Articles
Articles and analyses from the INET community on the key economic questions of our time.
Sinn Advises Greece to Reinstate the Drachma
It is time for Greece to make a daring leap and adopt its own currency, says Ifo President Hans-Werner Sinn. “The drachma should be introduced immediately as a virtual currency,” Sinn said in Munich.
Fiscal implications of the ECB’s bond-buying program
The monetary-fiscal policy connection is under scrutiny by the German Constitutional Court in the context of the ECB’s OMT bond-buying programme. This column argues that most analyses are deeply flawed by the misapplication of private-company default principles to the central bank. ECB bond-buying transforms public bonds into monetary base, and sovereign-default risk into inflation risk. The real question is: What is the non-inflationary limit to money-base expansion? This depends upon the economic situation and is much higher in the current liquidity-trap setting.
The rise of financialization has led to lower living standards and reduced growth in the U.S.
The last 30 years has seen a massive rise in the importance of financial instruments in the American economy. But what has been the impact of this shift in corporate investment strategy?
Why journal editors should commission history papers for their anniversary issues
Writing the history of economic journals is not merely a way to reconstruct the development of new fields and new approaches to economics. It also recasts current debates on peer-review, retractions, open-access, replicability, and bias in scientific publishing in a wider perspective. It answers important questions on the influence of editors, publishers and referees on the development or marginalization of various economic approaches. But such endeavour requires the preservation of journals’ archives, the recognition of historical expertise, and economists’ adoption of a more relaxed and humble approach to their history.
History as Personal Expression — a personal note
Economists and historians of economics have constructed different (and sometimes conflicting) narratives about the past of their field. In fact what is history for economists may not be what is history for historians. To celebrate its 125th anniversary, the Economic Journal invited renowned economists to discuss important contributions published in the past by the journal and the works on similar topics by historians of economics are absent from these accounts. History of economics here seems to have the weight of a JEL descriptor attached to an invited contribution, which we ought to agree that it is not much.
New Climate-Economic Thinking
We Must Lean Over Backwards
Marxian Economics: The Oldest Systems Theory Is New Again (or Always?)
The best new economic thinking in an age of the dominance of rent-seeking will be Marxian economic thinking
Why Understanding Money Matters in Greece
The solutions to Greece’s crisis challenge many existing economic paradigms, including the concept of “money” itself.