Nahid Aslanbeigui

The Asian Crisis, Gender, and the International Financial Architecture

This paper begins with an account of the Asian crisis, its creation and management by international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), and the gender impact of their stabilization and structural adjustment programs. Next we consider the new debate on reforming the IMF and the World Bank and restructuring the international financial architecture to prevent crises and manage them more effectively. Finally, we consider the gender ramifications of these changes. Since feminists have been absent from this debate, we examine issues essential to the formation of a gender-conscious international financial structure.

Assessing Microcredit in Bangladesh: A Critique of the Concept of Empowerment

Assessing microcredit programs by testing their contribution to the empowerment of borrowers has been widely advocated and explored in the literature on women and development. There is considerable debate on whether microcredit empowers or disempowers women, and there are attempts to reconcile conflicting conclusions based on heterogeneous samples or data sets and grounded in a variety of methodologies. Although there is little agreement on the relation between microcredit and empowerment and no consensus on the meaning of the idea of empowerment itself, students of gender and development seem to be at one in regarding empowerment as a logically unproblematic concept. We argue that the idea of empowerment employed in this literature is vulnerable to a number of logical criticisms and cannot serve as a sound basis for determining the value of microcredit to borrowers. Our research suggests that in assessing the impact of microcredit, it is essential to consider generational and inter-generational differences it makes in the lives of borrowers and their families. Results of ethnographic work conducted in January 2008 on long-term borrowers of the Grameen Bank inform the exposition of the arguments.

Scissors or Horizon: Neoclassical Debates About Returns to Scale, Costs, and Long-Run Supply, 1926-1942

Modern treatment of long-run (U-shaped) cost curves developed from reactions to Sraffas criticisms of Marshall. He argued that internal (dis)economies were incompatible with partial-equilibrium analysis under perfect competition. Pigou concurred, and drew L-shaped cost curves; Viner realized that this made firm size indeterminate, and industry output volatile. Using Austin and Joan Robinsons analyses, Stigler justified rising costs/supply, determinacy, and stability by irrational entrepreneurs enduring coordination failure and by factor price changes. We conclude that consistency requires constant costs; but firm employment, output, and factor incomes remain theoretically indeterminate. It becomes likely that large firms will undermine perfect competition.

The Theory Arsenal: The Cambridge Circus and the Origins of the Keynesian Revolution

In the winter of 1934–35, when John Maynard Keynes was beginning to circulate proofs of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he indulged in a playful exchange of letters with George Bernard Shaw devoted mainly to the merits of Karl Marx as an economist. At the end of his letter of January 1, 1935, Keyness observations took a more serious turn, documenting fundamental changes in his theoretical ambitions following the publication of his Treatise on Money in 1930: “To understand my state of mind, however, you have to know that I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize—not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years—the way the world thinks about economic problems†(Keynes 1973a, p. 492).

The cost controversy: Pigouvian economics in disequilibrium

The standard treatment traces the relation between a firms costs and output to Jacob Viners seminal article in 1931. This glosses over the importance of the cost controversy a by-product of which is the development of the basic elements of the theory of the firm in the long-run perfectly competitive framework. This article focuses on the contributions to this area of Arthur Cecil Pigou who-while defending specifying and changing the Marashallian treatment of the laws of returns during the 1922–1932 period - separated external and internal economics of the equilibrium firm drew (perhaps for the first time) U-shaped cost curves and spelled out stability conditions for competitive equilibrum. These provided the building blocks of modern theory of the firm as presented in undergraduate economic textbooks.

Risk, Gender, and Development in the 21st Century

Globalization creates wealth but also financial crises. Although these systemic risks are generated by all participants in the world economy, their costs are disproportionately borne by the poor, especially women, who live in developing nations, with irrevocable damage to their capabilities. Since current reform proposals do not address inequities in the distribution of the costs of financial crises, we suggest changes in the design, implementation, content, and funding of policies that could provide security to women during crises. We argue that our suggestions will not succeed without womens participation in the debate on the reform of international financial architecture.

Foxwell's Aims and Pigou's Military Service: A Malicious Episode?

