Tag Archives: economy

Eurostat published new data on employment in Europe. Average employment growth is +0,9%. The average hides stark differences. A Germany-centered core consisting of Germany, Austria, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, and Hungary shows declines. Surprisingly, it excludes Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. The South does better. Countries like Portugal, France, Greece, and, especially, Spain post above-average increases. But unemployment in these countries is still high (over 5%), even when EU...

Executive summary: if investments are needed, do not reform. Invest. Investments are the reform. Angus Maddison (historical patterns of growth) and Jan Kregel (leading post-Keynesian economist) were the intellectually dominant forces during my economics study in Groningen around 1982. Let´s apply their frameworks to Greece. Growth, as we measure it, has many sources: increasing the productivity of existing activities (the mechanization of the potato harvest), shifting labour from...

11th of November 2024 My Lords, there are many things to welcome in this Budget, particularly on the spending side. I am less keen on some of the tax proposals, which seem to be mean-minded and counterproductive, such as the tax on knowledge. The spending commitments are important because they reverse the disastrous policy of austerity, which has brought our public services and infrastructure close to collapse. Even the IMF, originally a champion of austerity, admitted that it had...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]US consumers keep economy on solid ground ahead of election – By Lucia Mutikani Reuters WASHINGTON, Oct 30 (Reuters) – The U.S. economy grew solidly in the third quarter. Consumer spending increasing at its fastest pace in 1-1/2 years and inflation slowing sharply, continuing to defy forecasts of a recession, and outperforming its global peers ahead […] The post Economy on Solid Ground “Before Election” appeared first...

from Lars Syll We have already shown that deficit spending increases our collective savings. But what happens if Uncle Sam borrows when he runs a deficit? Is that wht eats up savings and forces interest rates higher? The answer is no. The financial crowding-out story asks us to imagine that there’s a fixed supply of savings from which anyone can attempt to borrow … MMT rejects the loanable funds story, which is rooted in the idea that borrowing is limited by access to scarce financial...

from Peter Radford Well done AJR.  A prize deserved.  And remarkably little grumbling.  What’s wrong with that? In other news, my wife is deep into creating an artificial intelligence application.  One of the great challenges of getting AI to be useful is something called ‘prompt engineering’.   What have these two snippets of news have in common? The great thing about our better economists — the triumvirate we know affectionately as AJR being an example — is that they all seem to...

from Lars Syll Today’s model of delegation has much to recommend it. But it should not be cloaked in euphemism. It is an abrogation of democratic sovereignty for pragmatic reasons, conditioned on the one hand by deeply entrenched and unflattering assumptions about electoral politics and, on the other, on an unquestioning acceptance of the private organization of credit markets and their lack of confidence in democratic control of economic policy. This may be an abrogation that we are...

from Steven Klees I am quite sure that this year’s three Nobel Laureates in economics — Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson – are very competent new institutionalist economists.  Lars Syll offers a thoughtful critique of their substantive arguments, but he misses the main point for me.  New institutional economics, by and large, is nonsense.  We used to have many sensible institutional economists who offered a qualitative, sociological-type analysis of the role of economic...

In Europe (the Euro area, to be precise), both unemployment and inflation are down, according to Eurostat,. Which, again, shows that the Phillips curve, a crucial concept behind neoclassical macroeconomic thinking that assumes a more or less stable negative relation between unemployment and inflation (high unemployment will bring inflation down), is not the place to go when predicting or analysing inflation. Sometimes, this relation is specified as a relation between wage increases and...

from Peter Radford “Mathematics is the art of the perfect.  Physics is the art of the optimal.  Biology, because of evolution, is the art of the satisfactory”. That’s Sydney Brenner speaking.  He should know a thing or two.  He won a Nobel Prize. It’s a shame, is it not?  Economies are always changing.  Not just in terms of innovation and all the normal things we think of as change, but also in more simple terms: in the people making up an economy change.  They are born and they die.  And...