‘Post-Keynesian’ became an umbrella term for those heterodox economists wanting to move away from the dominant neo-classical paradigm but not comfortable with another umbrella term of ‘political economy’. This review is about the contributions to understanding societal and economic change from an established and internationally recognised group of post-Keynesian economists. Many of the features which differentiate them from other, and sometimes fluid, subsets of post-Keynesian economists derive from their Kaleckian inspiration.

This personal biography by the son of GC Harcourt focuses mainly on the political aspects of the life and work of this important Australian and Cambridge economist.

In the 1950s and 1960s unemployment averaged about 2 per cent. The lowest level of unemployment in the last twenty years was double that and long term unemployment, virtually unknown in the 1950s and 1960s, has been a severe problem. In each period there were two major slumps. We examine the progress of each slump and macroeconomic policy responses in each case, in order to search for reasons for this contrast. The priority given to minimising unemployment rather than restraining inflation is the most important difference between the two periods. Other major principles stand out, the most important of which are that in response to a downturn a fiscal policy stimulus is essential and must play the major part of any response; and that implementation must be swift and then followed up by further measures if necessary.

Unless the global financial system is radically reformed – and the necessary reforms are looking increasingly unlikely to occur – it will continue to be conducive to financial crises. Government rhetoric and actions can often influence in desirable ways both the speculative actions that now determine the exchange rate and the effect of exchange rate movements on the domestic economy. Managing the exchange rate should start with Australian support for measures such as the Tobin tax that dampen speculation. In 2008 and 2009, exchange rate changes were helpful in reducing the impact of the global financial crisis on Australia, largely because of a very clear commitment by the Australian government to make preservation of jobs its top priority. In 2009, a rapid rise in the exchange rate was unhelpful. In the short run, little can be done about this, but in the longer run, it is possible to offset the adverse effects.

Governments’ economic policies need to be based on a coherent view of the role of innovation and productivity in sustaining growth. This article analyses advice on fostering innovation from Australia’s main statutory economics adviser, the Productivity Commission. It argues that the Productivity Commission’s comprehensive 2007 report, Public Support for Science and Innovation, contributed to a policy vacuum hampering government support for innovation for nearly a decade. First, within the Productivity Commission’s understanding of innovation was a contradiction between its required policy targeting criteria and the impossibility of meeting these criteria. Second, the resulting stance on innovation policy was at odds with research and theory on the drivers of innovation and hence growth – particularly innovation systems theories and those based on evolutionary economics. The ensuing innovation policy vacuum suggests that the Productivity Commission placed the abstract ideological ‘purity’ of neoclassical economic theory above empirical exploration of how government can best support Australia’s future economic development. Since late 2015, moves to fill this policy vacuum have included a Senate inquiry, a government department restructure, and the creation of a new Innovation and Science statutory advisory board. Whether these initiatives foster sustained innovation will depend on the extent to which they adopt approaches based on innovation systems or evolutionary economics, and transcend the static neoclassical mindset espoused by the Productivity Commission.

This is an edited version of a lecture by economist and former Australian Treasury Secretary (2001–2011) Dr Ken Henry, delivered at a Colloquium in honour of Professor J.W. Nevile, held at the University of New South Wales on 10 October 2012. Taking a practitioner’s perspective, the article surveys the management of the Australian economy from the 1970s to the present, with a focus on the reasons Australia escaped the global financial crisis of 2008 and the lessons for macroeconomic policymakers to be drawn from that experience. The author concludes that macroeconomic policy practitioners have to think deeply about microeconomic connections and the potency of different instruments in addressing shocks with different sources. They also have to deal with considerable uncertainty. The global financial crisis demonstrated forcefully that there is no separation between macroeconomics, financial system stability, prudential regulation, micro-level incentive structures and market efficiency.

The power of finance ensured that, other than for an initial fiscal push to salvage financial institutions, monetary measures in the form of quantitative easing, involving the infusion of large volumes of cheap liquidity, were the principal response to the 2008 global financial crisis. The effects of the generalised and prolonged dependence on such measures have been a substantial increase in vulnerability, at the centre of which is a huge build-up of private – especially corporate – debt, and unwarranted and unsustainable asset price inflation in both developed country and ‘emerging economy’ markets. A consequence of these processes is a massive increase in income and wealth inequality across the world, which limits the level of effective demand and growth.

