Search results

This study aims to present the perspectives of heterodox economics and Islamic economics on environmental economics, as an alternative to mainstream economics, which takes economic growth as its main objective and argues that environmental problems will largely disappear when economic growth is achieved.

In this study, there was no intention to conduct a detailed analysis of heterodox economic models and Islamic economics. Instead, the approaches to the “environment,” which can be considered as an urgent need of the planet, were evaluated, and the inadequate proposals of the mainstream economics’ environmental approach were theoretically criticized and heterodox economics and Islamic economics were proposed as an alternative model.

Heterodox and Islamic economics offer alternative models of development prioritizing social and ecological justice to address environmental problems, which is in contrast to mainstream economics’ narrow focus on market mechanisms and individual rationality. Thus, engaging in more dialogue in the context of the environment is inevitable for both schools, considering the vast geography inhabited by Muslims and the proposed heterodox economic policies, and moreover, these approaches are modeled for the first time.

This article presents a synthesis of Islamic economics and heterodox thinking in contrast to mainstream economic policy, highlighting their similarities and differences and providing a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities and potential solutions of environmental problems. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this approach has not been previously explored, making it an original contribution to the literature.

We utilize a unique comprehensive dataset, drawn from the 1999 baseline survey of some 2000 micro and small-scale enterprises (MSEs) in Kenya. We analyze the financing behavior of these enterprises within the framework of a heterodox model of debt-equity and gearing decisions. We also study determinants of the success rate of loan applications. Our results emphasize three major findings. First, MSEs in Kenya obtain debt from a wide variety of sources. Second, debt-equity and gearing decisions by MSEs and their success rates in loan applications can all be understood by relatively simple models which include a mixture of conventional and heterodox variables. Third, and in particular, measures of the tangibility of the owner's assets, and the owner's education and training have a significant positive impact on the probability of borrowing and of the gearing level. These findings have important policy implications for policy makers and entrepreneurs of MSEs in Kenya.

Lesson study has become a popular approach for supporting the development of student-teachers within initial teacher education (ITE) programmes. In a short space of time, the original model of lesson study, originating in Japan, has been adapted to fit into the work contexts of different national systems and ITE provider structures. This chapter classifies the different emerging models of lesson study into three main groups, university and hybrid approaches, practicum approaches and heterodox approaches. Learning study is also considered, due to its developing popularity, as a practice development approach. Having outlined the different models of lesson study used in ITE, the authors go on to outline some of the main challenges and advantages of participating in lesson study which have been identified in the literature.

To overcome the errors of the exogenous growth theories of the past, the new growth theories, currently in vogue, attempt to incorporate technological change as endogenous to the growth process. While making a commendable effort to see into that black box of technological change, these so‐called new growth theories are also subject to question and critique on a variety of grounds. One of these is that the new growth theories are not really that new. Another area of concern relates to their empirical relevancy. This is especially evident in assessing the practical use of the new growth theories in terms of problem identification and policy resolution. Other problem areas relate to issues of conceptual clarity and underlying assumptions. By assuming the process of economic growth to be synonymous with that of economic development the result is to avoid the prerequisite structural transformation inherent in the dynamics of culture evolution. Culture evolution in turn is predicated upon technological advance conceptualized as both material and social technology. It is argued in this paper that an explanation as to why technology is endogenous to the processes of growth and economic development is best served vis‐à‐vis an analysis of the dynamics of culture evolution.

The aim of this paper is to review Fred Lee's book A History of Heterodox Economics.

The paper provides a context for Lee's research within the current debates over the financial crisis, then reviews and evaluates his analysis.

Lee has provided valuable and almost overwhelmingly meticulous documentation of the struggle to maintain space for heterodox economics within the discipline of economics, beginning before the turn of the twentieth century and continuing into the present. He is most concerned to use this research to formulate strategies to build community among heterodox economists, to provide a strong alternative to mainstream economics.

The author was less than convinced by Lee's suggestion that heterodox economics should emulate a professional model based on publications and citations that bears a striking resemblance to the methods of mainstream economics. That said, the author shares his belief that heterodox economics has important insights to offer economic theory and policy. In all, Lee has provided an important service in his documentation of the rise of heterodox economics as well as the attempts of mainstream economics to marginalize other schools of thought.

This paper aims to describe cooperation between public and private market players from different legal and religious orders. The author argues that such public–private partnerships (PPPs) enable the development of a possible convergence between selected areas of mainstream public finance and the Islamic moral economy (IME).

