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Two optimistic traditions in the dismal science : rationalism and the 'invisible hand'
Get PDF16 A4 pages in pdf format.Inaugural address delivered by Prof Stan du Plessis on 28 February 2007, Stellenbosch University
Two optimistic traditions in the dismal science: rationalism and the "invisible hand"
Get PDFThis paper explores two traditions of optimism in economics. In one of these traditions optimism is based on the comprehension of a spontaneous (and often progressive) order in a decentralised (or market) economy – what I will call the optimism of the “invisible hand”. Against the optimism of the invisible hand stands another optimistic tradition in economics, whereby we might take courage from our ability to do right by society through instructing governments with the keen edge of our most enlightened plans. This tradition is called “constructivist rationalism” here. The paper explores the logic of each tradition and their historical development and applies both to a recent example of policy making in South Africa: government’s fundamental regulatory overhaul of the pharmaceutical industry based on the Medicines Act of 1997, specifically, the decision to implement price controls on medicines.Spontaneous order, Modernism, Planning, Optimism, Information, Uncertainty, Price controls, Institutions, Constitutions, Law and Economics
South Africa's Growth Revival After 1994
No full textThis paper aims to describe, identify underlying factors and seek explanations for South Africa's economic recovery since 1994, as evidenced by trends in growth and investment. Compared with an international peer group, the initial conditions for a dramatic growth recovery were inauspicious in 1994. Growth accounting methods are applied to distinguish the relative contributions of capital, labour and total factor productivity (TFP) to the growth revival, employing a broader range of measures for the contribution of labour at the aggregate level than used previously, and data of a more recent vintage. Sectoral developments since 1997 are also analysed using growth accounting. We find that TFP growth accounts for 50% or more of South Africa's economic recovery, with the result mainly holding at the sectoral level too. Examination of empirical studies suggests that this result is primarily explained by openness to trade and capital flows, lower uncertainty and lower interest rates. Finally we consider policy implications. Copyright 2007 The author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected], Oxford University Press.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Implications of the financial crisis for models in monetary policy
Get PDFMonetary authorities have been implicated in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. John Muellbauer, for example, has blamed what he thought was initially inadequate policy responses by central banks to the crisis on their models, which are, in his words, “overdue for the scrap heap”. This paper investigates the role of monetary policy models in the crisis and finds that (i) it is likely that monetary policy contributed to the financial crisis and (ii) that an inappropriately narrow suite of models made this mistake easier. The core models currently used at prominent central banks were not designed to discover emergent financial fragility. In that respect John Muellbauer is right. But the implications drawn here are less dramatic than his: while the representative agent approach to microfoundations now seems indefensible, other aspects of modern macroeconomics are not similarly suspect. The case made here is rather for expanding the suite of models used in the regular deliberations of monetary authorities, with new models that give explicit roles to the financial sector, to money and to the process of exchange. Recommending a suite of models for policy making entails no methodological innovation. That is what central banks do; though, of course, how they do it is open to improvement. The methodological innovation is the inclusion of a model that would be sensitive to financial fragility, a sensitivity that was absent in the run-up to the current financial crisis.Monetary policy, financial crisis, methodology of policy models
Collapse. The story of the international financial crisis, its causes and policy consequences
Get PDFThis paper is the story of success and failure in the financial markets, the markets for goods and services and in politics. It is a difficult story to tell because the crisis had many causes, but the focus here is on three main factors. First, the incentives that contributed to a credit-fuelled bubble, especially in property markets. Monetary and regulatory policies feature prominently in this part of the story. Second, because the housing bubble alone cannot explain the magnitude of the subsequent events, gearing in the financial sector, which affected asset markets unrelated to sub-prime mortgages will be examined. These developments are explained by reference to private financial sector decisions, including the role of the shadow-banking sector, and their regulatory backdrop. Finally, an answer will be sought to the question of how highly geared banks first became fragile and then failed with such dire consequences for the economy that massive policy intervention had become essential. The consequences of these large policy interventions and the international tensions caused by them are also explored.Financial crisis, Banks, Financial regulation, Monetary policy, Fiscal policy, Currency wars
The miracle of the Septuagint and the promise of data mining in economics
Get PDFThis paper argues that the sometimes-conflicting results of a modern revisionist literature on data mining in econometrics reflect different approaches to solving the central problem of model uncertainty in a science of non-experimental data. The literature has entered an exciting phase with theoretical development, methodological reflection, considerable technological strides on the computing front and interesting empirical applications providing momentum for this branch of econometrics. The organising principle for this discussion of data mining is a philosophical spectrum that sorts the various econometric traditions according to their epistemological assumptions (about the underlying data-generating-process DGP) starting with nihilism at one end and reaching claims of encompassing the DGP at the other end; call it the DGP-spectrum. In the course of exploring this spectrum the reader will encounter various Bayesian, specific-to-general (S-G) as well general-to-specific (G-S) methods. To set the stage for this exploration the paper starts with a description of data mining, its potential risks and a short section on potential institutional safeguards to these problems.Data mining, model selection, automated model selection, general to specific modelling, extreme bounds analysis, Bayesian model selection
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