{"title":"Redesigning the International Monetary System. Intellectual Influences and the Return of the Special Drawing Rights: An Open Issue","authors":"Albertina Nania","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-002005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-002005","url":null,"abstract":"The paper suggests to explore the theoretical and cultural influences on the re-forms made to the International Monetary System since the 1960s, when Triffin's Dilemma \"was apparent for all to see\", as Volcker suggested. Schmelzer argues that \"when Milton Friedman published his article calling for flexible exchange rates in 1953, less than 5 percent of economists around the world shared his view,\" while in the late 1960s, \"about 90 percent of economists did, and they were joined by powerful figures within the government and banking community\". Such con-sensus contributed to strengthening the influence of neoliberal theories not only in the scientific environment of economists, but also and especially in the terrain of the directions taken internationally by political and financial institutions. It is therefore high time to ascertain through an empirical and chronological investigation whether there is any correlation between neoliberal paradigms and the International Monetary Fund's restrictive policy choices regarding the allocations of special drawing rights (the basket currency that was supposed to provide for global liquidity needs), and whether their supporters followed any specific and shared view.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43381990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Stefano Figuera, Guglielmo Forges Davanzati, Andrea Pacella
{"title":"Considerations on the Legacy of Ordoliberalism in European Monetary Policy","authors":"Stefano Figuera, Guglielmo Forges Davanzati, Andrea Pacella","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-002004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-002004","url":null,"abstract":"The paper aims to analysis the ordoliberal legacy in European Monetary Policy between 1998 and 2020. What emerges is that although ordoliberal principles were incorporated into the guiding values of the European treaties, they did not play a key role in guiding either the monetary policy strategies fixed in 1998 and 2003 or the ECB interventions implemented between 2011 and 2020 in response to the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis. This is basically due to a) the ECB's acceptance of the New Consensus Macroeconomics (NCM) that recognises the endogenous nature of money and its partial non-neutrality, b) the ECB's constant tendency to act discretionally in order to reach different goals.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42078060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Luigi Capoani, Gianluca Bortoletto, Samuele Fratini, Violetta Van Veen, Cristoforo Imbesi
{"title":"The Genesis and Evolution of the Blue Banana Region","authors":"Luigi Capoani, Gianluca Bortoletto, Samuele Fratini, Violetta Van Veen, Cristoforo Imbesi","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-002001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-002001","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to present a balanced bibliographic review on the genesis of the Blue Banana and its further developments. Different contributions have been collected to obtain a comprehensive picture of the European regional concept from both historical and theoretical perspectives. Besides the review of the litera-ture, this article contributes to the existing research on the Blue Banana with a comprehensive investigation of its current features, including urbanization, infra-structures, labor market, productivity, and competitiveness. These aspects raise significant implications at the EU level in terms of promoting policies aimed at the reduction of disparities among the European regions, whose development strate-gies could be further scrutinized, thus benefiting the continent as a whole.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48763335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Early Invention of the so-called Laffer Curve and the Mathematics of the Progressive Tax in the Italian Tradition","authors":"M. Pomini","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-002003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-002003","url":null,"abstract":"The theories of progressive income taxation developed in the Italian debate of the last century have been discussed in depth in a review article by Domenican-tonio Fausto (2008). Italian economists have taken an active part in the debate on the progressive taxation of income and wealth. In general, despite a few oppo-nents, the idea of progressive taxation is agreed upon for political and social rea-sons. In this broad debate on progressivity developed in Italy, there is also an ana-lytical path that Fausto's article does not consider. The first mathematical contri-bution on this topic was put forward by Tullio Martello in his polemic book against the progressive tax, La progressività in teoria e in pratica (1895). The debate was concluded in the 1950s by a mathematical economist and follower of Pareto, Raf-faele D'Addario. D'Addario is worth considering because he explicitly introduced the revenue curve. The decreasing part is well known today as the Laffer curve.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43226169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Norman Edwin Himes's \"Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action\" (1939). The Eugenic Manifesto of a Devote Carverian","authors":"L. Fiorito, Valentina Erasmo","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-002002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-002002","url":null,"abstract":"This note presents an unpublished 1939 address given by the American sociologist and population specialist Norman Edwin Himes on \"Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action. Himes's discussion of eugenics and democracy has a two-fold relevance. First, it provides further evidence that among population studies specialists a generalized commitment to eugenics persisted well beyond the era of the so-called Progressive Era and continued throughout the 1930s. Second, Himes's approach reveals an attempt to reformulate a eugenic agenda along \"liberal\" lines, which was intended to distance him from the coercive and racialist approach of his progressive predecessors. Yet, it will be shown, even though Himes seemed to temper the extremism of the earlier movement with sociological and voluntaristic language, there was little actual change in the ultimate goals of his agenda regardless of the apparent switch to democratic eugenics.