Some have argued that a significant decrease in the demand for money, due to financial innovations, could imply that central banks are unable to implement effective monetary policies. This paper argues that central banks are always able to influence the economy's interest rates, because their...

This paper provides an analysis of Keynes's original Bancor proposal as well as more recent proposals for fixed exchange rates. We argue that these schemes fail to pay due attention to the importance of capital movements in today's economy, and that they implicitly adopt an unsatisfactory notion...

In the debate on monetary policy strategies on both sides of the Atlantic, it is now almost a commonplace to contrast the Fed and the ECB by pointing out the former's flexibility and capacity to adjust rigidity, and the latter's extreme caution, and obsession with low inflation. In looking at...

This paper contributes to the debate on income growth and distribution from a nonmainstream perspective. It looks, in particular, at the role that the degree of capacity utilization plays in the process of growth of an economy that is not perfectly competitive. The distinctive feature of the...

This paper studies the effects of an (exogenous) increase of nominal wages on profits, output, and growth. Inspired by an article by Micha± Kalecki (1991), who concentrated on the effects on total profits, the paper develops a model that explicitly considers the dynamics of demand, prices,...

First paragraph: Giuseppe Fontana and Mark Setterfield have edited an interesting book on the relationship between recent developments in macroeconomics and the teaching of the discipline at the undergraduate and intermediate levels (Fontana/Setterfield 2009). The editors have chosen to focus...

Post-Keynesians in general, and Geoff Harcourt in particular, have always laid much emphasis on incomes policies, which allow policy-makers to implement expansionary demand-side policies and ensure price stability. Mainstream economics, instead, gives little, if any, relevance to incomes...

The paper deals with the relationship between public spending and growth as well as the dynamics of the ratio of public debt to GDP. The authors show that a composition of public spending that favors productive expenditures, that is, those with a direct positive effect on the economy's long-run...