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In the early 1930s, Nicholas Kaldor could be classified as an Austrian economist. The author reconstructs the intertwined paths of Kaldor and Friedrich A. Hayek to disequilibrium economics through the theoretical deficiencies exposed by the Austrian theory of capital and its consequences on equilibrium analysis.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The integration of capital theory into a business cycle theory by the Austrians and its shortcomings – e.g. criticized by Piero Sraffa and Gunnar Myrdal – called attention to the limitation of the theoretical apparatus of equilibrium analysis in dynamic contexts. This was a central element to Kaldor’s emancipation in 1934 and his subsequent conversion to John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). In addition, it was pivotal to Hayek’s reformulation of equilibrium as a social coordination problem in “Economics and Knowledge” (1937). It also had implications for Kaldor’s mature developments, such as the construction of the post-Keynesian models of growth and distribution, the Cambridge capital controversy, and his critique of neoclassical equilibrium economics.

The close encounter between Kaldor and Hayek in the early 1930s, the developments during that decade and its mature consequences are unexplored in the secondary literature. The author attempts to construct a coherent historical narrative that integrates many intertwined elements and personas (e.g. the reception of Knut Wicksell in the English-speaking world; Piero Sraffa’s critique of Hayek; Gunnar Myrdal’s critique of Wicksell, Hayek, and Keynes; the Hayek-Knight-Kaldor debate; the Kaldor-Hayek debate, etc.) that were not connected until now by previous commentators.

The aim of this paper is to disentangle the contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous relationship between regional business cycles and manufacturing productivity in a developing country, namely Colombia.

The methodology is quantitative. To deal with the problems of endogeneity in the production function and with the law motion of productivity (the Markov process), the authors obtain Total Factor Productivity (TFP) through the Wooldridge’s two equations system that can be jointly estimated under the generalized method of moments framework (GMM). Secondly, to avoid bias we estimate regional business cycles through the Kalman filter. Subsequently, we implement an instrumental variables/generalized method of moments regression (IV/GMM) to capture the contemporaneous and endogenous TFP–GDP cycles’ linkage at the regional level. Lastly, to deal with the non-contemporaneous link, the authors estimate a vector autoregressive model with exogenous variables (VARX) for each region. We also present the corresponding impulse–response functions.

The authors’ general results suggest a remarkable causality, both contemporary and non-contemporary, from productivity to GDP (but not vice versa) in the most developed regions of the country. This implied productivity could influence in the economic growth of regions in short and long runs. These results are different than those expected by economic theory and should be considered by local economic policy makers.

The authors consider that a more detailed analysis should be carried out at the level of each sector within the manufacturing industry to further clarify these findings.

The policy should be oriented to obtaining cutting-edge technologies through subsidies, and also should facilitate the access to financial capital and the investment in R&D laboratories. On the other hand, the link with international trade also must be reinforced because the importing of intermediate inputs and exporting of output allow the firms to obtain embodied technologies, also to incur on learning by exporting and importing processes and finally to gain experience and competitiveness in foreign markets.

The causality in the region that provides more than 50% of economic activity within the country (Third region) is only in one directional, from TFP towards gross domestic product (GDP) and not vice versa. As the influence from GDP towards TFP is minimal in the remaining regions, the manufacturing productivity influences both short and long run regional economic growth in Colombia. This implies that economic policy at the level of macro-region must be modified; the government should give additional support to the manufacturing sector, especially in developed regions and for the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (wich represent 92% of manufacturing firms) to increase economic growth in the future.

The authors’ contribution is threefold. First, they pay special attention to the contemporaneous cyclical relationship (i.e. pro-cyclical, counter-cyclical or acyclic) and the non-contemporaneous causality with productivity. Second, they estimate productivity with the GMM two equation system considering an endogenous Markov process. Third, to the best of their knowledge, at least in the case of Latin America, there are no studies in this direction combining these statistic methods, including that of Colombia.

The purpose of this study is to focus deeply on the short term to explain the relative long-term evolution of the Argentinian economy in the long and the short term.

The study of the long-term evolution of the Argentine economy and identifying the moment in which it began to lose ground compared to other developed economies, such as Australia and Canada, constitutes the central axis of the historiography of this country. However, an additional problem presented by the Argentine economy is its high volatility. For this reason, the long term should be influenced by the short term, an issue that requires a more detailed study of the cyclical behavior and a deep analysis of the relationship between the long and the short term.

The results obtained point to a cyclical development that influences the long-term evolution and, therefore, explains Argentina’s convergence process with Australia and Canada. Frequent deep busts and short booms characterize the Argentine cycle, offsetting its long-term growth potential.

