Financial repression committed by central banks has been put forward as a means to secretly reduce the real burden of high public debts. Financial repression has allegedly played an important role in the impressive reduction of the US debt ratio after World War II. A mix of conventional budget...

This article extends the inspection of Central Bank Independence (CBI) with respect to inflation performance to an examination of the relationship between CBI and economic welfare in general. The common view of monetary neutrality, i.e. a “free lunch” of CBI with respect to economic growth...

It will be argued that it is not of fundamental importance for growth and employment whether the EU clings to the Euro or allows for a dissolution of the Eurozone and a reemergence of national currencies but how multi-level macroeconomic coordination of different policy areas and nation-states...

The Great Recession after 2008 did not turn out to be as deep and severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to the European Commission, this positive result is due to the fact that economic policy-makers around the world learnt their lessons from the Great Depression in stabilizing...

The 'big trade-off', described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again. Equality or efficiency, or to put it differently again: modern highly developed economies and societies must choose between the Scylla of income inequality or the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it seems...

Die Wirtschaftswissenschaften in Deutschland werden schon seit langem von einem neoklassischen Mainstream dominiert. Was sind die wesentlichen Grundlagen dieser neoklassischen „Normalwissenschaft“ in der Ökonomie? Wo setzt die Kritik am neoklassischen Paradigma an? Welche alternativen...