Journal of Economic Issues articles from June 1998

Journal of Economic Issues archives from June 1998

The institutional economics of poverty: an inquiry into the causes and effects of poverty.
June 1, 1998... Remark Upon Receiving the Veblen-Commons Award The thesis of this essay is that the failure of the American people to invest adequately in the human capital represented by impoverished children is both the most important cause and the most...

Against inequality. (income inequality)
June 1, 1998... Definition and Plan of Attack Inequality is the systematic division of the members of a society into separate groups for the benefit of one group at the harm of the other. I call members of the benefited group the top dogs and members of the...

Static and dynamic comparative advantage: a multi-period analysis with declining terms of trade.
June 1, 1998... There is no body of economic theory that has achieved greater professional acceptance than David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage and the modern emendations of Ricardo's "law." Criticisms of comparative advantage and its extensions from...

Speculation and the dollar in the 1980s.
June 1, 1998... With the end of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s, the market for foreign currency grew rapidly in both size and instability. The liberalization of capital flows that followed the adoption of floating exchange rates brought vastly larger flows of...

In defense of a tax on foreign exchange.
June 1, 1998... This past fall has been a most interesting period in the history of the world's financial markets. Several East Asian countries, so recently celebrated as models of orthodox economic development strategies, suddenly foundered under the pressure...

Integrated international production and non-market activity.
June 1, 1998... The greater reliance on markets in managing economic activity is now recognized as a major feature of the new world economy. To many, it has appeared that the ideological contest between market and non-market is over and has been won by market....

Conditionality, restructuring, and the reperipherization of Latin America.
June 1, 1998... During recent decades, many Latin American nations have undertaken market-oriented economic reform programs. These reforms have arisen in response to perceived failures of the structuralist-inspired import substitution approach to development of...

Mexico's liberalization strategy, 10 years on: results and alternatives.
June 1, 1998... A liberalization strategy began in Mexico during 1988 under the Salinas administration, and since 1994, that strategy has been continued, with minor changes, under President Zedillo. The Mexican economic strategy is an important test case for the...

International conservation assistance in an era of structural changes.
June 1, 1998... The foreign debt crises that afflicted many Latin American and Caribbean nations, beginning with Mexico in 1982, led to lending programs by multilateral lending agencies (MLAs) that required recipients to undertake structural reforms in their...

Multilateral trade negotiations and the changing prospects for third world development: assessing from a southern perspective.
June 1, 1998... It has been three years since the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the implementation, subject to differentiated phase-in periods for different areas, of the agreements reached in the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade...

Rethinking American participation in economic development: an institutionalist assessment.
June 1, 1998... I begin this paper with a personal note. In 1989, I spent a month in Bujumbura, Burundi, under the aegis of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Previously I had toured six central African countries, also for the USIA. These two tours enabled me...

Interwar Japanese economists - how did they pick their questions?
June 1, 1998... This project explores the ideas of a group of economists trained at Tokyo University between 1910 and 1927, mainly Ouchi Hyoe and his students - Sakisaka Itsuro, Omori Yoshitaro, Arisawa Hiromi, Wakimura Yoshitaro, Takahashi Masao, and Minobe...

Exporting a Japanese model? Collusion in the foreign aid program.
June 1, 1998... In recent years, we have heard more and more about a Japanese model of development. This model differs markedly from the orthodox models of capitalist development championed in Great Britain and the United States, particularly in its reliance on...

An evolutionary interpretation of the Japanese depression in the 1990s.
June 1, 1998... Modern capitalism has entered into a transition era since the 1970s. The four institutional structures that had supported "the Golden Age of Modern Capitalism" became unstable. First, Pax Americana has been declining. Second, the increase in...

The political economy of liberalization and regulation: trade policy for the new era.
June 1, 1998... The emerging global economy is a source of both great promise and anxiety. Tariffs and quotas have been reduced to historically low levels through various negotiating rounds sponsored by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As these...

Current welfare reform: a return to the principles of 1834.
June 1, 1998... In his Presidential Address of 1992, President Clinton announced his intention of "ending welfare as we know it." That promise has finally come to fruition in principle, if not yet in actual practice, with the passage of The Personal...

Poverty and charity: early analytical conflicts between institutional economics and neoclassicism.
June 1, 1998... The recent restoration of capitalism in the United States, and elsewhere, has renewed interest in a century-old theoretical conflict about the analysis of poverty in a capitalist system. One of the defining characteristics of the difference...

Adam Smith's higher vision of capitalism.
June 1, 1998... Adam Smith had a vision of capitalism that was much more elevated than that of most neoclassical economists. His ideal society would satisfy the ends of human nature as he identified them, and it is from this standard that Smith criticized...

Postmodernism, institutionalism, and statistics: considerations for an institutionalist statistical method.
June 1, 1998... In this paper, we outline and advocate the use of an approach to statistical measurement and evaluation informed by the link between postmodernism (as a general way of thinking about the world) and institutionalist economics, which is practically...

Public purpose and private ownership: some implications of the "great capitalist restoration" for the politicization of private sector firms in Britain.
June 1, 1998... The business firm carries the burden of delivering many aspects of "the satisfactory life" in the developed world of the late twentieth century. It is a fundamental unit of social organization. Analogous in many ways to the family, it takes many...

