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Tag Archives: Uncategorized

‘Testing’ purchasing power parity theory

from Lars Syll Purchasing power parity doctrine is examined by sophisticated statistical and econometric techniques. The time series of aggregated price levels and the nominal exchange rates are treated as a random sample. Most papers of this type deal with the technical properties of the slightly different data sets. To take some examples (at random): “Two potential problems arise when working with nominal exchange rates and ratios of price levels. First, unit roots are possibly present...

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War in Ukraine and global finance

from Marcello Spanò and RWER issue 104 Let us now turn to the signals of changes that are emerging with the war in Ukraine. The field of analysis regarding the relation of the war with the breakdown of unipolarism and its transformation into a multipolar world is certainly vast and complex. Here we limit the analysis some relevant aspects connected to the centrality of the dollar in the international monetary system. If we examine the 25-year period prior to 2014, we can...

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How dangerous is the European far-right ?

As is usual with trends of all kinds, some recent electoral successes for far-right parties in Europe have been extrapolated into a narrative in which the rise of the far-right is just about unstoppable. That narrative took a blow with the recent Spanish elections in which the far-right Vox party performed poorly and its coalition with the traditional conservative Popular Party failed to secure a majority. Possibly as a result, the leader of the German CDU backed away from a...

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Disaster and denial

I was looking at this picture of people (mostly tourists, it appears) fleeing massive fires in Rhodes, feeling despair about the future of the world when I was struck by an even more despairing thought.Almost certainly, a lot of the people in the picture are climate denialists. And even more certainly, they will mostly remain so despite this experience. Australia was one of the first countries to experience massive fires clearly attributable to global heating. In December...

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The future of climate change

We installed rooftop solar on our house in St. Louis ten years ago. Half of the cost was paid by Ameren and we got a 30% tax rebate on the balance. By the time we moved to Rhode Island last year and sold the house, we still hadn’t made back our investment even in nominal dollars. I’m OK with that, since at the time of installation, 80% of our electricity was generated by burning coal. Our donation to the planet.Rooftop solar was an object of...

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US Government to consider alternatives to patent monopoly financing of drug development

from Dean Baker In some really big news that is likely to get almost no media attention, Senator Bernie Sanders, the chair of the Senate HELP Committee, negotiated a deal with Bill Cassidy, the ranking Republican, on a package of amendments to the reauthorization of the nation’s pandemic preparedness law. While there are a number of items in the deal, a really big one is funding for a study to be done by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to consider...

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new issue of WEA Commentaries

Volume 13, Issue 1download the whole issue Summary of the Great Transformation by PolanyiAsad Zaman Economics, Anthropology and the Origin of Money as a Bargaining CounterPatrick Spread “Capitalism is the most successful, but also the most destructive ideological-economic system.”An interview withLaibachMitja Stefancic Brainstorming: Negative Impact of EconomicsAsad Zaman Closing RemarksStuart Birks Please click here to support the World Economics Association

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The dangers of using ontologically ungrounded idealizations

from Lars Syll Using ‘simplifying’ tractability or ‘heuristic’ assumptions — rational expectations, common knowledge, representative agents, linearity, additivity, ergodicity, etc — because otherwise they cannot ‘manipulate’ their models or come up with ‘rigorous ‘ and ‘precise’ predictions and explanations, does not exempt economists from having to justify their modelling choices. Being able to ‘manipulate’ things in models cannot per se be enough to warrant a methodological choice. If...

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Weekend read – Mixed progress in the fight against inequality and for democracy

from Dean Baker I have a birthday coming up, so it seems a good time to assess progress, or lack thereof, on the various issues that I have worked on over the decades. There is some big progress in at least a couple of areas, but not much to boast about in the others. I’ll start with the success stories. The Benefits of a Tight Labor Market The big one, where I feel we really have made huge progress, is the battle for full employment. It might seem like ancient history, but a quarter...

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