Geoff Harcourt has had a major impact on the field of Post-Keynesian economics, not only in his research but also in his teaching. Many of Harcourts students have gone on to make valuable contributions in this field. This volume brings together contributions from thirty such former students, now established in academic institutions around the world

In this volume more than 40 leading economists pay tribute to, and critically evaluate, Geoff Harcourt's work. Contributors include Tony Atkinson, Tony Lawson, Edward Nell and Ian Steedman.

Transcending Transaction examines recent attempts to show how, in theory and history, market transaction can emerge from the unregulated interaction of competitive traders. Alan Shipman examines the legal, informational, organisational, social and financial foundations of market trade, focusing on the possible routes by which it could arise without the influence of pre-market social conventions or political structures.

This book investigates the interaction of effective goods demand with the wage-price spiral, and the impact of monetary policy on financial and the real markets from a Keynesian perspective. Endogenous business fluctuations are studied in the context of long-run distributive cycles in an advanced, rigorously formulated and quantitative setup. The material is developed by way of self-contained chapters on three levels of generality, an advanced textbook level, a research-oriented applied level and on a third level that shows how the interaction of real with financial markets has to be modelled from a truly integrative Keynesian perspective. Monetary Macrodynamics shows that the balanced growth path of a capitalist economy is unlikely to be attracting and that the cumulative forces that surround it are controlled in the large by changes in the behavioural factors that drive the wage-price spiral and the financial markets. Such behavioural changes can in fact be observed in actual economies in the interaction of demand-driven business fluctuations with supply-driven wage and price dynamics as they originate from the conflict over income distribution between capital and labour. The book is a detailed critique of US mainstream macroeconomics and uses rigorous dynamic macro-models of a descriptive and applicable nature. It will be of particular relevance to postgraduate students and researchers interested in disequilibrium processes, real wage feedback channels, financial markets and portfolio choice, financial accelerator mechanisms and monetary policy.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of one of the classic texts to have emerged from the Cambridge Capital Controversy.

The capability approach has developed significantly since Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. It is now recognised as being highly beneficial in the analysis of poverty and inequality, but also in the redefinition of policies aimed at improving the well-being of individuals. The approach has been applied within numerous sectors, from health and education to sustainable development, but beyond the obvious interest that it represents for the classical economics tradition, it has also encountered certain limitations. While acknowledging the undeniable progress that the approach has made in renewing the thinking on the development and well-being of a population, this book takes a critical stance. It focuses particularly on the approach’s inadequacy vis-à-vis the continental phenomenological tradition and draws conclusions about the economic analysis of development. In a more specific sense, it highlights the fact that the approach is too bound by standard economic logic, which has prevented it from taking account of a key ‘person’ dimension — namely, the ability of an individual to assume responsibility. As a result, this book advocates the notion that if the approach is used carelessly in relation to development policies, it can cause a number of pernicious effects, some of which may lead to disastrous consequences. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, this book will be of interest to those working in the fields of economics, philosophy, development studies and sociology.

Despite the depth of the Greek crisis, the exorbitant burdens placed upon the working people and the massive popular resistance movement to capitalist policies, there is a definite lack of consistently Marxist analyses of the Greek problem. International debates regarding the Greek crisis have been dominated by orthodox (Neoclassical and neo-Keynesian) approaches. The heterodox side of these debates has been occupied by Radical Political Economy approaches (usually radical post-Keynesian or Marxo-Keynesian perspectives). Moreover, they are dominated by the ‘financialisation’ thesis which is quite alien to Marxism, neglects the sphere of production and professes that the global crisis is simply a financial crisis that has nothing to do with ‘real’ accumulation and the profit rate. This book argues that by emphasising the sphere of production and profitability, classical Marxist analysis better explains the Greek crisis than its orthodox and heterodox competitors. The contributors present critiques of the prevalent approaches and offer studies of the Greek crisis that use the methodology and the analytical and empirical tools of classical Marxist Political Economy. In particular, it is shown that the Greek crisis was caused by falling profitability and the ensuing overaccumulation crisis. The ‘broad unequal exchange’ existing between the euro-center and the euro-periphery contributed to Greek capital’s falling profitability. This book enriches the debate about the Greek economic crisis by demonstrating the insights that can be drawn by considering the Marxist alternative to the dominant mainstream and heterodox approaches.

The main areas of interest in Marxian economics are examined, paying particular attention to class conflict, analytical Marxism and game theory and will be of interest to a wide variety of economists and social scientists.