Journal of Economic Issues articles from June 1994

Journal of Economic Issues archives from June 1994

The Veblen-Commons Award: Robert L. Heilbroner. (economist)
June 1, 1994... It is both a personal joy and a professional honor to introduce Robert L. Heilbroner as the 1993 Veblen-Commons recipient. It has become traditional to begin the introduction of the current Veblen-Commons Award recipient by drawing linkages,...

Vision in economic thought: remarks upon receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award. (economist Robert Heilbroner speech) (Transcript)
June 1, 1994... I fell into the history of economic thought more or less by chance, having signed up as a just discharged veteran at the New School for Social Research, which I had never visited before in my life, for a course given by Adolph Lowe, of whom I...

Economy as instituted process: change, transformation, and progress.
June 1, 1994... In this year of 1994, we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Publication of two oracular cornerstones of our common intellectual lineage: Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation [1944] and Clarence Ayres's The Theory of Economic Progress...

The enclosure movement revisited: the South African commons.
June 1, 1994... As I have said elsewhere in relation to the European conquest of North America, "Private property is not necessarily theft, as Proudhon put it, but a good deal of theft has ended up as private property" [Bromley 1991, 25]. Nowhere is this more...

So what's wrong with dumping on Africa?
June 1, 1994... In February 1992, The Economist published an excerpt of internal World Bank memo written by lawrence Summers in December 1991. This sparked a short-lived controversy in print media and protests from environmentalists [Summers 1992]. Before The...

The networks as infrastructure - the reestablishment of market power.
June 1, 1994... In the past few years, public utility networks have come to be recognized as an integral part of the nation's infrastructure [e.g., NTIA 1993!. This accords public utilities a new dimension of importance because of the interdependent...

The emergence of global networks in telecommunications: transcending national regulation and market constraints.
June 1, 1994... Telecommunications is currently undergoing an unprecedented reorganization from a predominantly national organization to an industry that operates globally. The importance of electronic telecommunications for international communications and...

Social goals and partial deregulation of the electric utility industry.
June 1, 1994... Electric power is an essential and vital element of the nation's infrastructure. The electric power industry is also extensively regulated. Federal policy is moving toward partial deregulation of the generation/wholesale power portion of the...

State experience in InterLATA toll deregulation.
June 1, 1994... While the Federal Communications Commission has declared on numerous occasions that the interstate toll market is competitive, this declaration is not universally accepted. It can be argued that significant market power exists and is being...

Economic research and public policy toward employee ownership in the United States.
June 1, 1994... Nineteen ninety-four marks the twentieth anniversary of the passage of the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act (ERISA), which codified the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) as a form of qualified compensation. There is now a...

Profit sharing and public policy.
June 1, 1994... The structure of American workplaces, and the relation of this structure to economic performance, has received increased attention from researchers and policymakers [e.g., Reich 1993; U.S. Department of Labor 1993]. In contrast to the prediction...

Post-industrial metaphors: understanding corporate restructuring and the economic environment of the 1990s.
June 1, 1994... The most used and abused word of the 1990s is "change." Indeed, in the 1992 election, Americans voted for "change." Bill Clinton's challenge to Americans to have the "courage to change" echoes the refrain of corporate America throughout the...

Instrument-targeting or context-making? A new look at the theory of economic policy.
June 1, 1994... To be invited to give the C.E. Ayres lecture is a great honor. For an European economist, it is at the same time a great gift. It is an occasion (or invitation?) to indulge in American institutional thought. Given the riches of this tradition, it...

Long waves, long cycles, and long swings. (economic growth)
June 1, 1994... Have there been, since (say) 1800, "long wave" cycles of some 45-60 years in world rates of economic growth? If so, we are in a downswing. Some 60 years' data have accumulated since Kondratiev and Schumpeter's works, with much improvement in data...

An institutionalist review of long wave theories: Schumpeterian innovation, modes of regulation, and social structures of accumulation.
June 1, 1994... Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, most highly developed capitalist economies have suffered from a high level of instability and a sustained reduction in the rate of growth of real GDP. This has manifested itself in the three major recessions...

The impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on commercial banking.
June 1, 1994... This paper examines the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on commercial banking by comparing the banking systems of the United States, Canada, and Mexico and the consequences of the NAFTA treaty on these systems. It will...

The Japanese cooperative sector.
June 1, 1994... The modern history of Japanese cooperatives began in the Meiji Era of the nineteenth century. Today in Japan, more than 30 million people are members in cooperatives.(1) The cooperative sector is especially strong in agriculture and related...

The role of labor in post-socialist Hungary.
June 1, 1994... An examination of Hungary's 1992 macroeconomic indicators is startling, yet there are signs that the situation is moderating. Gross domestic product declined 4-6 percent, compared to a 12 percent drop in 1991. Household consumption declined 2-3...

Women and the Great Retrenchment: the political economy of gender in the 1980s.
June 1, 1994... Policy analysts and scholars are only now beginning the serious task of sifting through the debris of the 1980s to chronicle the impacts of policy changes and to evaluate the policies as well as the policymakers. The 1980s will no doubt be...

The implicit male norm in Australian housing finance.
June 1, 1994... Australian literature on women and housing has tended to concentrate on sole parent women or single "never married" women from the conventional view of discrimination through lower income, lower human capital investment, or by combining single...

Toward a feminist expansion of macroeconomics: money matters.
June 1, 1994... Orthodox economics has long been confident that money is of minor importance in economic life. From Adam Smith onward, we have heard that it is real goods, not money, that determine economic well-being and that "economic scarcity" refers to...

Institutional myopia and policy distortions: the promotion of homeownership for the poor.
June 1, 1994... Housing is acknowledged to be a national problem in the United States. The precise nature of that problem, however, is largely unspecified--and certainly not an element of policy consensus. Most policies are directed at relatively short-term...

An American dilemma: fifty years later. (economic condition of Black Americans)
June 1, 1994... Half a century ago, Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma [1944] was published. This paper attempts to assess the arguments and the policy solutions of this classic work on the economic condition of black America 50 years after its initial...

Market competition and the failure of competitiveness enhancement policies in the United States.
June 1, 1994... U.S. efforts to enhance the international competitiveness of its industries have largely been a failure. U.S. export market shares in most manufacturing industries have fallen steadily over the past 20 years as have the average earnings of U.S....

Technology policy in the post-Cold War world.
June 1, 1994... Technology policy in the United States has been driven by the Pentagon for many decades. The civilian technology strategy was simply to hope for "spin-offs" from the nation's investment in military technology. Any public effort to improve the...

To market, to market, with what? Some observations on labor market rationales for industrial policy.
June 1, 1994... With the arrival of the Clinton administration in Washington came an increase in the volume of rhetoric calling for government policies aimed at creating "good" jobs, "high-performance" jobs, and more jobs in "high-value," "high-tech," or...

Is there a new institutional consensus in labor economics?
June 1, 1994... We are interested in the extent of convergence between paradigms in labor economics. Proponents of both neoclassical and institutional paradigms now embrace the common premise that labor markets cannot be adequately understood in terms of the...

Trading ethics: auditing the market.
June 1, 1994... Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. --Friedman, 1962 ... ...

The pragmatic instrumentalist perspective on the theory of institutional change.
June 1, 1994... The purpose of this paper is to explore certain implications of John Dewey's pragmatic instrumentalist philosophy for an understanding of the meaning and significance of institutional change.(1) It will be argued that the theory of...