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Distributive Conflict, Investment, and Persistent Unemployment: Evidence from a Kaleckian Long-Memory Model — The Case of Germany (1990–2024
No full textThis paper investigates the interplay between distributive conflict, investment dynamics, and persistent unemployment within a Kaleckian framework, emphasizing the long-memory properties of wages. We develop a stochastic model in which wages adjust adaptively to historical discrepancies between prices and wages, while investment is driven by expected profitability rather than market clearing. Applying this model to Germany over the period 1990–2024, we provide evidence that cumulative divergences between prices and wages generate persistent effects on real wages, aggregate demand, and employment. Our findings highlight that long-memory wage dynamics amplify the unemployment consequences of investment-driven accumulation, demonstrating a structural mechanism through which distributive conflict and inflation interact. The results underscore the importance of historical wage inertia and profit-led investment in shaping macroeconomic outcomes, offering new insights into the sources of persistent unemployment in advanced economies
Decentralized Environmental Governance under State Capacity Constraints: Institutional Challenges and Policy Innovations in Zamboanga City, Philippines
No full textDecentralization reforms assign extensive environmental governance responsibilities to local governments across the Global South, yet environmental outcomes remain uneven. This article examines how state capacity constraints shape decentralized environmental governance in Zamboanga City, a highly urbanized coastal city in the southern Philippines. The study situates the Philippine Local Government Code within broader debates on decentralization, multilevel governance, and local state capacity. Using qualitative process tracing supported by administrative, fiscal, and enforcement data from 2015–2023, the article analyzes three policy domains: solid waste management, coastal resource management, and urban watershed protection. Findings show that formal authority decentralizes faster than administrative capacity, fiscal autonomy, and enforcement power. Political incentives, intergovernmental fragmentation, and uneven technical capacity produce sectoral variation in governance performance. The study identifies policy innovations that emerge under constraint, including interlocal cooperation, hybrid enforcement arrangements, and civil society co-production. The article contributes to environmental governance scholarship by demonstrating how decentralized systems operate under persistent capacity gaps and by offering a framework for assessing policy performance in constrained local states
Which taxes should be reduced to foster employment and growth? A Fiscal simulation framework for Madagascar
No full textThis paper develops a structural fiscal simulation model to evaluate the macroeconomic and budgetary effects of alternative tax reform scenarios in Madagascar. The model examines the impact of reductions in value-added tax (VAT), personal income tax (IRSA), employers’ social contributions, and customs duties, both individually and in combination, on output, employment, and public revenues.
Simulation results show that isolated cuts in VAT or IRSA have negligible effects on production and employment but lead to substantial revenue losses. By contrast, lowering employers’ social contributions stimulates employment (+2.8%) and output (+1.8%) while limiting fiscal costs, highlighting the sensitivity of labor demand to labor costs. Reductions in customs duties modestly increase output (+1.9%) but do not affect employment significantly and generate large revenue shortfalls. A combined reform package maximizes output (+3.7%) and employment (+2.8%) but at a significant cost to public revenues (-39%), raising concerns about fiscal sustainability.
Overall, targeted reductions in labor taxation emerge as the most effective instrument for promoting employment and growth while preserving fiscal balance in a developing-country context. The model provides a first-order analytical framework for Madagascar and a benchmark for future studies incorporating informality, distributional effects, and dynamic adjustments
Family matters: gendered patterns in job mobility of early career workers in Switzerland
No full textThis paper examines gendered mobility patterns for early career workers, focusing on family motivated job changes. Using the Swiss Household Panel data (1999-2023) we use multinomial logit, fixed effects, and event study models to understand the impact of family related job mobility on early career workers. The paper shows that compared to men; women are more likely to cite family reasons for job change. Women who change jobs for family reasons face wage stagnation although they earn improvements in specific satisfaction dimensions whilst overall job satisfaction is lower as compared to career motivated job mobility. We also find that job mobility rates for mothers remain constant around childbirth and among mothers who change jobs, family considerations emerge reactively post birth. The results have policy implications for early career job mobility which include subsiding childcare, standardizing flexibility at work and increasing paternity leave periods
From Assets to Liabilities: Applied Net Present Value Profiles in Resource Project Failure and Rescue
No full textGovernments around the world increasingly acquire, rescue, or inherit capital-intensive projects that private actors are unable or unwilling to complete, operate, or remediate. These interventions are often framed as exceptional policy failures or discretionary rescues. This paper argues instead that such outcomes reflect a structural feature of capital-intensive projects: long-lived obligations associated with environmental risk, site-specific assets, and public safety cannot be extinguished through market exit alone. Building on the concept of forward-looking project valuation, the paper develops a complementary institutional framework that focuses on the costs and constraints of state operation after private exit has occurred. The analysis shifts attention from project-level profitability to institutional capacity, emphasizing that state ownership entails the assumption of complex operational, regulatory, and governance responsibilities that generate real economic costs over time. These institutional costs are endogenous, state-contingent, and often amplified under conditions of deep uncertainty and project failure. Using stylized examples drawn from resource extraction, infrastructure, and environmental remediation, the paper shows how projects may transition from productive assets to pure liabilities, and why governments frequently become residual claimants by necessity rather than by choice. The framework highlights the intergenerational consequences of deferred remediation and underinvestment in institutional capacity, and reframes state intervention as a response to persistent project-level obligations rather than as an ideological departure from market governance. The contribution of the paper is conceptual rather than prescriptive. It does not propose optimal ownership structures or regulatory instruments. Instead, it provides a structured way to analyze the economic significance of institutional capacity when governments assume responsibility for capital-intensive projects whose liabilities outlive private profitability
