Mainstream economics is ill equipped to deal with systemic issues such as the climate crisis. Yet there is no shortage of approaches that extend neoclassical principles to nature-economy relations, and they hold considerable currency in policy discourses. This article interrogates neoclassical thought on climate change from the perspective of economics imperialism, the expansion of economic analysis onto new subject matter at the expense of other approaches. Drawing on the work of William Nordhaus and Nicholas Stern, I argue that climate change economics has been underpinned by economics imperialism in its second “market imperfection” and third “suspension” phases. Economics imperialism has thus contributed to excluding considerations of power, race, class, gender, and other systemic inequalities from the field, and underpins solutions that delay radical climate action. JEL Classification: B41, B50, Q50, Q54

This paper contends that the project of mainstream economics ought to be understood through the totality of its systemic delusion to reveal its failings as a societal science. I argue that this systematic delusion springs from and is sustained by two interrelated systems. I construct a framework of mainstream economics that integrates its ideological foundations with its methodological pillars, which I refer to as system I and system II of the mainstream project. First, I document the process of the ideological evolution (sub-system IA) of mainstream economics from the Classicals to the present to demonstrate that the mainstream has consistently served the capitalist system. Second, I argue that this service is made possible through the obstinate use of homo economicus (sub-system IIA) and the dogmatic insistence on mathematical formalism (sub-system IIB), despite their incompatibility with the true behavior of social individuals. Lastly, I expose how the intellectual cartel of mainstream economists (sub-system IB) at various levels of the capitalist social system marginalizes those outside the cartel. In this vicious circular project, the intellectual cartel upholds the capitalist ideology by committing to analytical rigor that does not necessarily engage with concrete material reality.

Abstract This paper revisits the work of Richard R. Nelson (1930–2025), focusing on his critique of equilibrium theory, to explore persistent methodological debates within the field of economics. It examines the tension between theoretical abstraction and empirical realism, arguing that Nelson’s evolutionary approach offers a compelling alternative to the dominant general equilibrium framework. By foregrounding processes of change, uncertainty, and adaptive behaviour, Nelson (alongside Sidney G. Winter) challenges the discipline’s tendency to model economies as static, fully understood systems. While this paper does not aim to provide a comprehensive review of their contributions, it highlights how their critique remains strikingly relevant today. Despite methodological refinements, shifts in research topics and policy engagement, mainstream economics continues to struggle with dynamic, out-of-equilibrium analysis. Revisiting Nelson’s legacy is not only timely, but also essential for those seeking a more realistic and responsive economics.

This review of a selection of literature in critical geography, political ecology, eco-Marxism, and ecological economics over the past five decades reflects on the paucity of discussion on the phenomenon of modern, all-purpose money. This is paradoxical, given the almost universal denunciation of mainstream economics and capitalist political economy in this literature. The critiques of environmental injustices and uneven development tend to target an abstract capitalist ‘system’ rather than the peculiar and historically recent artefact of money through which it operates. A rethinking of the role of money in the modern world economy can unravel ambiguities in Marxian concepts of value, unequal exchange, and exploitation. In remaining confined to the hegemonic worldview, monetary framings of inequalities miss the mark of exposing the veiled material asymmetries in social metabolism. It is argued that the concept of value refers to money, rather than vice versa, while unequal exchange should be understood as asymmetric transfers of material resources, rather than values. Monetary and biophysical flows must be approached as analytically distinct phenomena, where the latter are mystified by the former. Rather than attempt to straddle this distinction, the Marxian labour theory of value can be understood as addressing a subset within a wider range of exploitative, biophysical exchange relations. The monetary theory of value indicated here appears to be aligned with some recent Marxist scholarship.

The Trump administration has initiated a war on international trade of a scale that has not been seen since the 1930s. Mr. Trump’s speeches and actions demonstrate contempt for economic theory from Adam Smith and David Hume to mainstream economists of today, and for the lessons of historical experience. His policies and their inconsistencies have created uncertainty, inefficiency through massive diversion of trade flows, and a climate ripe for corruption. The initiatives will leave a legacy of lasting damage to the U.S. economy and those of its trading partners, drive countries into closer trading relationships with China, and drain the goodwill toward the U.S., which has lubricated international cooperation in many spheres, including military, development assistance, and climate protection.