This paper explores the theory of both mainstream finance and the IME, and using deductive reasoning from axioms, develops the assumptions of a theoretical approach to heterodox PPP. The proposed method affects the ability to find common platforms between mainstream public finance and the IME, through the example of public–private investment projects.

This endeavour is subject to trade-offs between profit maximisation and social justice values on the basis of long-term PPP contracts. The author shows the assumptions under which this compromise would be beneficial to public entities, multicultural societies and conventional and Islamic investors. It is proposed to distribute profit to the owners up to a predetermined value, above which the PPPs would finance public services for persons otherwise excluded from them.

The success of this approach must depend on a compromise between profit maximisation as the sole investment objective and investment guided by social justice values. Private investors can achieve a capped level of profit on a long-term contract basis, and public partners can obtain long-term contracts for providing public goods. Both would undertake a project with a strong emphasis on corporate social responsibility, with particularly large opportunities in developing Islamic countries.

This paper aims to examine the role that academic publishers have historically played and how this is being undermined by the revolution in information and communications technology. A central issue here is that of copyright. Although authors need to be protected against plagiarists, the main role of publishers' control over copyright is to generate profits for the publisher by limiting access.

The paper explores some open‐access models for academic publishing, the first involving a heterodox economics library portal and the second a more general open peer quality review site.

It identifies a residual role for commercial academic publishers in the new guise of fee‐for‐service providers of refereeing services, whose accreditations may accelerate the uptake of scholarly contributions.

The paper examines the role that academic publishers have historically played and how this is being undermined by the revolution in information and communications technology.

Pete Boettke’s “What Is Still Wrong with the Austrian School of Economics?” sketches a program for Austrian economics based on a Kuhnesque analysis of scientific communities. His core recommendations focus on what we might call the Uptake and Diffusion dimensions of the scientific enterprise. If taken as a core commitment, they entail an Integrationist program, a concomitant of which is a reduction in the unique insights of the Austrian approach and, so, an overall reduction of the diversity of perspectives in political economy and moral sciences. A cost of this program is to decrease the diversity of perspectives in economics, which in turn decreases the ability of Republic of Economic Science to explore and solve a wider variety of problems. The author presents the “Fundamental Diversity Dilemma,” according to which there is a trade-off between uptake/plausibility and diversity: as we increase uptake and plausibility, we decrease diversity. The author concludes with a defense of the role of heterodox research programs, and questioning the focus on a small set of metrics to indicate excellent and important research.

The purpose is to establish the impact of trade on manufacturing employment in South Africa.

Two techniques, the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) and the Dynamic Common Correlated Effects (DCCE), are applied on a panel dataset comprising 26 three-digit manufacturing industries with data observed between 1970 and 2016.

The impact of trade on employment is miniscule at best and insignificant at worst once the study controls for cross-sectional dependency. This is true for both skilled and unskilled workers. Employment of skilled workers is explained by remuneration while employment of unskilled workers is explained by output dynamics.

Trade is widely attacked for causing labour market disruption through job losses. This hypothesis is not supported by data for South Africa as no link is confirmed between trade and employment of skilled and unskilled workers.

Estimating the trade and employment link for skilled and unskilled workers while controlling for both endogeneity and cross-sectional dependency.

This paper aims to tackle in turn the merits and limits of Nicholas Georgescu‐Roegen's entropic model, as well as its implications for the methodological discourse in economics. This appraisal of the Georgescu‐Roegen's work emphasizes the emergence of the entropic nature of the economic processes as a paradigm à la Kuhn of explanation in social economics.

This work provides a critical assessment of the entropic model's main conceptual pillars, namely the role of mathematical formalism and the natural imagery of irreversibility. This discussion takes them in turn and develops a critique from a methodological point of view.

The focus of this work is that the proposed epistemological reconstruction of economics is vulnerable to attacks from two methodological objections. The first deals with the change of metaphor from the “pendulum” of mechanics to the “hourglass” of thermodynamics. The second refers to the changes this replacement of metaphors brings about as to the relevance of the formalism of the discipline.

This material has gathered arguments to show that the intellectual concurrence of the arguments onto the field of physics makes the methodological value of the new paradigm of entropy not transcend into a new logic of reasoning in economics. The limits of this approach stems from the same rationale for which it has got its revolutionary stature: what it proposes consists of a scientific discourse based on a mixture of evolutionary biology, economics and thermodynamics, which may open up new original and insightful perspectives, but which has never been justified on terms of economic nature alone.