Although the long term has been profusely studied in Argentina, the short term has not been analyzed to the same extent, which is surprising given the extreme volatility of this economy (Prebisch, 1950). The studies performed on economic cycles have always been partial, disconnected from the long term and carried out without much technical rigor.

The authors explore the hypothesis that some movements in commodity prices are anticipated (news shocks) and can trigger aggregate fluctuations in small open emerging economies. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

The authors build a multi-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with endogenous commodity production. There are five exogenous processes: a country-specific interest rate shock that responds to commodity price fluctuations, a productivity (TFP) shock for each sector and a commodity price shock. Both TFP and commodity price shocks are composed of unanticipated and anticipated components.

The authors show that news shocks to commodity prices lead to higher output, investment and consumption, and a countercyclical movement in the trade-balance-to-output ratio. The authors also show that commodity price news shocks explain about 24% of output aggregate fluctuations in the small open economy.

Given the importance of both anticipated and unanticipated commodity price shocks, policymakers should pay attention to developments in commodity markets when designing policies to attenuate the business cycles. Future research should investigate the design of optimal fiscal and monetary policies in SOE subject to news shocks in commodity prices.

This paper contributes to the knowledge of the sources of fluctuations in emerging economies highlighting the importance of a new source: news shocks in commodity prices.

The performance of financial markets is significantly influenced by the political environment during general elections. This study investigates the effect of general elections on stock market performance in selected African markets.

Prior studies have been inconsistent in determining whether electioneering events negatively or positively influence stock market performance. The study utilized panel data set with annual observations from 1990 to 2020. The generalized method of moments (GMM) is employed to investigate the effect of electioneering and change in government on key stock market performance indicators, including stock market capitalization, stock market turnover ratio and the value of stock traded.

The study finds that electioneering activities generally have a positive impact on the performance of the stock market, whereas a change in government has a negative impact. As a result, the study recommends that stakeholders of the stock market remain vigilant and actively monitor electioneering events to devise and implement effective policies aimed at mitigating political risks during general elections. By adopting these measures, investor confidence can be significantly enhanced, fostering a more robust and secure investment environment.

The study investigates a neglected section of the literature by highlighting not only the effect of elections on stock market indicators but also possible change in government during elections.

The study uses the multivariate GARCH-BEKK model (which was first proposed by Baba et al. (1990) and then further developed by Engle and Kroner (1995)) to examine the return and volatility spillover between India and four leading Asian (namely, China, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and two global (namely, the United Kingdom and the United States) equity markets.

The study employs a multivariate GARCH-BEKK model to quantify return correlation and volatility transmission across the pre- and post-2008 global financial crisis periods (apart from other conventional time series modelling like cointegration, Granger causality using vector error correction model (VECM)).

The results show a tendency of the Indian stock market index to move along with the US and Hong Kong market indices. The decrease in the value of the co-integration coefficient during the recession was explained by reduced investor confidence in developing countries. The result further shows a clear distinction in terms of volatility spillover between the Asian market vis-a-vis US and UK markets. Volatility transmission from India to Asian markets was found to be significantly higher as compared to the US and UK. So also, the study’s results show a puzzling result giving us comparable co-integration ranks for phase 2 (expansion) and phase 3 (slow-down) of the business cycle in most cases.

In Granger causality testing, the results were unable to ascertain the difference between phase 2 (expansion) and phase 3 (slowdown). However, the multivariate GARCH (MGARCH)-BEKK model showed a clear reduction in volatility transmission to NIFTY50 (is the flagship index on the National Stock Exchange of India Ltd. (NSE)) as India entered slow-down. This shows that the Indian economy does go through different business cycles, and the changes in parameters hence prove hypothesis 3 to be true with respect to volatility transmission to India from International markets.

The results show that for all countries, the volatility transmitted to India increases significantly going from phase 1 (recession) to phase 2 (expansion) and reduces again once the countries enter slow-down in phase 3 (slowdown). This shows that during expansion shocks and impulses in international markets affect the Indian markets significantly, supporting the increase in co-integration in phase 2 (expansion). During expansion, developing markets like India become profitable for investors, due to the high growth rate when compared to developed countries. This implies that a significant amount of capital enters Indian markets, which is susceptible to the volatility of international markets. The volatility transmission from India to the US and UK was insignificant in phase 1 (recession and recovery) and phase 3 (slow-down) showing a weak linkage between the markets during volatile time periods.

