Description:
Seventy years ago a bizarre tragedy befell one of Australia’s most eminent economists just minutes after giving his evening lecture. This paper revisits the case of Edward Shann and, in particular, the forensic evidence that persuaded the coroner to conclude that he took his own life. The paper presents new evidence that might contest that finding. In doing so, a brief account is given of Shann’s illustrious career.
Description:
Seventy years ago a bizarre tragedy befell one of Australia’s most eminent economists just minutes after giving his evening lecture. This paper revisits the case of Edward Shann and, in particular, the forensic evidence that persuaded the coroner to conclude that he took his own life. The paper presents new evidence that might contest that finding. In doing so, a brief account is given of Shann’s illustrious career.
Description:
Cycles, crises and innovation are the major economic forces that shape capitalist economies. Central to this book is a critical realist political economy approach based on the works of Joseph Schumpeter and Michal Kalecki who identified cycles, crises and innovation as the three dynamic forces plotting the path of economic development. The book examines how the rise of capital, through investment, enshrines innovation in profit and power which determines the course of cycles and crises. Based on this analysis, strategic intervention by transformative eco-innovation is proposed as a public policy path to ecologically sustainable development
Description:
This paper develops an analysis of innovation based on Allen Oakley's (2002) primary themes of ontological priority, agency-structure and critical realism. I develop a history of thought and contemporaneous endogenous view of innovation in an environment of uncertainty, potential novelty and policy priority. Drawing on the literature of Austrian, institutional, Schumpeterian, Penrosean and other schools, I explore a continuum of agency-structure relationships that enhance innovation. These relationships cover environments that are based on agency and contingency, through to those that balance contingency with containment (structure), and situations that are heavily contained. The literature on innovation is investigated vis-à-vis the degree to which different environments encourage creative, original marketable opportunities for the common good. Innovation policy-making is then investigated through the traverse process of irreversibility, and within a retroductionist planning process. Overall, I seek to advance the cause of realism through innovations generated in different environments.
Description:
This paper develops an analysis of innovation based on Allen Oakley's (2002) primary themes of ontological priority, agency-structure and critical realism. I develop a history of thought and contemporaneous endogenous view of innovation in an environment of uncertainty, potential novelty and policy priority. Drawing on the literature of Austrian, institutional, Schumpeterian, Penrosean and other schools, I explore a continuum of agency-structure relationships that enhance innovation. These relationships cover environments that are based on agency and contingency, through to those that balance contingency with containment (structure), and situations that are heavily contained. The literature on innovation is investigated vis-à-vis the degree to which different environments encourage creative, original marketable opportunities for the common good. Innovation policy-making is then investigated through the traverse process of irreversibility, and within a retroductionist planning process. Overall, I seek to advance the cause of realism through innovations generated in different environments.
Description:
Though there is a consensus surrounding the importance of people working at older ages – and in a more flexible way – trends in employment and trade patterns mean that existing policies are not as effective as they need to be.
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The paper is motivated by a desire to find common ground between mainstream and post-Keynesian approaches to fiscal policy. A post-Keynesian approach with origins in Kalecki offers a promising line of enquiry which is developed here. The paper identifies the principal differences between the Keynesian and Kaleckian approaches. The possibilities are explored of finding accommodation between the mainstream and Kaleckian approaches to the taxation of greenhouse gases. The macroeconomic implications of taxing greenhouse gases are identified. However, these may be thwarted by the emergence of ›political aspects of innovation‹, akin to Kalecki’s ›political aspects of full employment‹. A Kaleckian balanced budget approach allied to fiscal incentives to innovate offers some prospect of common ground with the mainstream.
Description:
J.M. ‘Pete’ Garland was an outstanding Australian economist sometimes much overlooked. Despite a promising academic career, as evidenced by his work on land tax, he was lost to Australian universities when the Commonwealth Bank snapped him up on his return to Australia from Cambridge. He became a key figure in the development of Australian central banking practices, establishing a longstanding liquidity convention that the private trading banks upheld for many years. He was also instrumental in building up the economic research department at the Bank. He maintained his links with academe and was considered the man most likely to write the biography of L.F. Giblin.
Description:
A radical economic change, such as moving from a centrally administered economy to an economy based on market relations, also requires reform of the institutional structure. The shock-therapy process of transition utilises market incentives to internalise the developmental process of institutions instead of relying on the government, an actor external to the whole process. In contrast, gradualists argue that the development of the institutional structure requires government action. Gradualists recommend active state intervention in institutional development. Empirical evidence is inconclusive as to the more appropriate method. It is argued that a combination of the two methods would produce an optimal sequence. (JEL: P 2, P 3).