PMJDY integrates poor into economic mainstream and plays a crucial role in development of marginalised communities. This programme was launched by PrimeMinister Shri Narendra Modi on 28th August 2014, completes a decade of successful implementation today.To cover the financially excluded segments of society under financial inclusion; the Government of India and the Reserve Bank of India have made several attempts.Our government is also making an effort in this area with a new scheme called Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY).PMJDY is India's national financial inclusion campaign.PMJDY ensures that banking and financial services are available to the weaker and poorer sections of society at a reasonable cost.The success of the initiative is reflected in 53 crore people having been brought into the formal banking system through the opening of Jan Dhan Accounts.These bank accounts have garnered a deposit balance of Rs. 2.3 lakh crore, and resulted in the issuance of over 36 crore free-of-cost RuPay cards, which also provide for a 2 lakh rupees accident

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to present Karl Mittermaier’s work as a form of political economy, very close to James Buchanan’s views of political economy. We indeed claim that Mittermaier’s analysis parallels Buchanan’s. Their criticism of standard economics is similar—they both oppose a deterministic form of economics. They also both claim that economists should focus on institutions, rather than on choice. To them, and in contrast with what mainstream economics assumes, choice is not a firm empirical basis on which economists can rely. From this perspective, Mittermaier’s political economy could be viewed as an extension of Buchanan’s.

For the arts and culture to be regarded as components of overlooked, everyday and providential foundational economy, we need to address the obstacle of how they are currently seen by policy. This article explores how evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) uses statistical data analysis to articulate the value of cultural activity and appraise the policy interventions designed to enhance this value to society and to economy. Within dominant UK and Australian policy discourse, data are privileged where they can provide evidence of agglomeration of arts and cultural activities, taken as an indication of the benefits for their localities, known as ‘spillovers’ and ‘positive externalities’, and accompanied by metrics for economic output and productivity. Such measures comply with government frameworks for understanding the returns of public investment; however, we argue that the prioritisation of transactional and extractive properties of economies undermines understanding art and culture as a form of infrastructure which is generative and foundational to everyday life and wellbeing. To test this and explore the possibilities for more ‘infrastructural thinking’ about culture, we use the idea of re-performance and perform a re-analysis of existing employment data organised by standard industrial classifications to look under the bonnet of these statistical lenses. The article examines the implications of this exercise for creating heuristic empirics that move away from the constraints of orthodox economics which currently dominate cultural policy towards the progressive approaches positioning culture as central to foundational economy and liveability.

To address the practical impasse of mainstream economics—rooted in the deterministic worldview of Newtonian mechanics—where its mechanistic and linear analytical framework struggles to handle complex scenarios in the digital economy era, such as interactive decision-making, globally non-local correlations, and systemic mutations after sudden shocks, leading to a pronounced tension between theory and practice, this paper constructs a quantum economics analytical framework. Drawing on the inherent uncertainty revealed by quantum mechanics and based on the core isomorphism between economic systems and quantum systems (both centering on uncertainty, featuring superposition of multiple states, observer-induced interaction, and holistic correlations), it translates quantum core logics like superposition, entanglement, and transition into economic analytical tools. Methods such as entanglement entropy and quantum state transition probabilities are employed to quantify the complex correlations and state transformations of economic variables. Empirical studies of China’s macroeconomy validate the framework’s effectiveness, precisely capturing structural features like the strong correlation between money supply and economic growth, transmission frictions between money and prices, and paradigm shifts under policy shocks and event impacts. It further reveals the synergistic effect of a multi-variable system (“1+1+1>3”), quantifies the transitional characteristics and transformation laws of inflation states. The findings demonstrate that quantum economics elevates “uncertainty” to the theoretical core, transcending the paradigm limitations of traditional economics. It provides a novel quantitative perspective for understanding the complex essence and structural contradictions of economic systems, offering a systematic solution to the challenges of modern economic complexity.

Sadi Carnot entered the Paris Polytechnic School at a very young age. Having been born in 1796, in 1812, he entered that renowned educational institution. He studied mainly physics and economics, spending much of his time visiting industries and studying industrial organization and economics, having become an expert on trade and industry issues in several European countries. The Romanian mathematician and economist Georgescu-Roegen studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest and consolidated his training in statistics in France. He then went on to study economics under the guidance of Joseph Schumpeter, in USA, from whom he was strongly influenced. He obtained his degree in economics under Schumpeter and also became familiar with the ideas of the economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. This training gave him great skill in applying mathematics to economics. He then adopted a markedly interdisciplinary approach in his studies and gradually moved away from orthodox economics. As his studies progressed, he began to apply the concept of entropy to economics, borrowing it from thermodynamics. For him, economics was now viewed from the perspective of natural sciences such as physics and biology.

This article critically evaluates Walt Rostow’s modernization theory, a Cold War-era model that presents development as a linear, universal process. It argues that the theory is fundamentally flawed due to its Eurocentric assumptions, reductionist framework, and disregard for historical and structural inequalities, particularly those stemming from colonialism. Drawing on postcolonial critiques from thinkers such as Mohanty and Spivak, the article contends that such models impose epistemic violence, erasing the voices and agency of the Global South while reinforcing neocolonial hierarchies under the guise of progress. It also critiques the theory’s neglect of non-linear development trajectories, political contexts, and environmental sustainability. In response, alternative frameworks such as dependency theory, Sen’s capabilities approach, and ecological modernization are explored for their more inclusive and context-sensitive visions. However, while Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach offers a profound shift from Rostow by focusing on expanding human freedoms, his positioning within the mainstream economics tradition and the incomplete nature of his theory reveals certain ambiguities. Ultimately, the article calls for a postcolonial reimagining of development that embraces pluralism, sustainability, and local realities, aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals to foster an equitable future.