Globalization and democracy.
June 1, 1998... Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow. - Isaiah Berlin In this paper, I make the following points: capitalism is a creative/destructive system; the democratic welfare state emerged to tame the destructive side of capitalism while...

American-style capitalism and income disparity: the challenge of social anarchy.
June 1, 1998... With the end of the Cold War on Christmas Day 1991, the word "capitalism" seems also to have disappeared from public discussions. In its place, there is much talk about "the market" as an impersonal object and praise for its alleged merits as a...

Institutions matter: great (and not so great) transformations and their macroeconomic consequences.
June 1, 1998... As the next millennium approaches, global economic institutions increasingly resemble those that characterized the laissez-faire era of a century ago. Most representative of this transformation is the return to a self-regulating market system, as...

The fight to preserve universal social programs: a Canadian perspective on the great capitalist restoration.
June 1, 1998... In 1987, Robert Gilpin spoke about the crisis of national welfare capitalism in a non-welfare international capitalist world [1987, 60-64]. That crisis is only in part a logical consequence of the integration of global markets. It is also a...

Whaterever happened to New Zealand? The great capitalist restoration reconsidered.
June 1, 1998... During significant periods of its modern history, New Zealand has been hailed as the "social laboratory of the world." In the 1890s, a Liberal government engaged in a range of "state experiments." The First Labour government (1935-1949) provided...

Economics and the cold war: an inquiry into the relationship between ideology and theory.
June 1, 1998... The cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union - a struggle for world hegemony between two great powers - was a political, diplomatic, economic, and ideological conflict. At times it became armed conflict. At the ideological level,...

The institutional origins of crises for economy and ecology.
June 1, 1998... The Fundamental Problem of Existence All species share a common denominator in the struggle for survival: they must extract a constant flow of energy and materials from the environment to maintain the self-organized state of low entropy called...

Equality, democracy, institutions, and growth.
June 1, 1998... The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any...

The ethical rate of unemployment: a technical note.
June 1, 1998... Assuming that there exists a stable long-term, positive relationship between the rate of unemployment and the rate of change of inequality in the wage structure, the ethical rate of unemployment is defined as that rate of unemployment above which...

Zero unemployment and stable prices.
June 1, 1998... The 1946 Employment Act committed the U.S. government to high employment and stable prices, while the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act strengthened the government's commitment by setting a goal of "full employment," defined as an adult unemployment rate...

The buffer stock employment model and the NAIRU: the path to full employment. (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment)
June 1, 1998... Governments redistribute resources from private households to the public sector to advance a variety of collective actions. The desirable size of the government (and the amount of resources redistributed) is a political choice, rather than an...

Flexible full employment: structural implications of discretionary public sector employment.
June 1, 1998... Full employment is often associated with structural rigidities. An economy running at full employment and high levels of capacity utilization will have difficulty adjusting to structural changes such as capital- and labor-displacing technical...

Mafianomics: how did mob entrepreneurs infiltrate and dominate the Russian economy?
June 1, 1998... Following Thomas Schelling's [1966] pioneering paper on organized crime (OC), attempts to define it have focused on determining either the characteristics of organized crime activities (OCAs) or those of the groups (OCGs) committing them.(1)...

The relationship of race and outcomes of non-standard labor.
June 1, 1998... In the last 30 years, the U.S. economy has faced increased competition and globalization in product markets, rapidly changing technology, increased capital mobility, globalization of financial transactions, and the growth of merger and...

Too many hours - too little pay: the impact of market and household hours on women's work lives.
June 1, 1998... As a society we have been loathed to acknowledge the chronic overwork that plagues the American household, preferring to romanticize the role of housewife and mother. Yet the shortage of time is not merely a problem of our paying jobs - we spend...

The privatization of community: implications for urban policy.
June 1, 1998... Appeals to community are usually anti-urban. . . . Throughout the modern period, the city has often been decried as embodying immorality, artificiality, disorder, and danger. - Iris Young, 1995, 260. Wealthy and exclusive residential areas...

Violence, organized crime, and the criminal justice system in Colombia.
June 1, 1998... One of the concerns of the economic theory of crime has been the effect of the justice system on criminal activities. Theorists have proposed that the probability of being caught and sanctioned is a factor affecting the decisions made by...

Redistributing income upward through the cost-plus reimbursement terms of subgovernment contracts.
June 1, 1998... This is a case study designed to test the thesis (drawn from political science literature) that the power of "subgovernments" in the United States has decreased and, in particular, claims a demise in the power of the atomic energy subgovernment...

Public support for conservative economic policies.
June 1, 1998... Do materialist or ideological forces drive economic policy making in the United States? Mayo Toruno [1997] recently argued that the "right turn" of the U.S. government after the 1960s was not directly related to worsening economic conditions....

Labor relations in changing capitalist economies: the meaning of gifts in social relations.
June 1, 1998... Impurity and Social Order Geoffrey Hodgson [1995] has proposed that capitalist economies can be distinguished by how the "impurity principle" works and by the extent to which a capitalist economic system is "impure." He argues that "every...