Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French thinker who did most of his writing in the last six years of his life. One of his major contributions to economic thought was his application of opportunity cost to a wide range of economic policies. The present paper uses the Bastiat approach to...

From an economic perspective, imposing a credible one-off net wealth levy in crisis times as a tool to ward off a national emergency appears to be advantageous as, in an ideal world, this would not distort market players' allocation decisions. However, in practice, charging such a levy may give...

In the history of global economic growth and development, the year 2008 had set the pace of recession and almost all countries of the world and enterprises were struggling to come out of the grips of recession. The question of their survival rested on meeting a variety of challenges; grab the...

For many years now, a growing number of economists, policy makers, and civil society groups have pointed to the limits of using only GDP as the primary measure of national economic progress. Accordingly, a progressively greater focus has been placed on the concept of well-being and its optimal...

For the past few years there has been a call to raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $15.00 per hour. The purpose of this article is to remind the reader that a wage earner receives the higher of the Federal, State, City, and in many cases the private sector company’s minimum wage. But more...

This paper considers how appropriately designed financial institutions can allow economic development to become self-financing, and improve the management of the currency and the economy. The business concept of self-financing, not found in leading economic text books, is described. Related...

Latin America is a region whose critical social imagination has stalled, changing from a uniquely prolific period during the 1950s and 1960s - revolving around structuralism, 'dependency', Baran and Sweezy-type analysis of 'monopoly capitalism', French structuralism, the German Historical...

The explosion of the global financial crisis in 2008 and its transmission to the real economies have been interpreted as calling for new kinds of regulation of the banking and the financial systems that would have allowed reestablishing a virtuous relation between the real and the financial...

We present a comprehensive macroeconomic model for the U.S. There exist strict long-term relations between real GDP, price inflation, labor force participation, productivity, and unemployment. The evolution of real GDP depends only on exogenous demographic forces. Other macro-variables follow up...

While this paper emphasizes the analytical ambiguity of the relationship between savings and income inequality, the empirical examination renders weak support for a negative association between them. However, this relationship is not very robust. Subsamples of OECD countries and Asian countries...