The Curious Career of David Bensusan-Butt

The Paper is focused on the crucial issues of the New Theories of Growth and of course a firm premise must be put forward for the Global Governance, in this really season of the history when winds of antagonist reactionary inspired thinking and political parties are tempted to embrace populism, nationalism, ethnic antagonism even racism. In a season of illiberal tolerance, a growing number of countries are affected and the adopted contrast measures seems still fragile and weak. International Relations, History and Political Sciences give room to realism and old fashion approaches and policy choices without finding a valuable critical analysis and public debate. The implications for the global order are quite alarming and the looming of more than 60 conflicts spreading out all over the world are associated with main fires as the North Korea case or the never ending Middle East, South Asia, North West and East Africa, horrific terrorism ongoing and tyrants regimes still on power. On the opposite side, the leadership of the reforming, open markets, economies and in primis the liberal democracies of the different inspirations are keeping higher the fences and the appropriate policies to dissipate the polluting clouds of extremism, while public opinions are poisoned by instrumental information, while too wide, diffused blind tolerance with movements and leaders who are feeding the authoritarian and nationalistic dangers, against constitutions and laws. Are the New Theories of Growth in a revisionist process to compromise with the populism and demagogy contaminating the world? Even if apparently the political elites are very cautious of higher the tunes and the measures of contrast, the firm assumption that the globalism in the unique condition for growth and advancement of societies, economies and peace among nations is hardening fast. In fact, any possible restauration of the past is possible in the already irreversible structure of economies, finance, technology standards, human capital, higher environment priorities, new generation weaponries, outer space perspectives, energy shift from oil and coal: the list of the reasons to push back the front of antagonistic thinking, practices and governance might never end. To enlighten the promising world governance and economies horizons to 2020-2030, the New Theory of Growth almost twenty years ago have added a terrific value added of research, innovative assumptions and policies: My paper proposes to read again the effective and well analyzed outcomes shown in the beginning of the mid Nineties with the publication of the Formel-G Global Trends 2020, by the Research Division of the Deutsche Bank. It was an applied and upgraded elaboration of the rigorous range and propositions by the distinguished scholars Romer-Mankiv-Weil from Berkeley University, announced by NEBER in December 1990. The New Theory of Growth is based in the relevant and quite impressive scientific and applied analyses of professors David Romer, Gregory Mankiv and Davis Weil. An extraordinary farsighted reviewing and enhancement of the global economics and governance perspectives of the world policies that I will summarize here as they might be not forgotten pillars in the scientific gathering of fellows, researchers and promising PhDs in the five continents and today at the CEA in Manchester University. The dialectic between globalization and nationalism return should not be carried out purely on a kind of demagogic propaganda slogans among factions but in an intellectual and scientific frame, where no room is left for the destabilizing reactionary and shadow protagonists of the esoteric return to the past when ignorance and instrumental use of the institutions accompanied the world through the XIX and XX centuries governance, even if in presence of a great but elitarian intellectual, scientific and cultural renaissance. Nevertheless it had not even a comparison with the openness and accessible movement of people and ideas, the quality of life in contemporary society, where knowledge, scientific discoveries, arts and humanities, universities and think tanks are the one really face of the crucial factors of the “one World”, not of nations or alliances but just the endowment of the new factors of growth and development under our eyes into a wide, unique human horizon, where races and skin colors are simply accepted, with reciprocal respect and inclusion policies.