Description:
FOR many developing countries, especially in Africa and Central Asia, cotton is an important cash crop. It is receiving attention of late because four poor cotton-exporting West African countries (the Cotton-4: Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali) have demanded that cotton subsidy and import tariff removal be part of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Development Agenda (DDA). Cotton subsidies are mostly provided by governments in high-income countries, and part of the US cotton subsidy programme has been ruled illegal following a WTO dispute settlement case brought by Brazil. Hence some reform can be expected soon, especially if the DDA is to live up to its name of being a development round (Sumner, 2006). This paper seeks to provide estimates of what is at stake in terms of cotton
Description:
When Joan Robinson visited Monash University in 1975 she was at the height of her fame. She had just brought out a new alternative economics textbook and was strongly tipped, in the International Women’s Year, to win the Nobel Prize in economics. The Cambridge School of Economics, which she represented, was in late bloom but it was the neoclassical school that was proving resurgent and already exhibiting a strong presence at Monash. It would make for theatrics when she arrived there. Although the visit to Australia overall was only for a few months, she gave lectures to first-year students at several universities and made several public presentations. The timing of her visit was poignant, with Australia, like Britain, caught in the throes of stagflation. There was an ongoing reappraisal of macroeconomic policy. Robinson’s visit occurred while Milton Friedman, too, was visiting Australia on a stockbroker-funded lecture tour to push the monetarist explanation of inflation. Drawing on her correspondence with Richard Kahn and some of the lectures and the reaction they provoked, this paper recalls Robinson’s visit and assesses the impact, if any, it had upon Australian economics.
Description:
Economics, Keynes once wrote, can be a ‘very dangerous science’. Sometimes, though, it can be moulded to further the common good though it might need a leap in mental outlook, a whole new zeitgeist to be able do do. This book is about a transformation in Australian economists’ thought and ideas during the interwar period. It focuses upon the interplay between economic ideas, players and policy sometimes in the public arena. In a decade marked by depression, recovery and international political turbulence Australian economists moved from a classical orthodox economic position to that of a cautious Keynesianism by 1939. We look at how a small collective of economists tried to influence policy-making in the nineteen-thirties. Economists felt obliged to seek changes to the parameters as economic conditions altered but, more importantly, as their insights about economic management changed. There are three related themes that underscore this book. Firstly, the professionalisation of Australian economics took a gigantic leap in this period, aided in part, by the adverse circumstances confronting the economy but also by the aspirations economists held for their discipline. A second theme relates to the rather unflattering reputation foisted upon interwar economists after 1945. That transition underlies a third theme of this book, namely, how Australian economists were emboldened by Keynes’s General Theory to confidently push for greater management of economic activity. By 1939 Australian economists conceptualized from a new theoretic framework and from one which they advanced comment and policy advice. This book therefore will rehabilitate the works of Australian interwar economists, arguing that they not only had an enviable international reputation but also facilitated the acceptance of Keynes’s General Theory among policymakers before most of their counterparts elsewhere.
Description:
This paper recalls the extraordinary lengths to which the University of Melbourne went to fill one of its most prized and ambitious endowments – the Ritchie Chair in economic research. Following a rebuff from an eminent English economist, an international head-hunt was conducted by two committees. While there was some interest in the names put forward, it was D.B Copland who rather unselfishly solved the problem by suggested a local enigmatic figure who had been initially overlooked. The subsequent appointment proved a wise one and reflected well upon the man who initially suggested it.
Description:
This paper recalls the extraordinary lengths to which the University of Melbourne went to fill one of its most prized and ambitious endowments – the Ritchie Chair in economic research. Following a rebuff from an eminent English economist, an international head-hunt was conducted by two committees. While there was some interest in the names put forward, it was D.B Copland who rather unselfishly solved the problem by suggested a local enigmatic figure who had been initially overlooked. The subsequent appointment proved a wise one and reflected well upon the man who initially suggested it.
Description:
Post Keynesian economic analysis recommended a different reform program for transition economies than the orthodox model in the form of shock therapy implemented and imposed by the Washington consensus. In contrast to the dominant view, Post Keynesians recommended gradual price liberalization, which involved maintaining fixed prices and wages and subsidies, the establishment and maintenance of buffer stocks, government intervention to stimulate investment and incomes, and industry-incomes policies. With regard to monetary policy, Post Keynesians argued that a discretionary monetary policy was essential to reduce unemployment. With respect to fiscal policy, budget deficits were essential to maintain full employment.