A Webinar on Development in India under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
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While it is criticized for eroding democracy and secular norms, India’s Hindu nationalist government is often portrayed as a roaring economic success. With an estimated growth rate of 7.6% in 2023-24, a booming stock market, massive public investment in infrastructure, and a rising middle class, a widely prevalent narrative suggests that India is becoming an economic powerhouse. At the same time, India’s educated youth unemployment is at a record high of 66%, rural wages are stagnant, precarity is rising, and the level of inequality has surpassed that in the colonial period.
What is India’s true economic record over the past decade? To what extent are the claims of prosperity justified and how widely are these gains shared? How reliable are the data that are being used to make these claims? Our roundtable of eminent experts will address these questions and examine the political economy underpinnings and consequences of India’s Hindu nationalist regime.
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13th May 2024 at 9:00am EST / 2:00pm BST / 6:30pm IST / 7:30pm CET
Nitin Kumar Bharti is a postdoctoral scholar in the Economics department of the New York University-Abu Dhabi. He is also Coordinator for South and South East Asia at World Inequality Lab at Paris School of Economics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Namur and the Paris School of Economics in 2022. Before that, he earned his bachelor’s degree from IIT-Kharagpur and has two years of experience working in the corporate sector. He is an applied micro-economist, and his research interests lie in understanding the development of educational systems and their linkage with economic growth and inequality. He is also interested in studying the long-term evolution of economic inequalities in the South Asia region
Jean Drèze, development economist, is currently Visiting Professor at Ranchi University and Honorary Professor at the Delhi School of Economics. He has made wide-ranging contributions to development economics and public policy, with special reference to India. His recent books include An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (with Amartya Sen) and Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone. Jean Drèze is also active in various campaigns for economic and social rights.
Professor Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for nearly 35 years, and since January 2021 she has been a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. Recent publications include When Governments Fail: Covid-19 and the Economy, Informal Women Workers in the Global South, and Demonetisation Decoded. Jayati has advised governments and consulted for international organizations, including the International Labour Organization (ILO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Dipa Sinha is Assistant Professor, Economics at Ambedkar University. She works on issues related to food rights and nutrition, public health, gender and social policy. She has worked for over five years with the Office of Commissioners to the Supreme Court (on the Right to Food) She has been part of a number of national and international research studies on food rights, health financing, gender and social development. She has done her MA in Economics from JNU, MSc in Development Studies from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London and Ph.d from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
26th Annual Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics
10-12 July 2024 in Bristol, UK
In collaboration with Bristol Research in Economics, the College of Business and Law at the University of the West of England in Bristol, and the Cambridge Political Economy Society
Registrations are now open for the 26th Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics, taking place on 10-12 July 2024 at the University of the West of England (Frenchay Campus) in Bristol (UK) and online. Registrations are open until 21 June 2024.
We are proud to see more than 170 individual submissions and 11 panel proposals, coming to a total of 214 scholars expressing interest in presenting at the AHE conference. The numbers demonstrate a renewed interest in the UK’s heterodox community.
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What to expect
The conference is a hybrid event with both in-person and online attendees and speakers. Please make sure to book the correct ticket on our website.
The conference will run for three days and sessions will typically start at 9am with the final sessions closing by 6pm.
Partner associations include: Cambridge Political Economy Society (CPES), INET Young Scholars Initiative (YSI), History of Economics Society (HES), Cambridge Social Ontology Group (CSOG), and the Post Keynesian Economics Society (PKES).
Each day we will have a keynote plenary where no parallel sessions will run. Themes of the keynote addresses will range from ecological and environmental justice to the political economy of conflict and migration, to heterodoxy and policy.
On Thursday 11th July the conference dinner will take place at 7pm (venue and details TBC).
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Confirmed speakers:
D’Maris Coffman (University College London)
Maria Nikolaidi (University of Greenwich)
Bengi Akbulut (University of Concordia, Canada)
Rafeef Ziadah (Department of International Development, King’s College London)
Bruna Boscaini (Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organization – IRMO)
Artjoms Ivlevs (UWE Bristol)
Gary Dymski (University of Leeds)
Lekha Chakraborty (National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, India)
Natalia Bracarense (OECD and Sciences Po, Toulouse)
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Fred Lee prize
Send your full paper by June 1st, 2024 with the subject line “Early career prize submission” at heteconevents@gmail.com. Eligible scholars for the prize include PhD students as well as those who received their PhD no more than 2 years prior to the date of the conference and are not currently in a full-time, tenured position.
