ROBERT SKIDELSKY and SIMONE GASPERIN (2021) Abstract: This paper upholds the classical Keynesian position that a laissez-faire market economy lacks a spontaneous tendency to full employment. Focusing on the UK case, it argues that monetary policy could not prevent the economic collapse of 2008-9 or achieve full recovery from the Great Recession that followed. The … Continue reading Reinstating fiscal policy for normal times: Public investment and Public Jobs Programmes

Published in Acta Oeconomica, Vol. 67 (S), pp. 31–35 (2017) I don’t want to say too much about Nicky Kaldor’s actual stylised facts, but about the methodological implication of the stylised facts approach. Paul Samuelson famously said, “those who can do economics, do it; those who can’t, babble about methodology”. Kaldor could certainly do economics, … Continue reading Stylised Facts

Published in Money in the Great Recession: Did a Crash in Money Growth Cause the Global Slump? [Ed. Tim Congdon] In recent years some monetary economists have voiced scepticism about aspects of the Keynesian revolution, particularly the importance of the 1936 General Theory relative to Keynes’ entire corpus.1 These sceptics have performed a valuable service by … Continue reading How would Keynes have analysed the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009? 

  China's ascent to world power has been as eagerly or fearfully anticipated as the coming of the robots. In this sober , well-documented, and persuasive book, HK-based  economist Chi Lo explains why China's moment will be delayed. The road to global  power and prosperity is open, but it faces severe internal obstacles which will require exceptional leadership … Continue reading Foreword to Chi Lo’s ‘China’s Impossible Trinity’

Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 1-13  Abstract This paper argues that the thinking of John Maynard Keynes remains highly relevant to an understanding of the financial collapse of 2007–8 and for policy measures to enable the world to escape from the ‘great recession’. The essay explains the role of uncertainty in … Continue reading The relevance of Keynes

Co-authored with Vijay Joshi Published in Rebalancing the Global Economy: A Primer for Policymaking by Stijn Claessens, Simon Evenett and Bernard Hoekman (eds) This chapter argues that the Keynes Plan of 1941 for dealing with the trade imbalances of his time is highly relevant to the problem of East Asian-US imbalances today. Just as the first Bretton … Continue reading Keynes, Global Imbalances, and International Monetary Reform, Today

Published in The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 45, No. 3, January 2010 pp. 321-335 John Maynard Keynes keeps returning, like the ageing diva who goes on giving farewell performances. What does this tell us? First, it tells us that in economics there are no final victories and defeats. Rather, economic doctrines ebb and … Continue reading The Crisis of Capitalism: Keynes Versus Marx

Published in World Economics, Vol. 8, No. 4, October-December 2007 I. Preliminary remarks ‘In the long run’, Keynes famously wrote, ‘we are all dead’. For the last twenty-five years it has been widely assumed that this applied to Keynes’s own theories. Markets were, or could be made efficient, removing the need for government stabilization policy. … Continue reading Keynes in the Long Run

Published in The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, edited by Edward Feser, (Cambridge University Press, 2006) ‘[Keynes] was one of the great liberals of our time. He saw clearly that in England and the United States during the nineteen-thirties, the road to serfdom lay, not down the path of too much government control, but down the path … Continue reading Hayek versus Keynes: The Road to Reconciliation