Degrowth and Full Employment

This paper advocates for the use of techniques of optimal planning that were developed by Soviet mathematicians. It argues that these techniques, based as they are on the labour theory of value, are compatible with: (a) the efforts of Modern Monetary Theorists to achieve full employment through a return to active fiscal policy (with the GDP gap serving as an estimate of the level of additional aggregate demand required to this end); (b) national income accounting procedures taken up by the United Nations; (c) the work of industrial ecologists who use input-output techniques to support and inform their analysis of waste, pollution, and the unsustainable use of renewable and non-renewable resources. It argues that, with slight modification, the techniques originally developed by Kantorovich and Novozhilov could be applied to the construction of metrics that account for the ‘short-changing’ of nature. For example, they could incorporate estimates of the labour time required to prevent unsustainable exploitation of renewable resources (including through higher levels of recycling and restocking), the use of non-renewable resources at rates exceeding the time required to produce substitutes, and the time required for adequate remediation and restoration of polluted resources (including investment in new transport and power generation systems).

The Making of Zimbabwe’s Currency and Economic Crisis: International Financial Architecture, Nationalism, and Economic Policies 1980–2000

This chapter examines the making of Zimbabwe’s currency and economic crisis from a historical perspective. It suggests that colonial legacies played an important role, together with the connections forged through the international financial architecture. Both these factors should be considered in examining why the country continues to face sustained economic crisis. Although the chapter acknowledges the importance of local political factors that many scholars have examined, it provides an alternative perspective that stresses a neglected aspect in the study of the Zimbabwean crisis. Attention must be given to the importance of inherited models and discourses of economic management and the ways in which they have been embedded into the fabric of economic administration. The chapter interrogates these influences, focusing in particular on the role of the System of National Income accounting in Zimbabwe’s descent into debt and aid dependency. It argues that these factors should be included in explanations of the multilayered political and economic crisis that Zimbabwe has been facing for the past two decades.

Measuring Difference? The United Nations’ Shift from Progress to Poverty

This article examines how the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) redefined their idea of development over the two decades from 1990, no longer presenting it as only a matter of economic progress but instead focusing more on the problem of poverty and its reduction. This change of definition was closely associated with changes in the preferred measurement of development, from average income (based on national income accounting) to the proportion of the population holding certain characteristics of what it meant to live in poverty (instantiated in various index number formulations). Measurements of development thus became direct measures of socioeconomic difference, not just between nations, but also within nations. This change was designed to create numbers that would be effective in capturing and communicating those differences in ways usable for both policy and public purposes. Those numbers thus provided a resource for fighting poverty reduction—though the UNDP had few powers to hold governments to account.

Recreational Value of Coastal and Marine Ecosystems in India: A Macro Approach

Coastal and marine ecosystems offer a large number of services for human well-being, including recreation, which is evidenced by people's willingness to spend on leisure. Traditional categories of national income accounting such as income from service sectors like "Hotels and Restaurants" do not capture the net welfare (consumers' surplus) from recreation that can be attributed to the existence of the ecosystem. This article presents the first estimates of a country-wide recreational value regarding the consumers' surplus generated by coastal and marine ecosystems in India using the Zonal Travel Cost Method. We found that the recreational value from nine coastal states in India generated consumers' surplus to the extent of 0.9% of India's gross domestic product at market prices [Rs93,888.76 billion or US$5,863 billion purchasing power parities (PPP)] in 2012–2013 for domestic and foreign tourist (at 2012–2013 current prices). The consumers' surplus generated for visitors of domestic origin is estimated at Rs295 billion (US$18.4 billion) and for visitors from the rest of the world is Rs562 billion (US$35 billion). This highlights the importance of ecosystems and provides a framework to estimate recreational demand functions. It also provides a mechanism to create suitable state-specific tariffs on recreational services for financing coastal and marine conservation.

Institutionalism in Action: Balancing the Substantive Imbalances of “the Economy” through the Veil of Money

Scholars working on the history of economics and economic governance assume national income accounting emerged naturally out of Keynesian concerns with economic growth and wartime needs. This paper provides an alternative and more complex genealogy, arguing instead that income accounting was born out of a governmental project, implemented by institutionalist economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) during the interwar period, to manage “the business cycle.” Bridging the literatures on the history of economic policymaking of the interwar period and the postwar triumph of “American Keynesianism,” it shows that institutionalists developed income accounting as a knowledge infrastructure to monitor inter-sectoral imbalances that generated cyclical fluctuations. Called the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) System, this infrastructure constructed “the economy” as a composite statistical object, composed of many disparate, nonfungible substantive elements that could not have been otherwise patched into a coherent whole. Wrapping these elements into the veil of money, the NIPA System became the interface through which policymakers intervened in intersectoral imbalances at the level of monetary flows with fiscal tools.

Nominal (Im)Balances of the National Economy: The Construction of the National Income and Products Accounts System as a Macroeconomic Infrastructure

Scholars working on the history of economics and economic governance assume national income accounting emerged naturally out of Keynesian 8 concerns with economic growth and wartime needs. This paper providesan alternative and more complex genealogy, arguing instead that income accounting was born out of a governmental project, implemented by institutionalist economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) during the interwar period, to manage “the business cycle.” Bridging the literatures on the history of economic policymaking of the interwar period and the postwar triumph of “American Keynesianism,” it shows that institutionalists developed income accounting as a knowledge infrastructure to monitor inter-sectoral imbalances the generated cyclical fluctuations. Called the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) System, this infrastructure constructed “the economy” as a composite statistical object, composed of many disparate, non-fungible substantive elements that could not have been otherwise patched into a coherent whole. Wrapping these elements into the veil of money, the NIPA System became the interface through which policymakers intervened in intersectoral imbalances at the level of monetary flows with fiscal tools.