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Conference location
The conference will take place at the Bristol Business School (X block), University of the West of England (Frenchay Campus) in Bristol (UK) and online. For online participants a Zoom link will be shared closer to the date of the conference. The address for in-person attendees is: UWE Bristol Coldharbour Lane, Frenchay, Bristol, BS16 1QY.
Click here for the Google Maps link to the conference venue.
Click here for a high-resolution map of the university campus.
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Getting to Bristol
Via plane
Bristol airport is the closest airport to Bristol. The Airport Flyer bus service connects Bristol Temple Meads and Bristol Airport, with the journey taking approximately 25 minutes. It takes another 30-40 minutes from Bristol Temple Meads to reach the UWE Business School.
London Heathrow airport for transatlantic and longer flights. It takes about 2.5 hours from Heathrow to UWE Business School using public transport (train and bus), with busses generally being the more affordable option.
From London Heathrow airport to Bristol by train: Take the Elizabeth line or Heathrow Express to Paddington. From there, take the train towards Cardiff or Swansea. Get off at Bristol Parkway. You can take a bus (e.g. 19 or metrobus m4 or m3 towards the city centre) from here to the Business School (Frenchay Campus).
From London Heathrow airport to Bristol by bus: Long distance coaches and coaches from London airports: Megabus and National Express provide a very cost-effective service direct to Frenchay Campus from many UK cities and some overseas destinations including London (city, e.g. Victoria, and airports), Cardiff, Birmingham, Exeter, Manchester and Leeds.
Via train
Direct trains go to Bristol Temple Meads from Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham and London (Paddington).
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Getting to UWE Bristol Business School once in Bristol
Via train
Bristol Temple Meads is the main train station and is located close to Bristol city centre.
The nearest train stations from UWE Bristol are: Bristol Parkway (approx. 20-25 minutes walking), or Filton Abbey Wood (approx. 10 minutes walking). From Bristol Parkway it is also possible to take a bus (19, m3, m4 towards the city centre) to the campus.
It will take about 40 minutes to reach the UWE Business School from Bristol Temple Meads (train ride of approx. 15 minutes, plus walking). Tickets can be bought at the station or online.
Via bus
From Bristol Temple Meads, buses operate 24 hours a day and at peak times, leave up to every 8 minutes.
Buses 72 and 74 will take you from the train station (Temple Meads) to the Business School campus.
From Bristol Parkway, it is also possible to take a bus (19, m3, m4 towards the city centre) to the campus.
From the city centre, Metrobus services m1, m3 and m4 are the best way to get to UWE, with buses up to every 10 minutes (Monday – Friday daytime). Bus routes, ticket prices and where to buy the tickets can be found HERE.
The First Bus app includes a journey planner and offers live bus times so you can check when your bus is due in real time.
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Accommodation
Accommodation on campus is now available for booking:
10 Women in Heterodox Economics that You Should Know About
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The theme for the 2024 International Women’s Day is “inspire inclusion”. Are you curious to find out more about women economists who advocated for inclusion and made history in heterodoxy?
Here are 10 women in heterodox economics you should know about!
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Victoria Chick (1936 – 2023)
Victoria Chick was one of the most important contributors to post-Keynesian economics, with works spanning from methodology, monetary economics, financialisation and industrial policy. After graduating from Berkeley, she moved to London in 1960 to pursue a PhD at the London School of Economics. She took up a post at UCL in 1963 where she remained all her working life. She became a professor in 1993. Vicky retired in 2001 though worked on research until her death in 2023. She was the co-founder of the Post-Keynesian Economics Study Group (PKES) and a world-leading expert on Keynes. Her interpretation of Keynes’ TheGeneral Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money after her dissatisfaction with mainstream attempts to hijack Keynes’ ideas led to her influential work, Macroeconomics After Keynes: A Reconsideration of The General Theory (1983).
More recent publications include Should Equilibrium Be Abandoned by Heterodox Economists? (2022) and Open and Closed Systems (2023).
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Maria da Conceição Tavares (1930 -)
Maria da Conceição Tavares is a Portuguese naturalized Brazilian economist. She is a full professor at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), and professor emeritus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). After completing an economics degree in 1960 at UFRJ, she published her first article in 1963, titled Rise and fall of the import-substitution process in Brazil, in which she discussed import-substituting industrialisation as a historical model of development. Together with Celso Furtado, Tavares became a leading scholar in the Latin American structuralist-developmentalist approach. Some of her works include From Import Substitution to Financial Capitalism (1973), and Capital Accumulation and Industrialization in Brazil (1986). After holding positions at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (1965-67) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (1968), she became a professor of UFRJ and Unicamp in the 1970s until the 1990s. Alongside her academic career, Conceição Tavares is a political activist, advisor, and a member of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies between 1995 and 1999.