The Economics of Keynes

Many writers have produced models of economic growth based on the theories of Classical Economists, but reformulated with the aid of the modern techniques of economic analysis. These writers have mostly concentrated on Ricardo's theory, and many mathematical models of the Ricardian system are now available. However, in more recent times, Malthus's theory of growth has also been the object of this kind of analytical approach.' The present article suggests a new formulation of Malthus's system, based on some features of his work which have not been taken in full consideration until now. We have incorporated these elements in a model which seeks to capture his essential and, in our opinion, most original contributions to the theory of economic growth. This article is divided in two parts. The first part is devoted to a restatement of Malthus's argument concerning the influence of effective demand on the growth of the economy. The second part of the article then develops a model of long-term growth which combines Malthus's views on effective demand and diminishing returns with his principle of population. One of the most interesting aspects of this model is its explanation of unemployment as a permanent phenomenon and not merely a transitory phase. The writings of Malthus are sometimes obscure and difficult to interpret. However, this does not excuse the cavalier way in which his work is treated and some of its most fundamental features are ignored, such as, for example, his theory of value and real wage determination. The present article seeks to redress the balance by analysing in some detail Malthus's ideas on value and real wages; it also explores his ideas on growth and unemployment. For lack of space, we cannot deal with other aspects of his thought which also deserve attention (such as, for instance, his views on the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, or on the role of fixed capital). However, this is not a serious problem for the issues covered in the present article are of central importance and can be considered in isolation from the rest of his ideas. To analyse the views of Malthus, we make use of a simple mathematical model and what follows is, in our opinion, a fairly accurate formalisation of these views. Moreover, quite apart from its merits as a formalisation of what Malthus himself believed, the model is interesting in its own right.

The failure of orthodox economic analysis to provide acceptable answers to the dominant contemporary policy problems has given rise to a widespread feeling of 'methodological crisis' in the discipline. Students find it increasingly hard to relate to a textbook-authenticated paradigm which seems to be in the process of disintegration. The object of this book is to put some of the current theoretical controversies into long term perspective by tracing their historical antecedents. A connected object is to interpret some of the doctrinal divisions in the modern debate by showing that they spring from profound disagreements about what economics is and what questions the economist ought to be trying to answer. It examines the way leading theorists have adapted their theories and concepts to major changes in the problem-situation facing policy makers. The book is in no sense exhaustive (either in the range of theories or in the selection of theorists discussed) but focuses particularly on changes in economists' views on the scope and methodology of economics and on the evolution of strategic ideas in the fields of value theory, monetary theory and growth theory. It raises questions of a socio-historical kind, such as: when did economics acquire a sufficently coherent and well-attested paradigm to rank as a distinct discipline? What were the distinguishing characteristics of successive paradigms for economics? How revolutionary were the changes attributable to periods of significant theoretical change? How can we explain the success or failure of alternative paradigms in gaining a hold over the minds of a majority of professional economists? All economists will find valuable insights in this book. For undergraduate students it is a compact and readable introduction to the history of economic thought.

The failure of orthodox economic analysis to provide acceptable answers to the dominant contemporary policy problems has given rise to a widespread feeling of 'methodological crisis' in the discipline. Students find it increasingly hard to relate to a textbook-authenticated paradigm which seems to be in the process of disintegration. The object of this book is to put some of the current theoretical controversies into long term perspective by tracing their historical antecedents. A connected object is to interpret some of the doctrinal divisions in the modern debate by showing that they spring from profound disagreements about what economics is and what questions the economist ought to be trying to answer. It examines the way leading theorists have adapted their theories and concepts to major changes in the problem-situation facing policy makers. The book is in no sense exhaustive (either in the range of theories or in the selection of theorists discussed) but focuses particularly on changes in economists' views on the scope and methodology of economics and on the evolution of strategic ideas in the fields of value theory, monetary theory and growth theory. It raises questions of a socio-historical kind, such as: when did economics acquire a sufficently coherent and well-attested paradigm to rank as a distinct discipline? What were the distinguishing characteristics of successive paradigms for economics? How revolutionary were the changes attributable to periods of significant theoretical change? How can we explain the success or failure of alternative paradigms in gaining a hold over the minds of a majority of professional economists? All economists will find valuable insights in this book. For undergraduate students it is a compact and readable introduction to the history of economic thought.

While the endogenous growth theory has claimed success in modeling various factors of growth and providing analysis on sustainable growth of economies, most of the growth models in published work are for closed economies. These models are deemed to be inadequate for economic analysis because trade, which is often regarded as the engine of growth, has been neglected. The theory of international trade, on the other hand, is characterized by models that are mainly static. While the interest in the dynamics of trade has been growing, work in this area is still scarce. The success of the newly industrialized economies that have been adopting trade-oriented policies suggests how limited present trade theory is in explaining and analyzing the growth of these economies. The work collected here serves to bridge the old growth theory and growth theory; merge growth and trade theory; suggest new analysis and techniques of economic growth; and provide analysis of new issues related to growth and trade.