Whilst neo-liberal globalisation contributed to development and improved living standards in the poorer and less developed countries (Milanovic) it has as well enriched those already more than just well-off individual or group capital investors in those more developed ones who invested globally. However, it has also left-out a large numbers of unemployed and under employed in those same more developed countries. Those are the ones who lost their old jobs, many of which that have been outsourced abroad to lower-wage countries and who could not find alternative full time jobs while GDP growth in those countries slowed down. While academic literature analyses how the profits of FDI are taxed at regular rates, or how they should be taxed on their return to the FDI source countries, they are often left untaxed as they are seldom returned but often reinvested or spent abroad so to avoid paying domestic income taxes. In addition to the rising under and unemployment through job losses, the sovereign tax revenues have been deprived of income and diminishing and so have been the sources of social and other forms of securities expected from the states. The capital flows then often end up attracted to the major sovereign bonds often more than balancing off their outflows upsetting the capital imbalances in the recent years have so that the Federal Reserve has been asked to start targeting the current account balance and impose flexible tax charges on capital inflows so to reduce their inflows and to maintain current account in balance when the inflows exceed the outflows (US Congress bill S.2375, 2019). Capital outflows are, however, not considered. On the other hand, COVID19 supply shocks have shown that just-in time import delivery cannot be guaranteed and relied upon and so many developed importer countries have started rethinking the globalisation aiming to reduce their dependency on distant-path foreign imports of, at least, the key goods. They are considering options such as re-localisation of the production, either within their own or within those other less developed but geographically (and geopolitically) closer countries. In Perendia and Tsoukis (2012/2020) we introduced a Taylor-like fiscal rule for government spending proportional to the expected unemployment levels. We so endogenised the government spending instead being driven only by external shocks as is case in the mainstream economics. This paper therefore:

Economics is currently facing a crisis, influenced by the Neoclassical Synthesis and its welfare state model, as evidenced both in real-life situations and classroom settings. The study of mainstream economics relies heavily on formal reductionism and instrumentalism, which introduce biases such as the ceteris paribus axiom, ergodicity, ancilla statistica, and concepts like F-twist or mathiness. Additionally, mainstream economics has shown a lack of adaptation to social reality changes, including digitalization and globalization 2.0, as well as phenomena like permacrisis and polycrisis. The purpose of this work is to propose a heterodox mainline approach for renewing economics studies and their learning processes in a digital and practical manner. The methodology is based on heterodox theoretical and methodological frameworks, offering a critical review and systematization of biases and failures within current curricula and syllabi. The aim is to implement active learning experiences that incorporate digital literacy with real data, thereby enhancing the study of economics and reconnecting the subject with students and their future professional expertise. The results indicate that, through this proposed learning experience utilizing platforms with real data and heterodox analysis student participation and understanding have improved over three years at Rey Juan Carlos University. Furthermore, this approach provides a foundational framework that other educators in different institutions can adopt to replicate and adapt the experience effectively.

ABSTRACT International Political Economy (IPE) has long positioned itself against the ahistoricism of mainstream economics. Yet IPE scholarship itself is not immune to putting theoretical commitments over historical specificity. This article engages with this tension within Marxist IPE. We examine a prominent ‘Open Marxist’ tradition that has made important recent interventions within IPE on state capitalism, industrial policy, financialisation, and social reproduction. While sharing the Open Marxist commitment to a critical and historically informed IPE, we argue their framework prioritises theoretical coherence over accounting for the political construction of capitalism. In contrast, we propose a ‘radical historicist’ approach for IPE. Building on a sympathetic critique of one prominent synthesis of Open Marxism as the ‘politics of governing alienation’, we outline how an alternative Hegelian-Marxist perspective on alienation underpins a novel methodological basis for IPE that can live up to the discipline’s historicist ambitions. To demonstrate this, we show how a radical historicist approach can provide a fresh depiction of a core issue that has long focused IPE attention – the contradictions of the neoliberal state.

