The article introduces the papers published in the present issue. It does so by elaborating a few comments on the role of institutions for economic development and how should economics analyse institutions.

In this article, Alessandro Roncaglia renders a careful and detailed intellectual tribute to the memory of Paolo Sylos Labini. Roncaglia’s contribution provides at once a biographical account and recounts the intellectual trajectory of his Italian colleague. While Sylos Labini’s theory of...

Economists commonly specialize in some limited parts of the general field. This is a necessity, due to the complexity of the different issues, the amount of literature available on each of them and the possibility of recourse to different analytical or statistical tools. However, specialization...

The brief note introduces the article collected in the present issue of the journal. It places the various contributions in perspective, critically summarizing the major economic developments since the publication of the last issue.

Most interpreters agree that Keynes had a wide-ranging, complex, 'vision of the world', which underlies his theoretical contributions. Whenever this is forgotten, as happens in the so-called neoclassical synthesis, not only the original Keynesian spirit goes lost but also, and especially, we...

The financial and economic crisis brings to a reconsideration of macroeconomics: as it happened in the past, after the Great Crash of 1929 as well as after the Second World War and after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the subsequent oil crisis. A brief critical survey of...