This article addresses the interconnections between two seemingly disparate worlds—the world of abstract economic analysis and the world of policy and politics, drawing on the author’s personal experience in the two worlds. A fundamental premise underlying the analysis is that it is a society’s ideas and beliefs that are ultimately responsible for its development. The absence of good, scientific ideas proves to be the biggest stumbling block in crafting good policies. Keynes was right when he wrote that ‘the power of vested interest is vastly exaggerated compared to the gradual encroachment of ideas.’ So was Nehru when, in 1929, in a speech in New Delhi, he urged his young audience: ‘The world is moved by ideas.’ India today stands on the cusp of a major economic take-off. It is up to us to seize the moment. To do so, however, we need to bring the best ideas from the world of scientific enquiry into the humdrum world of politics and policy. The aim of this article is to illustrate by drawing on real-life examples, that it is possible to do so.

With text mining technologies advancing it becomes easier to analyse and search through an ever-growing amount of literature and to semantically integrate literary works within large corpora of literature as well as with the emerging global web of linked data. It becomes possible to use and reuse literary works in more efficient and productive ways. With these new conditions and possibilities the existing justification of copyright law is questioned and a reassessment of the law’s efficiency is required. Copyright law is justified by the economic rationale of a dynamic incentive for production of knowledge by means of temporary property rights and monopoly rents for rights holders. The objective of this paper is to examine the current welfare economics-based justification of copyright law with regard to text mining technology uses in scientific research. The paper proposes possible changes to copyright law to address the conflict between the current copyright law and the opportunity of increased productivity. The paper combines micro-economic argumentation of the “Economic analysis of law” with growth theory and seeks to illustrate a public welfare analysis for the specific constellation of literary works information goods markets, researchers and research organisations as productive users of works and research text mining services. After introducing public welfare analysis and its application to questions of market failure and information externalities the paper describes the technical possibilities, benefits and conditions of text mining as well as relevant market players. The economics of copyright law are explained and how copyright currently applies to text mining uses. The economic methodology is then applied to the legal situation and the possibilities to realize the potential of text mining in scientific research. The paper also takes copyright’s competition objective and the coupling/tying of literary works markets and text mining services into account, considers network externalities and international trade and it draws analogies to other markets with similar challenges. The findings of the paper are presented mainly for national-level public welfare analysis, but can be applied to regional level. Applied to the economic region of the European Union (EU) the conclusion of this article is: A mandatory copyright limitation exempting all research/scientific-purpose text mining uses including uses with commercial purpose from copyright, combined with the requirements that anti-circumvention law and contract law must not prevent executing such a limitation and that “legal access” defined as technical access to literary works is a sufficient condition to exercise this limitation, should be implemented in EU copyright law, because this is the best way to maximise the public welfare in the EU. ----------- NB: A public consultation on the review of the EU copyright law also addressing text mining is currently underway (extended deadline for submissions: 5 March 2014).

With text mining technologies advancing it becomes easier to analyse and search through an ever-growing amount of literature and to semantically integrate literary works within large corpora of literature as well as with the emerging global web of linked data. It becomes possible to use and reuse literary works in more efficient and productive ways. With these new conditions and possibilities the existing justification of copyright law is questioned and a reassessment of the law’s efficiency is required. Copyright law is justified by the economic rationale of a dynamic incentive for production of knowledge by means of temporary property rights and monopoly rents for rights holders. The objective of this paper is to examine the current welfare economics-based justification of copyright law with regard to text mining technology uses in scientific research. The paper proposes possible changes to copyright law to address the conflict between the current copyright law and the opportunity of increased productivity. The paper combines micro-economic argumentation of the “Economic analysis of law” with growth theory and seeks to illustrate a public welfare analysis for the specific constellation of literary works information goods markets, researchers and research organisations as productive users of works and research text mining services. After introducing public welfare analysis and its application to questions of market failure and information externalities the paper describes the technical possibilities, benefits and conditions of text mining as well as relevant market players. The economics of copyright law are explained and how copyright currently applies to text mining uses. The economic methodology is then applied to the legal situation and the possibilities to realize the potential of text mining in scientific research. The paper also takes copyright’s competition objective and the coupling/tying of literary works markets and text mining services into account, considers network externalities and international trade and it draws analogies to other markets with similar challenges. The findings of the paper are presented mainly for national-level public welfare analysis, but can be applied to regional level. Applied to the economic region of the European Union (EU) the conclusion of this article is: A mandatory copyright limitation exempting all research/scientific-purpose text mining uses including uses with commercial purpose from copyright, combined with the requirements that anti-circumvention law and contract law must not prevent executing such a limitation and that “legal access” defined as technical access to literary works is a sufficient condition to exercise this limitation, should be implemented in EU copyright law, because this is the best way to maximise the public welfare in the EU. ----------- NB: A public consultation on the review of the EU copyright law also addressing text mining is currently underway (extended deadline for submissions: 5 March 2014).