Exploration Economics in a Fat-Tailed World: Evidence from Global VMS Deposits
No full textMineral exploration is an inherently speculative activity in which economic outcomes are dominated by a small number of exceptional discoveries. This paper develops a stylized economic model of mineral exploration grounded in the empirical distribution of known volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) deposits. Using global grade and tonnage data compiled by the United States Geological Survey, the analysis estimates gross metal value under simplifying assumptions and examines the resulting distribution of economic outcomes. Copper grade, ore tonnage, and gross metal value all exhibit pronounced fat-tailed behavior, implying that most deposits are economically marginal while a few generate extremely large values. A simple exploration business simulation is constructed to compare alternative project-selection strategies based on minimum grade and minimum tonnage thresholds. The results show that strategies focused on large-tonnage deposits substantially improve expected returns and reduce downside risk relative to grade-focused strategies. The paper illustrates how empirical geological data can be used to clarify the economic structure of mineral exploration and to explain why exploration markets persist despite frequent failure
Profit-Increasing Entry with Endogenous Banking
No full textThis paper shows that entry can raise each individual firm's profit---not merely industry profits---when Cournot oligopolists finance working capital through a contestable banking sector. Under average-cost pricing of loans, entry dilutes fixed banking costs across greater lending volume, lowering loan rates. Entry raises per-firm profits if and only if equilibrium output lies in an intermediate range where financing relief dominates intensified competition. Bank-side and firm-side frictions play opposing roles: firm-side frictions facilitate profit-increasing entry by amplifying cost relief as firms shrink, while bank-side frictions suppress it by raising funding costs as aggregate lending expands
Economic and Institutional Interpretations of Things Fall Apart: A Political Economy Analysis of Pre-Colonial and Colonial Transformation in Igbo Society
No full textThis study examines Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) as a literary representation of institutional and socio-economic dynamics in pre-colonial and colonial African societies. While previous scholarship has primarily focused on cultural identity and colonial critique, this paper interprets the novel through the combined lenses of institutional economics, political economy, and behavioural economics to investigate how governance structures, cultural norms, and individual incentives shaped economic behaviour and social stability within Igbo society. Using a qualitative textual-economic analysis, key narrative events were coded and analysed in relation to indigenous institutions, agricultural production, and colonial intervention. The findings reveal that pre-colonial Igbo institutions effectively coordinated economic activity and maintained social cohesion, while the introduction of colonial institutions generated institutional displacement, social fragmentation, and economic disruption. Behavioural factors, including leadership rigidity and social identity, further mediated responses to institutional change. The study contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship by demonstrating that literary texts can illuminate historical and economic processes, offering insights for contemporary governance and development policy in African contexts. These findings underscore the importance of integrating traditional institutions, aligning development initiatives with cultural norms, and promoting adaptive leadership to enhance institutional resilience and socio-economic development
El Índice de Precios de Consumo Efectivo Medio (IPCEM): Enfoque Académico para el Análisis de la Inflación Real
No full textEnglish:
This article proposes and analyzes the Average Effective Consumer Price Index (AECPI) as an
essential complementary indicator to the traditional Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Recognizing that the official CPI is based on an “average” consumption basket that does not
reflect actual household spending, the AECPI adjusts its weightings according to effective
spending patterns, derived from surveys such as the Household Budget Survey (HBS). This
methodology provides a much more accurate representation of the real impact of inflation on
family well-being. In specific contexts, such as the 2022 energy crisis, the difference between
the AECPI and the official CPI exceeded two percentage points, revealing a significant
underestimation of the actual inflation burden. This study discusses the advantages,
limitations, and potential applications of the AECPI in a country’s socioeconomic analysis,
highlighting its crucial relevance in today’s environment of high inflation, inequality, and
pressure on purchasing power.
Español:
El presente artículo propone y analiza el Índice de Precios de Consumo Efectivo Medio (IPCEM) como un indicador complementario esencial al tradicional Índice de Precios de Consumo (IPC). Reconociendo que el IPC oficial se basa en una cesta de consumo "media" que no refleja la realidad del gasto de los hogares, el IPCEM ajusta sus ponderaciones según la estructura de gasto efectiva, derivada de encuestas como la Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares (EPF). Esta metodología ofrece una representación mucho más precisa del impacto real de la inflación sobre el bienestar de las familias. En contextos específicos, como la crisis energética de 2022, la diferencia entre el IPCEM y el IPC oficial superó los dos puntos porcentuales, evidenciando una subestimación significativa de la carga inflacionaria real. Este estudio discute las ventajas, limitaciones y aplicaciones potenciales del IPCEM en el análisis socioeconómico de un país, subrayando su crucial relevancia en escenarios actuales de alta inflación, desigualdad y presión sobre el poder adquisitivo
Identifying the Median Grade-Tonnage Curve from the Global Database of VMS Copper Mining Projects
No full textThis paper presents a statistical analysis of the global database of Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide (VMS) mineral deposits. The paper shows the joint and partial probability distributions for copper equivalent grade and total tonnage based on current metals prices for copper, zinc, lead, and gold. The article develops a new method using the joint distribution to identify the set of quantile values for grade and tonnage that have approximately 50% probability; this set of quantile values represents the median grade-tonnage curve for VMS deposits around the world. The article also shows how to analyze individual projects in comparison with the global database. For example, the size of the Shamlugskoe mine in Armenia is ranked according to the global database. For another example, a model of the exploration project called Mount Sicker is presented and compared to nearby projects that are in the global database