Recent publications about her work include Fernandez’s (2021) interview with Tavares, and Bielschowsky’s (2010) article about her leading contributions to Latin-American structuralist thought.
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Krishna Bharadwaj (1935-1992)
Originating from Karwar, on the Malabar Coast of India, Krishna R. Bharadwaj studied at the University of Bombay, obtaining her PhD in 1960. Initially a development theorist, Bharadwaj became acquainted with the Cambridge School during a sojourn in MIT (USA), where she happened to first meet Joan Robinson. Bharadwaj wrote a highly influential review Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities in 1963. She went to Cambridge as a visiting fellow in 1967, coming under the influence of Piero Sraffa and going on to become one of his closest disciples. Bharadwaj returned to India in 1971, joining the faculty at the Nehru University in Delhi. She would continue to be a prominent Neo-Ricardian theorist and expositor of the school (and Sraffa’s ideas in particular) for the next two decades. Some of her work focused on applying Sraffian theory to development problems, such as Classical Political Economy and the Rise to Dominance of Supply and Demand Theories (1978).
Recent articles discussing her ideas are Bertram Schefold’s (1998) article about her reconstruction of economic theory through history, and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo (2021)’s analysis of Bharadwaj’s interpretation of expectations.
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Sadie Alexander (1898-1989)
Sadie T.M. Alexander was a pioneering Black professional and civil rights activist of the early to mid-20th century. In 1921, Alexander was the second African American woman to receive a PhD, and the first one to receive one in economics in the United States, with a dissertation titled The Standard of Living Among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia. After struggling to secure a job despite her formal education (Banks, 2005), she turns to Law. In 1927, she was first Black woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and went on to become the first Black woman to practice law in the state. Alexander developed arguments to overcome black oppression by calling for policies that would lead to economic justice, including in her contributions to economics through speeches and writings. She analysed discrimination in the labour market, including unemployment, job precarity, and low wage levels amongst the Black population, also focusing on the role of Black women and their contribution to Black American living standards and national output. Her contributions inspired the stratification economics tradition and the Black Radical approach in Political Economy.
Recent works about Alexander include Nina Banks’s book (2021) and article (2022) about her economic contributions, as well as Malveaux’s (1991) analysis on the missed opportunity in economics for not paying attention to Alexander’s works.
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Susan Himmelweit (1948 – )
‘Sue’ Felicity Himmelweit is a feminist economist interested in gender issues in economic and social policy. Susan researches in areas such as inequalities within households, the economics of caring as well as the gender implications of economic policy. Susan is an emeritus professor of economics for the Open University, and was the 2009 president of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). She is a founding chair and active member of the Women’s Budget Group; member of the editorial board of Feminist Economics; and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy.
Recent publications include a chapter in A Research Agenda for Financial Resources within the Household (2024), a chapter in In Taxation and Social Policy (2023) and a co-authored paper in Feminist Economics in 2021.
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Julia Steinberger (1974 – )
Julia Steinberger is Professor of Ecological Economics at the University of Lausanne and an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report. She received her PhD in physics in 2004 from MIT and was promoted to professor in 2020. Her research considers the relationships between the use of resources (energy, materials and emission of greenhouse gases) and performance of societies (wellbeing and economic output) and is geared towards alternative development pathways to guide the necessary transition to a low carbon society. She has pioneered links between ecological and heterodox economics, both through PhD supervisions and her adoption of the systems of provision approach.
Her research project, for which she received the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award, ‘Living Well Within Limits’ investigates how universal human well-being might be achieved within planetary boundaries.
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Sheila Dow (1949- )
Sheila Dow is a post-Keynesian economist who has extensively written about the philosophy of economics, the history of economic thought, and has raised methodological awareness in the fields of macroeconomics, money and banking. She earned her PhD in Economics from the University of Glasgow in 1981. During her PhD she became a Lecturer at the University of Stirling where she was promoted to reader in 1988 and full professor in 1996. Since 2012 she is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. Among others, she has held positions with the Bank of England and the Government of Manitoba. Sheila has also held positions as the co-editor of Economic Thought and was the associate editor for the Journal of Economic Methodology. She is part of the academic council of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and she is a member of SSRN Economics advisory board.
Sheila has over 250 research outputs. Recent books include Foundations for New Economic Thinking (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and co-edited volumes of The General Theory and Keynes for the 21st Century (Edward Elgar, 2018) and Money, Method and Post-Keynesian Economics for the 21st Century (Edward Elgar, 2018). Sheila Dow has often collaborated with Victoria Chick. The two published a pioneering article (2005) discussing the notion of “open systems” for economic methodology.