Until recently, modern macroeconomic models have remained solidly grounded on assumptions of rational expectations, efficient markets and representative agents, with policy prescriptions focused on the power of markets, and complex and esoteric financial intermediation instruments justified as solutions to problems of asymmetric information and risk. In modern microeconomics, behavioural economic analysis has flourished, focusing on individual responses and interactions. By contrast, in macroeconomics, humans are assumed to behave as if they are mathematical machines, making decisions in a mechanical, objective way. From this perspective, it is difficult to properly capture the instabilities that characterise modern macroeconomies and financial systems. While some progress has been made in recognising the bounds to rationality, the complexity of the macroeconomy can be captured fully only by embedding psychological and sociological forces more fully into macroeconomic models. Keynes was a pioneer in analysing the impacts of socio-psychological influences on macroeconomic phenomena. This article explores some of Keynes’ fundamental ideas about socio-psychological macroeconomic influences, including insights from A Treatise on Probability (1921) onwards, and links these insights both with modern behavioural economic theory and current macroeconomic policy debates.

The part played by unemployment in the rise to power of Hitler weighed on the minds of leaders in Western democracies. There was a determination to create a world in which large-scale unemployment was abnormal and at worst only a temporary phenomenon. The war had shown that this was possible in a community united to pursue a common goal and the aim was to create such a community in a world free from the horrors of war, by creating communities in which the welfare of every person was important. Australia was remarkably successful in achieving this for 30 years. Its success depended on governments responding to any sustained increase in unemployment by undertaking large increases in public sector expenditure supported by accommodating monetary policy and tax cuts if desirable. In bad times as well as good, there was a determination to ensure that both the incomes and prices paid for necessities by the less well-off did not force anyone to live in poverty. The biggest obstacle to achieving this today is the growth of neoliberalism with its emphasis on ‘freedom’ or giving individuals the ability to act as they please with minimal constraints and an ideological commitment to small government.

These books, different in style and content but united in purpose and major conclusions, analyse events from 2007 to 2010 to ascertain why the economic disaster happened and what must be done to put the United States economy (on which both books focus) on a more secure footing, and prevent any recurrence of the extended crisis of those years. Both target the increasing influence of market liberalism over the last 30 years, and the institutions of capitalist economies which they have encouraged. Taylor focuses more on the regulation of the international financial sector, and Palley on labour market policy. They agree that both need to be addressed if the United States economy is to be restored to health. Both argue that growing income inequality in the US must be reversed before the US economy can significantly improve. Finally, they stress the interrelationship between political ideology and economic explanation, and argue that value free positive economics is a myth.

This paper seeks to understand the link between resource governance and investor expectations in resource-rich countries. We test whether voluntary membership in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a public-private partnership that promotes transparency and accountability in the extractives sector, behaves as a credible signalling mechanism to investors that governments in resource-rich countries can manage resource revenue and adhere to sustainable fiscal policies in the medium and long run. Using an interrupted time series analysis coupled with a fixed effects model, we examine whether investor expectations on the price of sovereign debt behave as a credible signalling mechanism in the presence of certain conditions. Results indicate that in some cases there is a significant change in spread on the default price of sovereign debt as a result of announcement of either EITI candidacy or EITI compliance. However, it is clear that EITI membership alone is not a sufficient signal to investors that a country can effectively manage its resource revenues in the long run because the result of EITI implementation is heavily influenced by country-specific conditions.

Why did the transnational synchronization of wage inflations fail during the first 10 years of the euro? We analyze data from 1999 to 2008 for 12 euro members and estimate increases of nominal unit labor costs both in the overall economy and in manufacturing as dependent variables. While our analysis confirms that differences in economic growth shaped the inflation of labor costs, we add a political-institutional argument to the debate and argue that the designs of the wage regimes had an additional, independent impact. In coordinated labor regimes, increases in nominal unit labor costs tended to fall below the European Central Bank’s inflation target, while in uncoordinated labor regimes, the respective increases tended to exceed the European inflation target. Due to the stickiness of wage-bargaining institutions, the lack of the capacity to synchronize inflation is not likely to disappear in the foreseeable future.

The transcript of a panel discussion marking the 50th anniversary of John Muth's “Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements” (Econometrica 1961). The panel consisted of Michael Lovell, Robert Lucas, Dale Mortensen, Robert Shiller, and Neil Wallace. The discussion was moderated by Kevin Hoover and Warren Young. The panel touched on a wide variety of issues related to the rational-expectations hypothesis, including its history, starting with Muth's work at Carnegie Tech; its methodological role; applications to policy; its relationship to behavioral economics; its role in the recent financial crisis; and its likely future.

The panel discussion was held in a session sponsored by the History of Economics Society at the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) meetings in the Capitol 1 Room of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Denver, Colorado.

This paper studies the effects of social insurance policies on efficiency and distribution of resources in a general equilibrium model of a closed economy with heterogeneous agents and repeated moral hazard. I compare optimal allocations in stationary recursive equilibria for economies with different guaranteed minimum consumption levels (social insurance). I show that the efficiency–equality trade-off associated with social insurance does not hold: Efficiency and inequality decrease as the minimum guaranteed consumption increases to around one third of the average consumption. However, if social insurance expands even further, the efficiency loss becomes very high and inequality increases.