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42315425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sidney Armor Reeve: Engineer, Inventor, Progressive, and Underappreciated Utopian","authors":"Charles R. McCann Jr., L. Fiorito","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-001005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-001005","url":null,"abstract":"Sidney Armor Reeve, professional engineer and amateur historian, economist, and sociologist, writing during what has been described as the Progressive Era, at-tacked the very foundations of the existing economic and social orders. He explic-itly criticized the dominant commercialism of the capitalist society as being a can-cer, a major cause of inequality and unemployment, offering instead a program of reform that, while some reviewers characterized it as consistent with the program of the socialists, presented something of an alternative vision, one recognizing the primacy of the Ultimate Consumer. His remedy, favoring as it did the central con-trol of the economy, shared at least commonalities with the reforms advocated by the socialist writers of the period, even as he himself rejected the label, unequivo-cally stressing points of fundamental disagreement.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42917828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forecasting in the Long-Term: Aurelio Peccei, a Quite Neglected Manager and Utopian","authors":"Alessandro Le Donne","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-001002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-001002","url":null,"abstract":"Aurelio Peccei (1908-1984) was an Italian top manager who worked in FIAT and Olivetti and founded in 1968 the Club of Rome (CoR), an informal group of politicians and intellectuals. They had the objective to clearly scrutiny into the af-termath of the economic growth which apparently paid no consideration for its negative side effects, especially the exhaustion of energy sources, and, in general, its sustainability: all that sums up in the phrase world problematique. The present paper deals with Aurelio Peccei and the main points of his futurology, in the light of the thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel, whom Peccei considered as his mentor. We will discuss how, according to Peccei's vision, only through a cultural revolu-tion a process of social changings eventually leading to sustainable equilibria could be set up in motion. Moreover, the issues under investigation were deemed com-mon to both capitalist and socialist countries so that the solutions would have to apply to both fronts of the Cold War. Indeed, in Peccei's approach, the reshaping of the international order would be a non-political process; maybe unknowingly, Peccei and the CoR doctrine seem to have a utopian, Saint-Simonian flavour.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48948018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Symposium. The Limits to Growth: Economic Theorizing and Policymaking, 1972-2021","authors":"A. C. della Redazione","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-001001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-001001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44331490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Talking about growth, the discourse of the European Central Bank, 1997-2021","authors":"Eric Dehay","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-001004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-001004","url":null,"abstract":"The text proposes an analysis of the way the European Central Bank (ECB) considers the notion of economic growth or its limits and how the question of envi-ronmental risk has become an issue for it. For this purpose, an analysis of the speeches of the members of its board is carried out over the period 1997-2021. An automated statistical analysis of the corpus reveals the standard approach to growth adopted by the ECB. This is followed by a more qualitative reading of the discourse, which shows that the notions of sustainability and the climate crisis are becoming increasingly important in the rhetoric of the ECB, without leading to a radical revision of the way growth is conceived or to a questioning of its limits. In order to expand its discourse and action in the climate field, the ECB is rather pro-ceeding by superimposition, adding new ideas rather than replacing its initial paradigm. In doing so, it protects the legitimacy of its mandate and its epistemic credibility.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42862701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The limits to growth of buen vivir socialism: Ecuador's alternative development model from 2007 to 2017","authors":"Aurelio García-García","doi":"10.3280/spe2022-001003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3280/spe2022-001003","url":null,"abstract":"In 2006, the political coalition Alianza PAÍS promoted a \"Citizen's Revolution\" in Ecuador that would put an end to neoliberal policies and lead the country to \"buen vivir\". However, the coalition's arrival to the government and the negotiations of the 2008 Constitution generated fractures and splits within the party. The buen vivir was divided into three trends: Indianist, environmentalist and socialist. The socialist trend became the state representative, although it had huge controversies with the other two trends because it opted for a new post-neoliberal development model, while the indianists and ecologists rejected the continuity of the developmentalist models. This article presents the main characteristics of the three trends of buen vivir. In addition, based on the work The Limits to Growth and through the analysis of socio-economic and environmental indicators, it is shown how the socialist model of buen vivir (2007-2017) was an unsustainable model in the medium and long term.","PeriodicalId":40401,"journal":{"name":"History of Economic Thought and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49632134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}