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Marilyn Waring (1952 – )
Marilyn Waring (CNZM) is a New Zealand feminist, former politician, author, academic, and activist for female human rights and environmental issues. She is best known for her 1988 book If Women Counted, and she obtained a PhD in political economy in 1989. She is known as one of the founders of feminist economics. Since 2006, Waring has been a Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Public Policy at AUT in Auckland (NZ), focusing on governance and public policy, political economy, gender analysis, and human rights. She has outspokenly criticised the concept of GDP, the economic measure that became a foundation of the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA) following World War II. She criticises a system which “counts oil spills and wars as contributors to economic growth, while child-rearing and housekeeping are deemed valueless”.
Recent publications about her work include an edited volume by Bjornholt and McKay (2014), and Saunders and Dalziel (2017) article about her critique of national account systems.
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Suzanne de Brunhoff (1929–2015)
Suzanne de Brunhoff was a Marxist activist and economist who wrote widely on monetary policy, international monetary relations, financial liberalisation and Marx’s views on the significance of money within capitalist society. She studied sociology at the Sorbonne and received a PhD in Sociology as well as Economics. From 1960 onward Suzanne became a researcher at Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris where she became the Director later on. She taught at the University of Paris VII, the New School and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). International recognition came with Marx on Money (1976) where Suzanne as, a “radical thinker”, analyses how money, debt and credit fit into the logic of capital.
The State, Capital and Economic Policy (1978) is her second book that was translated into English. More recent publications on her work show how Suzanne has developed the most innovative contributions to Marxist theory of money since classical Marxism (Baronian, 2021).
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Hazel Kyrk (1886-1957)
Born in Ashley (Ohio), Hazel Kyrk was a pioneer in the study of consumption decisions and of the allocation of time in households. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1910 with a PhB in economics and a Phi Beta Kappa key. After a year as an instructor in economics at Wellesley College, Kyrk returned to the University of Chicago to study for a PhD in economics, writing her dissertation with the economic demographer James A. Field. Her dissertation, accepted in 1920, was published as A Theory of Consumption (1923) winning the prestigious Hart, Schaffner and Marx Prize for economic research. In that book and in The Economic Problems of the Family (1929), Kyrk discussed how social psychology shapes consumer choice and how the economic role of the housewife was moving beyond household production to being a “director of consumption”. She reinterpreted Thorstein Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda directed toward “wise” and “rational” consumption.
Recent articles discussing Kyrk’s works are Philippy et al.’s (2023) article on her intellectual roots, as well as Todorova’s (2023) analysis of Kyrk’s links with original institutional economics.
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Here is AHE’s management committee coordinator Danielle Guizzo promoting women in Economics in two short videos for the University of Bristol in the UK:
Since the beginning of the military dictatorship in March 1976, pro-market visions were imposed by violating human rights in the darkest period of Argentina’s history and occupied political thought for more than four decades, even in democracy. Although these ideas had a brief pause in the period 2003-2015, they are still in force and now more than ever under the new administration of Mr. Milei. Mr. Milei has imposed a huge depreciation of the national currency, reducing the purchasing power of workers, and an adjustment of public spending by dismissing more than 50,000 public employees under the slogan of efficiency. Inflation has reached 200% per year and poverty has reached 60% under his administration, which has been in place for less than 5 months. As a heterodox community, we wish to better understand the social and economic consequences of the Milei government and discuss the possible alternatives Argentina now faces.
Ramiro Álvarez is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Political Economy and Development Studies at the National University of Moreno (Argentina). He is a specialist in the Political Economy of Argentina. After his Master in Economic Development at the National University of San Martín (Argentina) he did his PhD at the University of Siena (Italy). Ramiro teaches basic and advanced economics at different Argentinean universities. He has been a guest professor at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo due to his studies in Political Economy and he published many papers analysing the political “pendulum” in Argentina, and its impacts on income distribution and growth.
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Matías Vernengo is Full Professor at Bucknell University. He was formerly Senior Research Manager at the Central Bank of Argentina (BCRA), Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, and Assistant Professor at Kalamazoo College and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He has been an external consultant to several United Nations organizations including the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He has eight edited books, two books and more than one hundred and twenty articles published in scientific peer reviewed journals or book chapters. He specializes in macroeconomic issues for developing countries, in particular Latin America, international political economy and the history of economic ideas. He is also the emeritus founding co-editor of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE), and co-editor in chief of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.