The appointment of Arthur Cecil Pigou as Alfred Marshalls successor has generated some interest among historians of economic thought (Coase 1972; Coats 1971; and Jones 1978). All agree that the 1908 election was highly political, affected by Marshalls intense efforts to manipulate the process in favor of Pigou and against Herbert S. Foxwell. T. W. Jones sheds light on “the lengths to which Marshall felt able to go in his support of Pigou and, in particular, the manner in which this impinged on one of the electors in 1908, J. N. Keynes” (Jones 1978, p. 235). This is interesting in the wake of John Neville Keyness many conflicting roles: he was an elector, a friend of Foxwell, and father of John Maynard Keynes, who had failed to secure a Fellowship at Kings College earlier that year. Regardless of the motives behind Marshalls maneuvers or the manner in which he accomplished his objective, the outcome of the election left Foxwell extremely, but understandably, disappointed and embittered. Some of this disappointment and bitterness must have been felt toward Marshalls successor, Pigou, of whom Foxwell did not think very highly to begin with. On different occasions, Foxwell had thought Pigou to be “an extreme agitator on a side not popular either here [Cambridge] or among influential people in the country”; “the last Economist I wish to see in any position where he could influence economic study. He has ruined it at Cambridge where complaints are incessant”; and “worse than useless”.

THE EDITOR AS SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONARY: KEYNES, THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL, AND THE PIGOU AFFAIR, 1936–1938

Thus spake Edwin Cannan, professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) and member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society, publisher of The Economic Journal (EJ). From 1911 to 1945, Keynes was editor of the EJ, arguably the most prestigious journal in British economics. At the time of Cannans remark in February 1934, when the early drafts of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money were taking shape and Keynes had assumed leadership of a movement to reconceptualize economic theory, he not only had ideas of his own but an uncommonly robust sense of their importance. Although Keyness conception of the ultimate purpose of economic theory remained true to the Marshallian tradition in which he was trained— forging scientific tools to improve the lot of humankind—his immediate objective was less pacific: the destruction of classical economics (Keynes 1935, p. 36). In his metaphor, classicism was a citadel fortified by an invincible superstructure constructed over generations by economists of great theoretical power and ingenuity, from David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill to Alfred Marshall and his own contemporary, Arthur Cecil Pigou. Because the citadel was vulnerable only in its “fundamental groundwork,†an assault would succeed only by undermining this foundation (Keynes 1973a, p. 533).

Developing A Framework

On Friday afternoon, 12 June 1903, William Hewins met Joseph Chamberlain for the first time in the latter’s private room in the British House of Commons to discuss the burning fiscal issue of the time: tariff reform. Chamberlain — committed imperialist, anti-Little Englander, and self-anointed leader of the reform movement — was Colonial Secretary in the Conservative cabinet of Balfour. Hewins was the founding director of LSE, a conservative imperialist and critic of free trade, and a member of the international community of historical economists. The tariff reform controversy of 1903–6 was the most contentious British political dispute in the decade before the Great War. It split the Establishment, inflamed the public, created a disastrous rift in the Conservative Party, and ended in a Liberal landslide victory in the general election of 1906, beginning the long Liberal ascendancy that set the foundations of the British welfare state. Although this may seem improbable in the extreme, the genesis of Pigou’s research programme for economics, first set out in Wealth and Welfare, is linked to the controversy and Chamberlain’s collaboration with Hewins.1

Joan Robinson's “Secret Document” A Passage from the Autobigraphy of an Analytical Economist

The Modern Archives, Kings College, Cambridge University contain a carbon copy of a three-page single spaced manuscript with the title “A Passage From The Autobiography of an Analytical Economist†(RFK/16/2/134–139, hereinafter “Autobiography†). Joan Robinsons initials are typed at the end of the document, which is dated October 1932.In October 1932, Heffer, the Cambridge University student bookstore, published Joan Robinsons methodological pamphlet, Economics is a Serious Subject, and she delivered the manuscript of The Economics of Imperfect Competition to Macmillan (Joan Robinson to Richard Kahn, October 30, 1932, RFK/13/90/1/19). The Autobiography was apparently drafted shortly after these two projects were completed. The typescript in Modern Archives, which seems to be the only extant copy, was not made until some months later. In a letter of March 2, 1933, Kahn suggested adding “a long section to your secret document if you can do so without spoiling it,†regretting that he had not asked her for a copy (RFK/13/90/1/162–67). She replied somewhat mysteriously, alluding to a superstitious reluctance to having it typed but admitting that eventually it would have to be done (March 23, 1933, RFK/13/90/1/205–208). Since the carbon copy refers to page 275 of her book, the Autobiography was not typed until she had seen the final set of page proofs, and perhaps not until the book had appeared.