Leaving labour markets to the market mechanism with flexible wages is the worst thing that can happen as the result would be a permanent destabilisation of the price level and an explosion of inequality—both of which adds to the instabilities of capitalism. Guarantee of minimum wages can play...

An economy with a stable medium-term growth rate of zero - or any other politically determined growth rate - needs new regulations and institutions to realise this target. Such an economy would look very different compared with the existing type of capitalism we have today in the Global North....

This paper analyses several severe financial crises observed in the history of capitalism which led to a longer period of stagnation or low growth. Comparative case studies of the Great Depression, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and the Japanese crisis of the 1990s and 2000s are...

This paper analyses financial crises from a theoretical point of view. For this it reviews what different schools of economic thought have to say about financial crises. It examines first the approaches that regard financial crises as a disturbing factor of a generally stable real economy...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) started to play an increasing and key role in the global economy from the 1990s on. The market mechanism in GVCs supports industrialisation in the Global South and under certain conditions product and process upgrading. But GVCs do not lead to the catching-up of...

After World War II only a few developing countries were able to catch up to real GDP per capita levels prevailing in developed countries. These successful countries in almost all cases came from Asia and did not follow the free market doctrine in the tradition of the Washington Consensus. There...

Labour market developments have Germany undergone two shocks: German reunification in the early 1990s, and the Hartz reforms in the early 2000s. They separated the German labour market into the traditional rather corporatist labour market segment, characterised by a high degree of coordination,...