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María Carolina Moisés is a distinguished Argentine politician and political scientist with a rich career dedicated to public service and political advocacy. Beginning her political journey with foundational education from the University of Belgrano, where she earned a degree in Political Science, she has been a pivotal figure in Argentine politics. Her early academic achievements were complemented by international exposure through a program at the University of Berkley, Boston, which broadened her perspective on governance and public policy. Carolina’s political career is marked by her tenure as a National Senator for Jujuy since December 10, 2023, showcasing her continued relevance and leadership in Argentine politics. Prior to this role, she served as a National Deputy for Jujuy from December 18, 2017, to December 10, 2023, and previously from December 10, 2005, to December 9, 2009, where she was known for her passionate advocacy and significant legislative contributions, including her involvement in the landmark Audiovisual Media Law. As a speaker, María Carolina Moisés brings a wealth of experience, a profound understanding of political dynamics, and a visionary approach to addressing contemporary challenges. Her career is a testament to her unwavering dedication to public service, making her an inspiring figure in Argentine politics and beyond.
Inflation in the UK reached their highest rates in 2022 and 2023 for three decades, putting an end to over a decade of historically low interest rates and pushing many into a cost of living crisis with poverty deepening for many.
Despite its prominence in recent political debate, public understanding of the causes and consequences of inflation remain partial and often cantered around and old conservative doctrine of the wage/price spiral.
Drawing from recent publications, the seminar explores evidence based understanding of recent hikes in inflation and the distributional conflict between wages and profit that ensue.
The Open University Economics Seminar Series and Rethinking Economics International are pleased to be hosting Rafael Wildauer (Greenwich University), Christine Berry (Joseph Rowntree Foundation) and Laurence Jones-Williams (Rethinking Economics International). The event will be chaired by Susan Newman (The Open University).
Christine Berry is a communicator, thinker and changemaker based in Manchester. Christine’s recent work has focussed on how we can build a more democratic economy, and in particular on the need to democratise ownership. She has been described by the Guardian as “one of the central figures” in the new economics, and her work has also been covered by the Economist, the Financial Times and various other major newspapers. She is currently working part-time with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation alongside completing her first solo book, Owned, published by Verso Books. Other hats include Associate Fellow of IPPR North, Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab and Associate Fellow of Abundance.
Laurence Jones-Williams is Director of Rethinking Economics International, a global charity working to transform economics education for people and planet. He has been with Rethinking Economics for the past 6 years and has overseen its growth to over 120 groups in over 30 countries, with 1,000s of students becoming rethinkers and over 10 major changes to economics curricula. Laurence also co-founded the Greater Manchester Tenants Union, previously studied Mathematics and Physics and is in his final year of a Masters in Leadership accredited by Essex University.
Professor Peter Skott will deliver a seminar on his new book Structuralist and Behavioral Macroeconomics
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Date:5th March 2024 (Tuesday)
Time: 4.00-5.30pm, London time, followed by drinks and dinner at The Rose (at own expense)
Seminar location: Goldsmiths College, University of London. Room DTH-G16 (Deptford Town Hall building, ground floor, entrance from New Cross Road). Click here for map.
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Book summary:
Mainstream macroeconomics is founded on the idea of perfectly rational representative agents. Yet there is a growing realisation that economic theories based on such agents are inadequate guides to real-world decision making. The behavioural evidence has had significant impacts on microeconomics but the same cannot be said of macroeconomics. This book is part of the movement to do for macroeconomics what behavioural thinking has done for microeconomics. Using behavioural evidence and insights from Keynesian and institutionalist traditions, it presents an empirically grounded alternative to the paradigm that currently dominates macroeconomic theory. It highlights how dynamic interactions across markets can generate instability, endogenous cycles and secular stagnation. It fully engages with macroeconomic theory, provides a multi-faceted view that explains how and why it is time to rethink its foundations and offers a path forward.
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Peter Skott is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Professor of Economics at Aalborg University. Before moving to UMass in 2003, he held positions at Copenhagen University (1981-1987) and Aarhus University (1987-2003). His research interests fall primarily within macroeconomics, with contributions on a range of topics, including economic growth and development, business cycles, inflation, and the distribution of income. His general approach draws on the (post-) Keynesian, (neo-) Marxian and institutional traditions as well as behavioral economics; a recent book on Structuralist and Behavioral Macroeconomics (Cambridge University Press, 2023) synthesizes some of his work on core macroeconomic issues.
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The seminar will be held in person at Goldsmiths. Click here for more information about the event.
No need to register. When you arrive at the reception desk, tell the concierge that you are attending the seminar in room DTH-G16, which is just behind the reception desk on the ground floor.
