This paper was originally presented at the ‘Marxism and Political Economy’ conference called by the International Socialist Journal on Saturday 29th September 2007. A revised version was presented to the Historical Materialism conference on 13th November 2007. It enquires why, although...

This paper revisits one of the classic debates on world capitalist development – the ‘transition to capitalism’ debate framed in Robert Brenner’s classic critique of World Systems and Dependency Theory. It was originally presented to the July 2007 conference of the International...

This paper is a prepublication version of a paper accepted for publication by Third World Quarterly. It offers a critique of the picture of world growth and world inequality generally disseminated by international agencies. The positive view commonly presented depends, it shows, on the...

This paper provides a tractable continuous-time constant-absolute-risk averse (CARA)-Gaussian framework to quantitatively explore how the preference for robustness (RB) affects the interest rate, the dynamics of consumption and income, and the welfare costs of model uncertainty in general...

Canonical analysis of the classical general equilibrium model demonstrates the existence of an open and dense subset of standard economies that possess fully-revealing rational expectations equilibria. This paper shows that the analogous result is not true in urban economies under appropriate...

Using the hybrid of Heckscher - Ohlin and Specific Factor models of trade we show that economic recession led shock results in a loss for both capitalists and skilled workers. Some of the unionized unskilled workers lose formal sector employment and move onto the informal sector. In case capital...

Canonical analysis of the classical general equilibrium model demonstrates the existence of an open and dense subset of standard economies that possess fully-revealing rational expectations equilibria. This paper shows that the analogous result is not true in urban economies under reasonable...

This paper builds a general equilibrium model for a small open economy with unemployment of unskilled labor to assess the impact of a recessionary shock. It is shown that irrespective of the factor intensity assumption skilled wage and rental ratio goes up if recession led price fall is...

The paper discusses Mark Blaug’s recent criticisms of “Sraffian economics”. It is shown that none of the criticisms stand up to close examination. Blaug commits a number of elementary blunders and mistakes the mathematical form of an argument for its content. He variously contradicts...

We embed a stylized traffic model within a general equilibrium model in which labor supply is endogenous and income taxes are distortionary. Within this framework we derive simple rules for performing a cost-benefit analysis that can be applied knowing only the output of the traffic model and a...