The global emphasis on women's economic participation has grown significantly due to its vital role in promoting macroeconomic stability and advancing financial inclusion. Involving women in economic activities is essential for achieving Sustainable Development Goals, such as poverty alleviation and closing gender gaps. However, a range of regulatory, cultural, and structural barriers continue to hinder women’s ability to participate in the mainstream economy. This study aims to examine the impact of restrictive laws and regulations on women’s economic participation within the BRICS bloc. Women’s economic participation has been examined through three key dimensions: paid employment, political representation, and entrepreneurship. The findings suggest that the removal of restrictive laws and regulations is associated with increased levels of women's economic participation. It is important to acknowledge that while BRICS countries have made significant strides in dismantling legal barriers affecting women, substantial obstacles remain from both legal and regulatory perspectives that hinder women’s engagement in economic activities. Therefore, the study recommends that BRICS nations prioritize the complete removal of restrictive laws and regulations impacting various aspects of women's lives, including mobility, pay, marriage, and entrepreneurship.. Furthermore, ensuring a gender-equitable distribution of resources should be a central focus in policymaking to ensure that no one is left behind in the development agenda, particularly women and children.

The article provides a critical analysis of the main cliches and stereotypes surrounding modern economics. Using the work of the 2024 Nobel laureates D. Acemoglu, S. Johnson, and J. Robinson (AJR) as a case study, it is demonstrated that the modern mainstream economics does not conform to the numerous caricatures still drawn of it by critics. It is argued that the popularity of these economists is due not so much to the originality of their approaches, but rather to their excellent command of rhetorical techniques, which allows them to successfully communicate with different audiences and create compelling narratives for them. The authors highlight three contentious features of AJR’s research style:(1) compensating for a lack of theoretical novelty through empirical testing of already known historical “cases”; (2) offering an excessively liberal interpretation of the works of their predecessors; (3) suppressing research results from other scholars that are inconvenient for their interpretations. It is shown that the narrative of empirical rigor in their ideas, skillfully promoted by AJR, is, on the one hand, in tune with the challenges of the time, and on the other hand, deprives the subject area of economics of its distinctiveness, making it hardly distinguishable from other disciplines.

Abstract The latest developments in the science behind environmental and climate change have demonstrated a failure of the mainstream economics model to offer strategies and policies to circumvent and revert such issues. Recently, Oxford economist Kate Raworth (2022[2017]) has produced The Doughnut Economics Model that is portraying the economy as a system embedded in the social and ecological boundaries, and it is based on the Sustainable Development Goals elaborated by The United Nations and the nine planetary boundaries espoused by Rockstrom et al (2009). The model is fundamented by seven principles. One of the most important principles is the challenge brought to Gross Domestic Product as an indicator of economic growth, whilst prosperity can be achieved through meeting the needs of the people and planet. This paper investigates the Doughnut Economics model as a heterodox economics proposal to ensure a sustainable development of our economies and societies and its conceptual and pragmatic, policy implications. The paper urges caution regarding the necessary role of a ‘benevolent state’ in applying policies that help nations to ‘live’ and function in the Doughnut, and brings evidence that, globally, very few countries or cities are applying The Doughnut’s economic, social and ecological principles.

The article is based on my Professor C T Kurien Memorial Lecture at ISEC on July 2, 2025. Among other things, Kurien stressed the need to enlarge the sphere of people’s mutual cooperation in solving their problems and enhancing welfare. The mainstream economics assumed that competition plays the most dominant role in mutual relations, ignoring the role of cooperation and complementarity. It resulted in making economics based on narrow self-interest. On the other hand, it is necessary to bring in economics of love and altruism. This article critically analyses and emphasises the role of cooperation and complementarity for human survival and wellbeing.

Abstract The aim of this contribution is to explore the nature and meaning of the relation between the history of economic thought (HET) and ontology, focusing specifically on the case of a prominent nineteenth-century economist: Léon Walras. Drawing on this illustrative case, it argues that the history of economic thought remains essential for a deeper understanding of current economic analysis. The interpretation of Walras’s economics proposed is different from the one which is often retained by most of the mainstream economists. It is not founded on individual rational choice but on four fundamental ontological indications which concern the definitions of society, economic agents and the state. This reinterpretation of Walras’s works gives a significant example of the importance of history of economic thought and ontology to better understand the meaning of economic analysis.

Portugal has historically displayed strong external imbalances, which have already resulted in three requests for international financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and/or the European Central Bank. Stemming from the framework of mainstream economics literature, these institutions imposed demanding austerity measures based on internal devaluation, huge wage restraint policies and strict control on government balance in order to contain the Portuguese domestic demand and to promote Portuguese external competitiveness. Accordingly, Portuguese labor costs have registered a general decreasing trend, and government balance has substantially improved in the last four decades, but the Portuguese external imbalances remain unsolved, which suggests that we need to go beyond the conventional economic literature in order to better ascertain the right determinants of external imbalances. This paper aims to contribute to the current theoretical debate about the determinants of the external imbalances by relying on the post-Keynesian economics literature and performing a time series econometric analysis for Portugal from 1988 to 2023. Results evidence that the fall of labor costs and the surge of both stock and housing prices are the main drivers behind the Portuguese external imbalances over the last four decades.