This article is a contribution to the continuing debate within critical accounting and broader critical theory circles about the nature of capitalism in a globalized economic order. It argues that the contemporary economic environment cannot be adequately explained by traditional critical...

The idea of road pricing as a function of congestion costs in the United Kingdom (U.K.) was put forward in a seminal report published by the U.K. Ministry of Transport in 1964. After 35 years, little has been done and the reasons behind this delay are mainly political, as the failure to...

The paper considers the case for an internationally coordinated further fiscal stimulus during the second half of 2009. Although this makes some of the analysis period-specific, most of the issues and principles considered are timeless. For a fiscal stimulus to be both effective there must be...

The EMU accession countries are obliged to fulfill the Maastricht convergence criteria prior to entering the EMU. What should be the optimal monetary policy satisfying these criteria? To answer this question, the paper proposes a DSGE model of a two-sector small open economy. First, I derive the...

In this paper I analyse four different but related concepts, each of which highlights some aspect of the way in which the state acquires command over real resources through its ability to issue fiat money. They are (1) seigniorage (the change in the monetary base), (2) Central Bank revenue (the...

Recessions and policy interventions in labour markets in developing countries are characterized not only by changes in the unemployment rate, but also by changes in the proportion of formal or protected jobs. This reallocation between formal and informal jobs is large and occurs mainly because...

The World Bank is delegated the authority to provide long-term stabilization and general purpose balance of payments loans, what the Bank once described as 'program loans'. Yet after a brief period in its early years, the Bank stopped disbursing these loans for an extended period. Why? This...

How much weight should be assigned to a particular factor in explaining an outcome? How should an abstract concept be linked to empirical indicants? These methodological problems—known as the "how much" and "how to" problems, respectively—have raised serious obstacles for ideational...

Productivity is defined as the ratio of outputs to inputs. When applied to the public sector, productivity becomes a key performance indicator that shows how efficiently public resources are employed in providing public services. Until not too long ago productivity in the public sector was...

This paper analyzes the optimal income tax treatment of couples. Each couple is modelled as a single rational economic agent supplying labor along two dimensions: primary and secondary earnings. We consider fully general joint income tax systems. Separate taxation is never optimal if social...