Pedro Schwartz

Minimum wages in Spain

In Spain the minimum wage appears to have no significant employment-reducing effect for workers over 18. For the under 18s, however, minimum wages and employment are negatively related. The government should consider lowering the minimum wage for younger workers.

CENTRAL BANKS: FROM POLITICALLY INDEPENDENT TO MARKET-DEPENDENT INSTITUTIONS

Responses to the financial crisis are undermining the Chinese walls painfully built between monetary and fiscal authorities. Central banks and state treasuries are working side by side as lenders of last resort. Central banks are helping economic ministers with purchases of public debt and discounting of private paper. Regulation and control of financial institutions is now a political football. Central banks must be seen again as market-dependent institutions in a world of currency competition. Privatisation in law or in fact is back on the table.

Bentham on Spanish Protectionism

In 1821, John Bowring published a manuscript of Benthams under the title of Observations on the restrictive and prohibitory commercial system: especially with a reference to the Decrep of the Spanish Cortes of July 1820. In all probability this text was originally conceived as an appendix to a book that Bentham never published, to Wit Rid Yourselves of Ultramarina, the commentary on Spanish colonization. The 1821 publisned text has been reprinted by W. Stark in the third volume of Jeremy Benthams Economic With some corrections of obvious misprints, but without the benefit of the mauscript. Stark was very dismissive of this work, which he thought demonstrated how barren Benthams economic thought had become. Stark believed thad Bentham was too orthodox in attacking Spanish protectionism when, Stark said, Spain was a case fit for an educational tariff, in the fashion proposed by list. However, many economists today think that few things are so harmful for an underdevelooped country as a tariff, eduational or not (except when it is low rated, revenue raising and accompanied by an equivalent domestic excise tax).

Money, Currency and Crisis : In Search of Trust, 2000 BC to AD 2000

Money is a core feature in all discussions of economic crisis, as is clear from the debates about the responses of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States to the 2008 economic crisis. This volume explores the role of money in economic performance, and focuses on how monetary systems have affected economic crises for the last 4,000 years. Recent events have confirmed that money is only a useful tool in economic exchange if it is trusted, and this is a concept that this text explores in depth. The international panel of experts assembled here offers a long-range perspective, from ancient Assyria to modern societies in Europe, China and the US. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of economic history, and to anyone who seeks to understand the economic crises of recent decades, and place them in a wider historical context.

How Functional is the Eurozone? An Index of European Economic Integration Through the Single Currency

This article is a step towards empirically assessing how close the Eurozone is to becoming an ‘optimal currency area’, as originally defined by Mundell ([Mundell, R., 1961]). For this purpose we have compiled ten indicators, organised them in four partial indices, and summarised them in an overall indicator of ‘optimality’. The resulting picture is mixed, with zone optimality not increasing when circumstances were favourable but the trend towards integration returning after the 2008–14 crisis. The suggestion is that disintegration during the crisis, rather than being evidence of failure of the Eurozone when the going was tough, showed a self‐healing mechanism at work. However, our measurements and indices show that optimality is much further away than it was in 1999, when the euro was launched.

The Market and The Metamarket

The aim of this chapter is to summarize contributions made by economists to the economic analysis of property rights. I believe that economists have made great strides recently toward the understanding of social institutions which for many years had been ignored and that the new hypotheses formulated by economists will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, and students of law. In addition, the reincorporation of the study of property rights into the field of economic theory has enabled economists to solve some problems which remained unsolved in the economic theory of the market, such as, for example, what conditions are necessary for the existence of workable competition, a more accurate definition of so-called “external effects,” remedies for “market failure,” the formulation of a theory of economic systems, and the answers to certain questions in the theory of the firm relating to ownership and control.1