Edward Amadeo

A post-Keynesian theory of growth, interest and money

While firmly based in the classical tradition, the work of Luigi Pasinetti, together with that of Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, has laid the foundations of a Post-Keynesian approach to the theory of growth, interest and money. The approach is ‘Post-Keynesian’ in the sense that it combines elements of Keynes’s (1936) ideas in the General Theory, as well as the extension of those ideas as developed in the last three decades by economists following the Cambridge tradition in Keynesian economics.1 The purpose of this paper is to attempt to synthesize the Post-Keynesian contributions by providing a critical discussion of the conceptual elements of the approach, and by developing a formal model of growth in which monetary aspects are explicitly taken into consideration.

Adjustment, stabilisation and the structure of employment in Brazil

A significant change in the structure of employment in Brazil in the period 1988–95 took place. Industrial employment fell, especially in the most traditional sectors such as clothing, textiles and footwear. There has been a shift of workers from the industrial sector to the services sector and an increase in the share of self‐employed workers and informal wage earners. The quality of jobs being created in the services sector are not of the same ‘quality’ as those in the industrial sector, leading to a deterioration of employment conditions and of the labour market performance. Hence the rate of unemployment is not a very good measure of labour market conditions during adjustment. The creation of jobs in general might therefore not be an explicit target under adjustment. Rather the objective should be trying to change labour market institutions in order to improve the quality of the jobs and the quality of the labour relations.

International trade, outsourcing and labor: a view from the developing countries

There has been an increase in trade flows between developed and Latin American countries as well as an increase in FDI since the late 1980s. At the same time, the competition between developing countries in the international market has increased. These new trends have raised interesting questions concerning the future of employment and wage patterns in Latin American countries.

Causes for Persistent Unemployment and Fluctuations in Monetary Economies

Capitalist economies follow different patterns of fluctuation. If we think of the rate of unemployment as a measure of the movements of the economy, we note that the patterns of fluctuation vary across time and across countries. After World War II, unemployment remained very low in all advanced capitalist economies up until the late 1960s, then started fluctuating around a much higher rate in the 1970s and 1980s. In certain European countries, the average rate of unemployment in the 1980s was significantly higher than the OECD average and much higher than what it was in the 1950s and 1960s.

An economist's political view of democratization in Brazil

The current economic and social crisis in Brazil cannot be dissociated from the legacies of the military period (1964–84). The ‘miraculous’ economic performance of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the debtcum-growth strategy of the late 1970s did have trickle-down effects. In these two decades, and especially in the 1970s, the level of poverty fell and all income groups benefited from economic growth. However, the military governments showed little regard for distributive policies. This is true not only of income distribution, which was strongly affected by the wage policies of the period, but also of the structure of social expenditure, subsidies and transfers, which were quite regressive.