In this paper we briefly review the evolution of the Italian economy in the post-war period, discussing the shift from a first period when fiscal policy was targeted - among other things - at full employment, to a later period when controlling inflation through a "foreign discipline" became the...

National Central Banks (NCBs) of the Eurosystem pool profits and losses related to monetary policy operations to form the Eurosystem's so-called 'monetary income'. This is then redistributed - i.e. allocated - among NCBs according to respective capital keys (the participation shares of each NCB...

In the last two decades Italy implemented a number of reforms of the public pay-as-you-go (PAYG) scheme that curtailed future pensions. Governments therefore felt the need to increase the number of workers contributing to fully funded (FF) schemes to offset the expected fall in public pensions....

The paper provides an account of the meaning and implications of TARGET2 in the eurozone (EZ) balance of payments crisis. In this context, it discusses Hans-Werner Sinn's thesis about a stealth bail-out of the EZ periphery by the ECB from a heterodox perspective. Financial liberalisation, a...

Starting from the seminal works of Wynne Godley (1999; Godley and Lavoie 2005, 2007a, 2007b), the literature adopting stock-flow consistent (SFC) models for two or more countries has been flourishing, showing that consistently taking into account real and financial markets of two open economies will...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall, and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. This paper assesses the magnitude of the impact of housing...

This paper considers a plan proposed by Warren Buffett, in which importers would be required to obtain certificates proportional to the amount of non-oil goods (and possibly also services) they brought into the country. These certificates would be granted to firms that exported goods. Exporting...

This paper presents the main features of the macroeconomic model being used at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, which has proven to be a useful tool in tracking the current financial and economic crisis. We investigate the connections of the model to the New Cambridge" approach, and...