Is a more inclusive and sustainable development possible in Brazil? – a WEA online conference:

This conference on sustainable development is now open and you are invited to leave comments on the papers on the conference site.
click here to leave comments

For an introduction to the background to the conference and the themes of the call for papers click here ›

THR PAPERS 

New issue of WEA Newsletter

World Economics Association Newsletter, Volume 3, Issue 6 – December 2013
is now available as a pdf file for download here

Ethics and Economics

from Maria Alejandra Madi and the WEA Pedagogy Blog

After the Second World War,  the idea of  development was associated with the active role of the national state that would support the sustainability of economic growth with social inclusion. After the Bretton Woods crisis, in the seventies, and with the advance of financial globalization, the institutional arrangement of the Welfare State has been shaken. As a result, both the  instruments of economic policy and the attendance of social demands were put in question in a context of the redefinition of  the scope of public policies.

After some decades, it is a reality that global economic  integration, guided by market credibility and financial rules, has broadened social exclusion. As a matter of fact, the new interconnections between wealth, production, labor and consumption have strengthened inequalities. Indeed, the apprehension of the current global inequality issues involves the understanding  of the deep tensions between the hypertrophy of finance in economic dynamics and the expectations of society about citizenship, labor and income.   read more here

Economic Thought: Special Issue on Ethics and Economics

Economic Thought – History, Philosophy, and Methodology
An open access, open peer review journal from the World Economics Association
Vol 2, No.1, 2013 – Special Issue on Ethics and Economics

Download issue in full (PDF)

Ontological   Commitments of Ethics and Economics Karey Harrison	Abstract	Download   PDF
Codes of Ethics   for Economists: A Pluralist View Sheila C Dow	Abstract	Download   PDF
No Ethical Issues   in Economics? Stuart Birks	Abstract	Download   PDF
Professional   Economic Ethics: Why Heterodox Economists Should Care George   DeMartino	Abstract	Download   PDF
And the Real   Butchers, Brewers and Bakers? Towards the Integration of Ethics and Economics Riccardo   Baldissone	Abstract	Download   PDF

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Volunteers needed to start WEA national chapters. If interested, email nationalchapters@worldeconomicsassociation.org

WEA Young Economists (Facebook Group – 8 days old – 260 members – join today)

WEA – Conference on the political economy of economic metrics

The Papers

Report for discussion at the Meeting of Experts on the Advancement of Employment and Unemployment Statistics (Geneva, 28 January–1 February 2013)

International Labour Office

The current resolution concerning statistics of the economically active population, employment, unemployment and underemployment (13th ICLS 1982), is recognized worldwide. Official national statistics for these topics are largely based on these standards. Not only do the standards define who is to be counted as employed and as unemployed, they also set the scope of measurement […]

Read this paper in full » Posted 7th February 2013 at 1:39 pmRead the comments » 0 comments

Happy for How Long? How Social Capital and GDP relate to Happiness over Time

Bartolini-Saracinno

What predicts the evolution over time of subjective well-being? GDP or Social Capital? We correlate the trends of subjective well-being with the trends of Social Capital and/or GDP. We find that in the long and medium run Social Capital largely predicts the trends of subjective well-being. In the short-term this relationship weakens. GDP follows a […]

Read this paper in full » Posted 30th January 2013 at 6:43 pmRead the comments » 2 comments

 

Energy as the Numéraire of any Given Economy

Olaf Schilgen

Economic theories are based on money as the unit of accounting, measuring and exchange. This paper discusses the usage of Energy as a physical characteristic of all commodities, all goods and services as the numéraire for measuring the size of any given economy. Since monetary value is not a real characteristic of the commodities and […]

Read this paper in full » Posted 27th January 2013 at 7:13 amRead the comments » 13 comments

 

The political economy of economic metrics (WEA online conference is now open)

Economic metrics are used to describe the world. Enormous amounts of money are spent on measuring GDP, employment, wages, unemployment, inflation, consumer and producer confidence, debt, money, the price level and whatever. These metrics show us if inequality is rising or if unemployment is going down. But these metrics are not just, or even mainly, gathered for the sake of science.

They also play a role in economic policy and are often designed to enable this. Some of these metrics like government debt as a percentage of GDP, are even used to call entire countries to account – they surely are part of ‘the language of power’.
But are we measuring the right metrics? And do we measure them in the right way? Or are our insights and policies biased because we’re looking at biased and incomplete metrics? And are we looking at them in the right way? Or do they act as blindfolds? Who decides anyway and on which grounds about the very definitions and about the money spent on gathering the data?

These kinds of questions are being discussed in the World Economics Association internet conference on The political economy of economic metrics. The conference, which is led by Merijn Knibbe and Dirk Bezemer, is now open here http://peemconference2013.worldeconomicsassociation.org/  Anyone may take part.

Rethinking Financial Markets – WEA online conference opens today

Rethinking Financial Markets – Social Capitalism, Economies of Money, and Custodial Regulation

This, the 3rd digital conference of the World Economics Association, aims to foster collective reconsideration of the social role of finance and, consequently, the regulation of financial markets.

Visit the conference site today and join the discussion. Papers have been submitted by scholars from all over the world.

You may post comments either on individual papers, groups of papers or on the conference as a whole.    Contributors are expected to respond to comments.

