier, maître de conférences à l’Université de Lille, « L’économie des Toambapiks » qui présente à partir d’une « fable » la loi des profits de Kalecki dont nous parlons dans la vidéo. Le livre se lit très facilement.

Quelles sont les opportunités et quels sont les risques des accords commerciaux de nouvelle génération négociés actuellement par l'UE (CETA avec le Canada, JEFTA avec le Japon,...) ? Cécilia Bellora, économiste et ingénieure agronome, CEPII Karine Jacquemart, directrice générale, Foodwatch (sous réserve) Charles de Marcilly, responsable du bureau de Bruxelles, Fondation Robert Schuman Katheline Schubert, professeure d’économie, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne - PSE Modération : Dominique Rousset, journaliste à France culture

Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.

One method of economic modelling that has become increasingly popular in academia, government and the private sector is Agent Based Models, or ABM. These simulate the actions and interactions of thousands or even millions of people to try to understand the economy – for this reason ABM was once described to me as being “like Sim City without the graphics”. One advantage of ABM is that it is flexible, since you can choose how many agents there are (an agent just means some kind of 'economic decision maker' like a firm, consumer, worker or government); how they behave (do they use complicated or simple rules to make decisions?); as well as the environment they act in, then just run the simulation and see what happens as they interact over time.

In this blog article Steve Keen elaborates on flawed climate change modelling and mainstream economics forecasts. In specific, he stresses the climate change forecasts of the DICE model (“Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy”) by Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner William Nordhaus.

Entretien avec Sylvie Morel, économiste et professeure titulaire au Département des relations industrielles de l’université Laval, à Québec, où elle est arrivée en 1996. Ses enseignements et ses recherches portent sur les politiques publiques de l’emploi, la sécurité sociale et la théorie économique (l’économie institutionnaliste de John R. Commons et l’économie féministe). Ses travaux sont menés dans une perspective de genre. Elle a collaboré à plusieurs réseaux de recherche féministes, aux fins, notamment, de l’élaboration de formations sur les théories économiques pour les groupes de femmes. Elle est membre du Réseau québécois en études féministes (RéQEF) ainsi que chercheuse associée à la Chaire Claire-Bonenfant – Femmes, Savoirs et Sociétés. Signataire du Manifeste pour un Québec solidaire (2005), elle a co-fondé le site Économie autrement – dédié à la promotion de l’économie hétérodoxe – et y a collaboré pendant 7 ans. Elle a aussi siégé quatre ans au Comité de direction du Centre d’étude sur la pauvreté et l’exclusion (CEPE), rattaché au ministère de l’Emploi et de la Solidarité sociale (MESS).

In this post, Rethinking Economics sets out what it means to decolonise economics education and how we can do that. The article first breaks decolonising down into a "mind-set" and a "process", then applies this process to economics education. It finishes with a reading list and some suggested actions to get you started decolonising economics today.

This Blog Post describes the U.S. federal reserve money system from the perspective of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Therefore it presents a theory of money creation, gives simple examples how this influences the economy and the historical process of why the monetary system of the US has developed this way.

This video provides a brief introduction to post-keynesian economics and how the school of thought would tackle climate change.

In this video University of Warwick Economist Robert Akerlof provides an introduction to a new type of behavioral economics He explains how this type is being driven by a desire to understand how people are shaped by social interactions and what the economic consequences of this are He begins the …

The authors discuss how identity affects economic outcomes by bringing together psychological and sociological perspectives and economics. For economic outcomes of a single individual, it might be interesting which kind of social groups this individual belongs to. This may influence individual daily decisions and hence economic outcomes. It can, however, not only affect individual economic outcomes but also economic outcomes of organizations, institutions and other groups. This paper describes these influences with respect to gender in the workplace, to the economics of poverty and social exclusion, and to the household division of labour.

Quinn Slobodian a historian of modern Germany and international history analysis of current development in the Mont Pèlerin Society and therefore neo-liberalism. He sees neo-liberalist thinkers less as believers in the self-healing power of markets, but more as ordo-liberal Globalists who wanted to protect the markets from post-war politics and especially mass democracy. Their goal of global capitalism is still strong, however sceptics in the Mont Pèlerin Society are rising, which see international migration as a threat to Globalisation. Therefore, turning neo-liberal policies away from international institutions like the EU back towards the national states as new defenders of the markets as well as international trade and investments. (A development which can be seen in the Friedrich A. von Hayek-Gesellschaft and especially in the "liberal" wing of the German rightwing populist party AfD)

There are three things one can do in this website - 1. Learn 2. Help Teach 3. Sign up MOOC. This is a semester-long graduate course in Econometrics. This course is intended for graduate students in economics-related fields and more generally in social sciences. The course includes an overview of the models and theory and applications using Stata, R, or SAS programs. This econometrics class covers about 15 of the most commonly used econometric models in economics, such as linear regression, panel data models, probit and logit models, limited dependent variable models, count data models, time series models, and many more.

Ce portrait de Ronald Coase brossé par Elodie bertrand chercheuse en histoire de la pensée économique permet de revenir sur son oeuvre avec un certain recul historique Sur la réception de ses travaux leurs sur interprétations et leur influence dans l économie de la deuxième moitié du XXème siècle en …

Poster of the different schools of thought made by Sergio A. Berumen. From the Greeks to late 20th and beginning of the 21th century.

This paper starts with an evaluation of three common arguments against pluralism in economics: (1) the claim that economics is already pluralist, (2) the argument that if there was the need for greater plurality, it would emerge on its own, and (3) the assertion that pluralism means ‘anything goes’ and is thus unscientific. Pluralist responses to all three arguments are summarized. The third argument is identified to relate to a greater challenge for pluralism: an epistemological trade-off between diversity and consensus that suggests moving from a discussion about ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ towards a discussion about the adequate degree of plurality. We instantiate the trade-off by showing how it originates from two main challenges: the need to derive adequate quality criteria for a pluralist economics, and the necessity to propose strategies that ensure the communication across different research programs. The paper concludes with some strategies to meet these challenges.

James Robinson gives in this talk a short introduction into the theory and ideas of his popular book "Why Nations Fail" which was published together with D. Acemoglu in 2012. With many real-life examples he gives a lively description on the fundamentals for economic success from an institutionalist view. According to Robinson, the nature of institutions is a crucial factor for economic success. Whether institutions are inclusive (such as in prosperous economies) or extractive (poor economies) stems from the nation's political process and the distribution of political power.

Economics has long been the domain of the ivory tower, where specialized language and opaque theorems make it inaccessible to most people. That’s a problem.

In her short contribution, the author questions how the value of goods and services is shaped in current neoclassical teaching. She criticizes the principle of pricing based on marginal income. She discusses what can be called wealth generating, what kind of wealth we need and points out a lack of a value theory.

La « décroissance » est-elle souhaitable ? Interview avec Eloi Laurent, économiste, conseiller scientifique à l'OFCE, maître de conférences à Sciences-Po et auteur de “ Sortir de la croissance : mode d’emploi “ (Les Liens qui Libérent, 2019).

Léon Walras, un des grands fondateurs de la théorie néoclassique, est un penseur complexe et à découvrir : tantôt brandi comme une grande figure du libéralisme, tantôt théoricien d'une planification économique rationnellement fondée. Court article tiré du mensuel Le Point sur l'auteur.

Dans une vidéo dense mais pédagogique Heu reka nous emmène dans les arcanes de la modélisation économique et environnementale En partant d une controverse entre les auteurs du célèbre rapport Meadows sur les limites de la croissance et des économistes d obédience néoclassique on découvre deux approches différentes pour un …