The article discusses the extent to which the research methodology of heterodox economics is suited to the economic impact analysis of land use and real estate applications. Fulfilling the requirements of context-sensitivity, sub-optimality and pragmatism is argued to be relevant for increasing our conceptual understanding of property value in its multiple dimensions, and consequently for improving the process and outcome of environmental amenity valuation. Here three different issues need to be addressed: (1) the appropriate economic theory framework; (2) the particular geographic and institutional context; (3) the perceived costs vs. benefits of any impacts. Such an analysis is shown in a case study on water valuation in the Netherlands.

Review of Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev's Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social. London: Routledge, 2014, 264 pp.The most fun an academic can have, at least on the job, comes from encountering a package of ideas one never expected to see that turn out to be deep and interesting. If, before I encountered Carsten HerrmannPillath's and Ivan Boldyrev's (henceforth, HPB) joint work at a conference two years ago, I had been asked to list canonical dead philosophers whose work might inspire fresh insights about current issues in economic methodology, I would have put Hegel near the bottom. Imagine anyone being so muddled about economic reasoning that that they could be set straight(er) by Marx! HPB's new book convinces me that this would have been a completely misjudged expectation.By this comment I do not mean to endorse HPB's view that what both the academy and the policy world need now is a general embrace of Hegelian economics. Nor am I about to repeat the experience, which I recall with a shudder from much younger days, of actually reading Hegel's Philosophy of right. But I will go this far: the authors make a compelling case for the proposition that Hegel is the most important fountainhead for a coherent set of ideas about both economic behavior and political economy that, when expressed in an idiom closer to that of contemporary social science, deserve to be represented in both methodological and policy debates. Furthermore, as I will explain, going beyond anything to which HPB allude, if someone thinks (as I did) that the current German model of capitalism is largely a path-dependent consequence of Bismarck's cunning in designing a welfare state that needed paternalistic oversight by a Junker aristocracy, then HPB's book reveals that that is wrong too, or at least simplistic. German-style capitalism has deep intellectual roots, and they can be found in Hegel.Before I get to economics, I will comment on HPB's basis for putting a convincing 21st-century gloss on Hegel's pure philosophy, which, as someone trained by analytic philosophers, I had previously found utterly archaic. Hegel, famously, goes on constantly about spirit, and, even more off-puttingly, about a kind of spirit he calls objective. This phrase smells like mysticism and, in its 19th-century context, nationalism to boot. Liberal cosmopolitan economists like me can hardly imagine a more repugnant mixture than that. But HPB make a convincing case that objective spirit is in fact Hegel's pre-Darwinian name for an element of the ontological furniture that so-called externalist philosophers of mind, following Tyler Burge (1986), Daniel Dennett (1987), Edwin Hutchins (1995), Ron McClamrock (1995), Andy Clark (1997), Radu Bogdan (1997, 2000, 2009, 2010, 2013), and Tad Zawidzki (2013), have established as central to an adequate science of human behavior: the socially scaffolded but primarily self-narrated person. I have argued repeatedly-but see especially Ross (2005, 2014)- that the standard story economists tell about the philosophical foundations of their most important theoretical concept, economic agency as inferred from revealed preference, snaps in a satisfying gestalt switch from incoherence to rich profundity if only one distinguishes such socially scaffolded but richly individuated people from the neural computers studied by psychologists and neuroscientists. Only then can we understand how preference consistency is stabilized as an achievement that simultaneously embeds normative individualism and identification with points in complex vector spaces of social markers. The relevant concept to replace the mind-as-internal-computer has unfortunately been established in the literature under the label of the 'extended mind' (Menary 2010). Since this suggests that the mind begins as an internal computer that is then accessorized, in terms of connotations the label is not much of an improvement on 'objective spirit'. …

