After the 2001 crisis, Turkey continued to pursue a radical market-oriented reform strategy that followed the philosophy of the Washington Consensus. By the early 2000s the government had already liberalised the capital account, privatised many banks and enterprises, and kick-started the...

This paper analyses several severe financial crises observed in the history of capitalism which led to a longer period of stagnation or low growth. Comparative case studies of the Great Depression, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and the Japanese crisis of the 1990s and 2000s are...

This paper analyses financial crises from a theoretical point of view. For this it reviews what different schools of economic thought have to say about financial crises. It examines first the approaches that regard financial crises as a disturbing factor of a generally stable real economy...

Over the past several decades minimum wages have steadily gained importance. In many cases this reflects the weakness of unions which have been unable to prevent very low wages compared to the national average wage in some segments of the labour market. Changes in minimum wages can affect...

Minimum wage policy supported by a strong social policy is an efficient mechanism against poverty and income erosion of the poorest households. Minimum wage is one of the instruments which can control wage dispersion and in this way reduce income inequality. It can also help to prevent a general...

Market driven wage dispersion is a critical feature of income inequality. In this paper especially the Keynesian perspective on how to explain the global trends of rising wage dispersion is elaborated. Special attention is given to the policy implications derived from the analysis. Keynesian...

Macroeconomically oriented wage policies had largely gone out of fashion. Instead, the prevailing view was that wage setting is just another market process comparable to market processes in goods markets. However, these theoretical approaches ignore some fundamental aspects of wage setting. For...

Makroökonomisch orientierte Lohnpolitik war weitgehend aus der Mode gekommen. Vorherrschend war vielmehr die Ansicht, dass die Lohnfindung ein Marktprozess wie jeder andere sei. Diese theoretischen Vorstellungen vernachlässigen jedoch wesentliche Aspekte der Lohnbildung. So wird ihre...

This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which...