Marco Missaglia

Demand Policies for Long-Run Growth: Being Keynesian Both in the Short and in the Long-Run?

The idea of demand-led growth is defended by neo-Kaleckians and neo-Keynesians using very specific assumptions. In their models the paradox of costs is always valid in the long run. The central message of this paper is that these specific and strong assumptions are not needed to defend the Kaleckian perspective of a demand-driven long-run growth. What is needed is simply a less demanding theory of flexible mark-ups in an open economy. The formal model developed in this paper shows that long-run growth may be demand driven even when the paradox of costs does not hold in the long run. Copyright

PREDICTING NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF THE SECOND INTIFADA: AN EX-POST EVALUATION OF SOME MODELS

In 2003, the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and de Boer and Missaglia (DBM) constructed models for the estimation of the 2002 macro-economic indicators of the economy of Palestine. In 2007, IMF and WB provided the consensus estimates of these figures using data that are more up-to-date and more complete than those available in 2003. This note proposes an ex-post evaluation of the predictive performance of the models of WB, DBM and IMF. A comparison of the models of WB and DBM, which are both micro-founded computable general equilibrium models using the same data, reveals that DBM strongly outperforms WB. We argue that the shortening of the time horizon and the quantity adjustment following the dramatic shock explain why our model performs much better. A comparison of DBM with IMF (a simple macro-founded income-expenditure model) also shows that our model performs better.

Neoclassical and Keynesian macro models: thinking about the ‘special case’

This book contends that post Keynesian economics has its own methodological and didactic basis, and its realistic analysis is much-needed in the current economic and financial crisis. At a time when the original message of Keynes’ General Theory is no longer present in most university syllabuses, this book celebrates the uniqueness of teaching post Keynesian economics, providing comparisons with traditional economic rationale and illustrating the advantages of post Keynesian pedagogy.

Finance, Foreign Direct Investment, and Dutch Disease

In recent years, Colombia has grown relatively rapidly, but it has been a biased growth. The energy sector (the “locomotora minero-energetica,” to use the rhetorical expression of President Juan Manuel Santos) grew much faster than the rest of the economy, while the manufacturing sector registered a negative rate of growth. These are classic symptoms of the well-known “Dutch disease,” but our purpose here is not to establish whether or not the Dutch disease exists, but rather to shed some light on the financial viability of several, simultaneous dynamics: (1) the existence of a traditional Dutch disease being due to a large increase in mining exports and a significant exchange rate appreciation; (2) a massive increase in foreign direct investment, particularly in the mining sector; (3) a rather passive monetary policy, aimed at increasing purchasing power via exchange rate appreciation; (4) and more recently, a large distribution of dividends from Colombia to the rest of the world and the accumulation of mounting financial liabilities. The paper shows that these dynamics constitute a potential danger for the stability of the Colombian economy. Some policy recommendations are also discussed.