An overview of the new growth theory is provided from both an analytical and empirical perspective. Following a historical outline and a brief analytical sketch of the R&D-based models, the results from fitting two structural models to data are presented. Results show the relative impacts on growth from trade and R&D-based policies including technological spillovers from trade. The mechanism of intersectoral adjustments to the long-run growth path is also discussed. Insights provided by the theory are related to agriculture from the view of agriculture in the context of the broader economy within which it must compete for resources, and in terms of growth in agricultural factor productivity as evidenced by the recent growth in genetic engineering. t is generally agreed that the world economy is in its second wave of globalization, with the first wave ending in the early 1900s, and the second wave beginning in the late 1950s to early 1960s. Contributors to this literature, such as Baldwin and Martin, draw heavily on the new growth theory to explain this transformation. Agriculture also has a role in this transformation. Technological advances have caused U.S. agriculture in the second wave to evolve from its classic role as an exporter of a relatively narrow class of primary commodities supported mostly by public research and development (R&D) expenditures, to a larger share of processed food products in exports, with an increasing array of attributes linked to private R&D efforts (Gopinath and Roe). The general task of this paper is to provide a relatively nontechnical discussion of the insights that the new growth theory provides into the linkages between growth and trade with particular attention to agriculture. The paper contains four major sections. The following section introduces the new theory by briefly

Contemporary general equilibrium theory is characteristically short-run, separated from monetary aspects of the economy, and as such does not deal with long-run problems such as capital accumulation, innovation, and the historical movement of the economy. These phenomena are discussed by growth theory, which being short term, cannot deal with the fundamental problem of how the production function is derived. This book provides a much-needed synthesis of growth and monetary theory, drawing on the work of Schumpeter, Keynes and the prewar neoclassical economists to formulate a capital-theoretic general equilibrium theory.

As governments and public service organizations across the globe engage in strategies of institutional and organizational change, it is timely to examine current developments and a future research agenda for public governance and management. The paper commences with reflections on the state of the field, based on an analysis of papers published in theBritish Journal of Managementover the last decade. While there was some variation apparent across the set, the ‘typical’ article was found to be influenced by the discipline of organizational behaviour, set within the health‐care sector, using case‐study methods within field‐based studies, and investigating shifts in roles and relationships and the management of change. It has also in the past been UK‐centric, though the journal editorial policy and our own article call for a stronger international and comparative focus in the future. The second section of the article summarizes the articles and themes contained in this collection of papers on public service organizations. The third section explores a possible research agenda for the future, arguing for the significance of public sector research for the understanding of management more generally, and for examining the interface between private and public organizations (an increasingly common phenomenon). We suggest the need to set public services research in policy and political contexts, and suggest this may reveal organizational processes of wide interest. We call for a wider set of disciplines to engage in public management research, and to engage in moving the agenda from the study of efficiency to effectiveness as defined by a variety of stakeholders. We address the issue of how far public management researchers should become directly engaged with the world of policy and suggest that whether researchers engage in Mode 1 or Mode 2 research, their work would benefit from a stronger theoretical base.

This book is an examination of the nature of economic explanation. The opening chapters introduce current thinking in the philosophy of science and review the literature on methodology. Professor Blaug then turns to the troublesome question of the logical status of welfare economics, giving the reader an understanding of the outstanding issues in the methodology of economics. This is followed by a series of case studies of leading economic controversies, which shows how controversies in economics may be illuminated by paying attention to questions of methodology. A final chapter draws the strands together and gives the author's view of what is wrong with modern economics. This book is a revised and updated edition of a classic work on the methodology of economics, in which Professor Blaug develops his discussion of the latest developments in macroeconomics, general equilibrium theory and international trade theory. A new section on the rationality postulate is also added.