World Economics Association – The next 3 years

Dear WEA member,

Today, 16 months after launch, the WEA:

• has a membership of 10,400;
• has a membership with a wide geographical distribution, approximately as follows: Africa 9%, Asia 18%, Europe 33%, Latin American and the Caribbean 12%, Oceania 8%, and US and Canada 20%;
• has published the first issues of its two new open-access and open-peer review journals, World Economic Review and Economic Thought;
• has increased the subscription base of its pre-existing open-access Real-World Economics Reviewto 20,900;
• has held its first online conference, with two more set to begin in September and November and with more lined up to follow;
• has published 5 issues of its 12-page bi-monthly newsletter, and
• has become a major presence in the world of economics.

Over the next 3 years the WEA expects:

Major new economics journal heavily downloaded in its first 24 hours

Yesterday the first issue of Economic Thought was published by the World Economics Association.  Already within 24 hours the journal’s number of downloads, over 3,000, was beyond the dreams of many academic journal editors.  From the contents page below you may download the whole issue, individual papers and also abstracts.

Volume 1, Number 1 (2012)

 Download this issue in full (PDF)

 Table of Contents

Editorial Introduction to the First Issue of Economic Thought	Download PDF
John Latsis

Mathematical Modelling and Ideology in the Economics Academy: competing explanations of the failings of the modern discipline?	Download PDF
Tony Lawson

Economics and Research Assessment Systems	Download PDF
Donald Gillies

Richard Cantillon’s Early Monetary Views?	Download PDF
Richard van den Berg

Different Approaches to the Financial Crisis	Download PDF
Sheila C Dow

On the Limits of Rational Choice Theory	Download PDF
Geoffrey M. Hodgson

An Evolutionary Efficiency Alternative to the Notion of Pareto Efficiency	Download PDF
Irene van Staveren

A good year (World Economics Association)

from Edward Fullbrook

It was a year ago today that the World Economics Association was launched with the emailing of a letter signed by 140 economists from around the world. 

That was the start of a good year for beginning to build an institutional foundation for the reform of economics and the economics profession. The WEA now has 9,936 members, widely dispersed around the globe and with all continents well represented. Although IT difficulties have delayed the launch of the WEA’s two new journals (World Economics Journal and Economic Thought) their strong first issues are now set to be published in the next two months. The fourth issue of the WEA’s lively 12-page bi-monthly newsletter will appear in June. The WEA’s inaugural online conference (Economics in Society: The Ethical Dimension) was successfully held in March, its second (Rethinking Financial Markets) will begin soon, and four more are scheduled. 

WEA conference “Economics in Society: The Ethical Dimension” has begun (list of papers)

from Edward Fullbrook

The World Economics Association’s first online conference “Economics in Society: The Ethical Dimension” begins today. The first batch of papers has been posted, and discussion on them is now open.  The conference will run for one month, with its 24 papers being released in groups over the first week.  

If you go to the conference site and register by leaving your email address, you will be notified each time a new group of papers is posted and opened for discussion.  Similarly, you may sign up to be notified each time a new comment appears on a particular paper or group of papers.  And of course you are encouraged to participate in what is an important and long overdue public discussion.

The conference organizers Peter Radford, Alan Freeman and Grazia Iletto-Gillies have assembled the papers from contributors from around the globe.  The conference is designed to encourage economists to reconnect with the ever-present ethical dimensions of economics ignored and forgotten until today by the economics establishment.  Among other issues, the conference will address the ethical questions concerning the causal role played by the economics profession in the Financial Crisis and ethical dimensions regarding North-South economic relations.      

The group of papers posted today is as follows:

World Economics Association – Two announcements

The WEA’s forum for the open review of proposed articles for the World Economics Journal and for Economic Thought is now open. It is located at http://discussion.worldeconomicsassociation.org/. 19 submissions have been posted so far. You are encouraged to read and comment on papers that interest you.

The WEA’s first online conference – “ Economics in Society: The Ethical Dimension ” – is now set to begin on March 1st. The cut-off date for submissions (a wide diversity of papers has already been received) is February 19th. For details, go to http://weaethicsconference.wordpress.com/. Leave your email address and you will be kept informed.

What is economics’ breakthrough of the year?

frm Merijn Knibbe

Some of the more important economic studies are never published in journals – let alone A+ journals. They stay within the walls of the Statistical Institutes, like Eurostat. Or they are published, anonimously, in the Bulletins of Central Banks. See Box 1 on p. 22 of the Bulletin of the Central Bank of Ireland, 2011, first quarter.. That’s a problem, as such publications do not count when economists apply for jobs at universities – which means that people working at for instance the Statistical Institutes will have problems when they apply for a university job. Which means that Universities do not employ people with first hand experience with the construction of economic statistics… That’s bad. And it’s also rather daft – people like Friedrich Hayek, Jan Tinbergen, Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes did do this kind of work, for an extended time!

Also, on this site, complaints about the (small) world of university economics are sometimes posted. Who ares! But it seems to be increasingly important that an economist can show a track record of publications in ‘important’ journals (i.e. when they want to apply for a job), prices and comparable tokens of prestige. But ‘prestige’ nowadays seems to have a rather ‘old school’ definition… Time for a change. Maybe this an idea for the World Economics Association:

‘Science’ every year publishes the ‘breakthrough of the year’. Economics are, however, absent from this list. .The newsletter of the World Economics Association might, every year, publish the ‘economic breakthrough of the year’. Possible rules: