This book provides an analysis of the country's political economy in transition. It documents the history of the gold mining industry's involvement in shaping the political landscape of South Africa, and shows the degree to which the political transition was induced to put in place a new mode of regulation for capital accumulation. In the process, the victims of apartheid have now become victims of democracy's neo-liberalism as the government is constrained from being developmental, interventionist and redistributive.
Structuralist macroeconomics has emerged recently as the only viable theoretical alternative for economists and practitioners in developing countries. Lance Taylor's innovative work represents a landmark in this field. It codifies a new generation of structuralist macroeconomic models that incorporate the economic power relationships of key institutions and groups, integrates both finance and real macroeconomics, and covers a diverse range of experience in the developing world over the past three decades. In an introduction Taylor explains his methodology, describes assumptions underlying the models used, and reviews theories that relate economic growth and the role of financial assets. He then takes up basic structuralist models of a closed economy and moves on to consider the open economy cases. He incorporates the latest developments in the field (inflation, financial crisis, exchange rate management, increasing returns, and the like) in a treatment that departs substantially from economic orthodoxy. Taylor first addresses the question of how to specify "closure" or define the causal structure of macro models. He also considers how income redistribution influences growth and output and how income redistribution interacts with inflation. Next, an investment-driven non-full employment growth model draws on ideas introduced earlier to illustrate how different sorts of macroeconomic policies affect short-run adjustment and growth prospects over time. Taylor then turns to the problems proposed by economic openness in a stylized semi-industrialized country, starting with international trade. A fix-price/flex-price model is developed, and additional models demonstrate cases of policy relevance as well as interactions between class conflict and growth.
The first volume of IDS Companions to Development Studies focuses on pivotal writing emerging from the IDS fellowship during the last 50 years. It includes five topics: perspectives and paradigms, debunking myths, development policy, gender and international perspectives, and policy, as well as names like Seers, Singer, Lipton, Reg Green.
'The editors of this volume have brought together an invaluable set of essays on each of these issues. the overall post-Keynesian message, of course - one that comes through very clearly - is that employment, growth and development are not at all separate topics, but each depend on the appropriate choice of macroeconomic policies for a monetary production economy.' - John Smithin, York University, Canada
The Fund has recognized in recent years that one cannot separate issues of economic growth and stability on one hand and equality on the other. Indeed, there is a strong case for considering inequality and an inability to sustain economic growth as two sides of the same coin. Central to the Fund’s mandate is providing advice that will enable members’ economies to grow on a sustained basis. But the Fund has rightly been cautious about recommending the use of redistributive policies given that such policies may themselves undercut economic efficiency and the prospects for sustained growth (the so-called “leaky bucket” hypothesis written about by the famous Yale economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s). This SDN follows up the previous SDN on inequality and growth by focusing on the role of redistribution. It finds that, from the perspective of the best available macroeconomic data, there is not a lot of evidence that redistribution has in fact undercut economic growth (except in extreme cases). One should be careful not to assume therefore—as Okun and others have—that there is a big tradeoff between redistribution and growth. The best available macroeconomic data do not support such a conclusion.
This volume seeks to go beyond the microeconomic view of wages as a cost having negative consequences on a given firm, to consider the positive macroeconomic dynamics associated with wages as a major component of aggregate demand.
Neoclassical growth theory is the dominant perspective for explaining economic growth. At its core are four implicit assumptions: 1) economic output can become decoupled from energy consumption; 2) economic distribution is unrelated to growth; 3) large institutions are not important for growth; and 4) labor force structure is not important for growth. Drawing on a wide range of data from the economic history of the United States, this book tests the validity of these assumptions and finds no empirical support. Instead, connections are found between the growth in energy consumption and such disparate phenomena as economic redistribution, corporate employment concentration, and changing labor force structure. The integration of energy into an economic growth model has the potential to offer insight into the future effects of fossil fuel depletion on key macroeconomic indicators, which is already manifested in stalled or diminished growth and escalating debt in many national economies. This book argues for an alternative, biophysical perspective to the study of growth, and presents a set of "stylized facts" that such an approach must successfully explain. Aspects of biophysical analysis are combined with differential monetary analysis to arrive at a unique empirical methodology for investigating the elements and dependencies of the economic growth process.
This report provides evidence of a fairly generalised increase in income inequality over the past two decades across OECD countries, but the timing, intensity and causes of the increase differ from what is typically suggested in the media.
