A new strategy for the European periphery
The southern European periphery suffered a severe setback in its catching-up process versus Western Europe after the financial crisis with GDP dropping by 10% between 2008 and 2012 and unemployment rates increasing to 20% for Greece, Portugal and Spain. We analyse first the reason for this setback, and then the policy reaction of the national governments and the European partners. Policy reactions mainly focused on restoring price competitiveness. It has important blind spots as far as industrial restructuring, upgrading tourism, making use of globalisation and alternative energies, supporting business starts, connecting education, as well as innovation and firm creation are concerned. There is a lack of national ownership of the reforms on the one hand, and a neglect of the European community and the surplus countries on the other hand, that they could support the southern periphery by measures increasing welfare in the community as well as in the surplus countries. Surplus countries profit heavily by the bifurcation of interest rates for government bonds and by capital flows.
Stylized Facts on the Interaction between Income Distribution and the Great Recession
There are several narratives connecting the financial crisis - as well as the Great Depression of the 1930s - with the functional or personal income distribution and its pre-crisis movements. The paper investigates whether this claim can be supported with evidence showing that the crisis was deeper in countries in which incomes were more polarized or where wage shares were lower. Empirical evidence for 37 mainly industrialized countries does not generally support the hypothesis that either the level of or the change in distribution was closely linked to the performance of a country during the crisis. Some evidence shows a tentatively improved performance if wage shares as well as polarization decreased. Declining wage shares could have increased the resilience of firms in the crisis; the lower income differences may have bolstered consumption of domestic goods. The existence of more compelling evidence for the impact of distribution on the crisis may have been diluted by the global character of economies. Savings in one country or region can lead to low interest rates as well as financial or real investment in other regions via international capital flows which might stop abruptly in the crisis.
Complexity, Network-Decisions And Alternative Risk Premia: Some New Theories Of Structural Change And Portfolio Decisions.
Structural Change is the basis for many decisions such as government fiscal and monetary policies, government interventions, corporate-expenditure decisions, corporate strategic decisions, portfolio management decisions in finance; household allocation decisions, etc.. Structural change in industries and national economies is increasingly more difficult to detect partly because of the growth and dominance of Complex Systems and “Networks” in modern industries and economies – such Networks and Complex Systems include GVCs (global value chains), retail store networks; franchising networks; internet networks; services networks; credit-chains in industries; online social networks; etc.. The relationship between Complexity and Structural Change is well established in the physics, applied math and economic dynamics literatures. Traditional definitions and modeling of structural change have erroneously focused on changes in labor, technological progress, market share, and or capital – which are grossly inadequate in the new economy and post- global financial crisis (as confirmed by changes in the global retailing and housing industries and other industries). Also the modeling of structural change seems to be constrained by the availability of data, and often omits the relationship between structural change on one hand, and globalization, financial stability and international financial contagion. This article: i) introduces the Operations Strategy Model of structural change, explains how it differs from the Lewis Model of Structural Change; and explains the often omitted relationship between operations strategy (of companies and government agencies) and structural change; ii) introduces other new Complexity-based models/theories of Structural Change in industries; iii) reviews the relationships among Operations Research, Complexity and Structural Change; iv) explains the symbiotic relationship between structural change on one hand, and economic growth, financial stability, financial contagion and globalization; v) discusses the significant gap between academic research and practice and explains some issues and factors that should be considered in the development and testing of structural change models; vi) explains how alternative risk premia can be generated from new models of Structural Change.