It is generally held, from both a global and a European perspective, that the three most impor-tant objectives for the years to come are 1) the reduction of current account imbalances, 2) the reduction of public deficits, and 3) the reduction of unemployment. This paper argues that the Stability...

We analyse the newly updated Stability Programmes of the Euro area governments by applying the simple accounting identity by which the financial balances of the government, the private sector and the foreign sector always sum to zero. While the focus of the old Stability and Growth Pact was...

The financial and economic crisis in the Euro area has revealed a number of important flaws in the economic policy framework in Europe. On the one hand, the imbalances, which have dominated European development since the introduction of the euro, are not sustainable; and this is more serious in a...

We develop a three-country, stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model to study the effects of changes in both personal and functional income distribution on national current account balances. Each country has a household sector and a non-household (corporate) sector. The household sector is...

We analyse the link between income distribution and the current account through a descriptive analysis for the G7 countries and a series of panel estimations for the G7 countries and a larger sample of 20 countries for the period 1972-2007. We find that, firstly, rising personal inequality leads...

Germany entered the euro with a current account deficit but over the entire past decade has run large and persistent current account surpluses. Besides joining the common currency, the increase of Germany’s current account since the late 1990s has been accompanied by strong shifts in the...

A simple Post Keynesian growth model is developed, in which financial variables are explicitly taken into account. Different possible accumulation regimes are derived with respect to changes of these variables. Several variants of an investment function are estimated econometrically. The...

A number of important contributions to the political economy literature have argued that changes in the financial sector have been amongst the main reflections, or even the driving forces, of recent transformations of capitalism in the rich countries. This hypothesis has been referred to as...

Various deviations from the Permanent Income consumption model with rational expectations have been discussed in the literature, including loss aversion and liquidity constraints. In the existing literature, these two types of consumption asymmetry are usually considered as mutually exclusive....

We review recent attempts to integrate 'financialisation' processes into Post-Keynesian distribution and growth models and distinguish three principal channels of influence: 1. objectives and finance restrictions of firms, 2. new opportunities for households' wealth-based and debt-financed...