This study investigates (1) whether democratization drives sovereign credit ratings (SCR) changes (the “democratic advantage”) or whether SCR changes affect democratization, (2) whether the degree of democratization in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries affects the associations and (3) whether the associations are significantly affected by resource dependence.

This study investigates the effects of SCR changes on democracy in 22 SSA countries over the period of 2000–2020 VEC Granger causality/block exogeneity Wald tests, and impulse responses and variance decomposition analyses with Cholesky ordering and Monte Carlo standard errors in a panel VECM framework.

The full sample impulse responses find that a SCR shock has a long-run detrimental effect on the democracy and political rights but only a short-run positive impact on civil liberties. Among the sub-samples, it is found that the extent of natural resource dependence does not affect the magnitude of SCR shocks on democratization mentioned above but it is found that a SCR shock affects long-run democracy in SSA countries that are relatively more democratic but is more likely to drive democratic deepening in less democratic SSA countries. The full sample variance decompositions further finds that the variance of SCR to a political rights shock outweighs the effects of all the macroeconomic factors, whereas in more diversified SSA countries, the variances of SCR are much greater for democracy and political rights shocks, which suggests that democratization and political rights in diversified SSA economies are severely affected by SCR changes. In the case of the high and low democracy sub-samples, it is found that the variance of SCR in the relatively higher democracy sub-sample is greater than in the low democracy sub-sample.

These results have three implications for democratization in SSA. First, the effect of a SCR change is not a democratically agnostic and impacts political rights to a greater extent than civil liberties. Second, SCR changes have the potential to spark a negative cycle in SSA countries whereby a downgrade leads to a deterioration in socio-political stability coupled with increased financial economic constraints that in turn drive further downgrades and macroeconomic hardship. Finally, SCR changes are potentially detrimental for democracy in more democratic SSA countries but democratically supportive in less democratic SSA countries. Thus, SSA countries that are relatively politically sophisticated are more exposed to the effects of SCR changes, whereas less politically sophisticated SSA countries can proactively shape their SCRs by undertaking political reforms.

This study is the first to examine the associations between SCR and democracy in SSA. This is critical literature for the Africa’s scholarly work given that the debate on unfair rating actions and claims of subjective rating methods is ongoing.

The authors analyse a growth model to explain how economic fluctuations are primarily driven by productive capacities (i.e. capacity utilization driven by innovations and know-how) and productive inefficiencies.

This study’s methodology consists of the combination of the economic growth model, à la Solow–Swan, with a sigmoidal production function (in capital), which may explain growth, poverty traps or fluctuations depending on the relative levels of inefficiencies, productive capacities or lack of know-how.

The authors show that economies may experience economic growth, poverty traps and/or fluctuations (i.e. cycles). Economic growth is reached when an economy experiences both a low level of inefficiencies and a high level of productive capacities while an economy falls into a poverty trap when there is a high level of inefficiencies in production. Instead, the economy gets in cycles when there is a large level of the lack of know-how and low levels of productive capacity.

The authors conclude that more capital per capita (greater savings and investment) and greater productive capacity (with less lack of know-how) are the economic policy keys for an economy being on the path of sustained economic growth.

The authors introduce non-Ricardian (“hand-to-mouth”) myopic agents into an otherwise standard real-business-cycle (RBC) setup augmented with a detailed government sector. The authors investigate the quantitative importance of the presence of nonoptimizing households for cyclical fluctuations in Bulgaria.

The authors calibrate the RBC model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999–2018).

The authors find that the inclusion of such non-Ricardian households improves model performance along several dimensions and generally provides a better match vis-a-vis data, as compared to the standard model populated with Ricardian agents only.

This is a novel finding in the macroeconomic studies on Bulgaria using modern quantitative methods.

Western economics came into being with the rise of the capitalist market economy. It had a nature of duality beginning from its birth: the justificativeness of providing theoretical pillars for the capitalist market economy system and the scientificity of revealing the internal relations and operating rules of the capitalist market economy. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

However, after the 1830s, this justificativeness gradually evolved into vulgarity. Since the 1930s, modern western mainstream economics has mainly explored the general market economy on the assumption that the capitalist system remains unchanged, and many outcomes of such research are positive and beneficial.

Political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics, at the present stage, is mainly a Chinese socialist market economics. It is guided by the Marxist political economy and rooted in the great practice of China’s reform and opening up and socialist modernization.

According to political complexion, western economic theories can be divided into political economic theory, mainstream economic theory and basic economic theory. By subjecting these theories to what we term “elimination,” “transformation” and “transplantation” surgeries, respectively, we can absorb and accommodate their beneficial elements in building a political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which in turn is conducive to the development and prosperity of such an economy.