Nach der Verabschiedung der Botschaft zur 11. Revision der Alters- undHinterlassenenversicherung (AHV) hat der Bundesrat im Hinblick auf die nächste Revision eine interdepartementale Arbeitsgruppe mit der Ausarbeitung und Durchführung eines Forschungsprogramms zur längerfristigen Zukunft der...

I investigate whether demand growth and productivity growth in Switzerland have benefitted from the wage moderation that set in at the beginning of the 1990s in this country. The results suggest that the Swiss demand regime is profit-led while the productivity regime is wage-led. This means on...

The Review of Political Economy (ROPE) welcomed the year 2009 with an issue in which the first two articles use an interesting yet not very popular modeling framework, namely the aggregate demand/aggregate supply (D/Z) model from Chapter 3 of Keynes's General Theory.Unfortunately, as I intend to...

The paper proposes a new test of endogenous vs. exogenous growth theories based on the Granger-causality methodology and applies it to a panel of 20 OECD countries. The test yields divergent evidence with respect to physical and human capital. For physical capital, the test results favor...

In a recent paper I argued that Baumol's (1967) model of 'unbalanced growth' offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in health care expenditure (HCE) in rich countries (HARTWIG 2006). Baumol's model implies that HCE is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth. I...

Keynes's essay “Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output” is widely believed to be an important amendment to his General Theory because, in this essay, Keynes relaxed his core assumption of decreasing marginal returns to labour. Non-decreasing marginal returns, however, do not sit...

The Bhaduri-Marglin model is a post-Kaleckian model that allows for studying the impact of functional income distribution on the growth in demand. Over recent years, a number of empirical studies based on this model have aimed at determining whether a redistribution towards profits harms or...

In a recent contribution to this journal, C. Sardoni takes issue with the identification by Trigg, in a 2006 publication, of a role for the Keynesian investment multiplier in Marx's schemes of reproduction. Indirectly, Sardoni also expresses his disagreement with Hartwig (by attributing one of...

Towards the end of 2009, the world economy was recovering from its deepest recession since the end of World War II. Most countries around the world took resort to fiscal policy in order to foster this recovery. In this paper, we first discuss the pros and cons of discretionary fiscal policy from...