Environment

Will environmental limits, including limits on the climate system, slow or even halt economic growth? If not, how will the nature of economic growth have to shift?

We provide an explanation for the large spatial wage disparities and low male migration in India based on the trade-off between consumption-smoothing, provided by caste-based rural insurance networks, and the income-gains from migration.

How well do our assumptions about the global challenges of energy, environment and economic development fit the facts?

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has awarded $2 million in grants to fund 21 different projects as part of the latest round of its research grant program.

People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.

Innovation is essential to economic growth. However, it appears that the ways in which we pursue innovation policies have aggravated inequality. Inequality is an increasingly contentious political issue in both wealthy and emerging economies.

The logic of deep global capitalist crises needs to be incorporated centrally into an understanding of the changes in the within-country inequality levels. I present a theoretical framework that incorporates two levels of political economic processes. First,global capitalist crises lead to the creation of an institutional structure or a regime in the capitalist centers that influences inequality in these core countries and in the periphery. Second the class configuration in the non-core countries - a set of institutional arrangements that can be termed local political economy - also plays a key role in determining inequality outcomes.

The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its sixth Annual Conference from April 8 to April 11, 2015, in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.