Economic Issues

Part I: Historical Background 1: Justice and Economics 2: The Modern Moral Dialogue 3. Justice in Economic History 4. The Disappearance of Justice 5. Property, Culture, and Economics Part II: The Social Encyclicals 6. Rerum Novarum: A Scandalous Encyclical? 7. Laborem Exercens: Work as the Key to the Social Question 8. Centesimus Annus: The Uncertain Victory Part III: Toward an Evolved Capitalism 9. The Social Teachings and Economics: Ideas in Tension 10. Toward an "Evolved" Capitalism 11. Marginal Productivity and the Just Wage 12. The Neo-Conservative Response 13. Distributivism Part IV: The Practice of Justice in the Modern Business World 14. Taiwan and the "Land to the Tiller" Program 15. Development and Globalization 16. Micro-Banking 17. The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation 18. ESOP's and Profit Sharing 19. The Just Wage in the Corporation 20. The Vocation of Business.

In the wake of the global financial crisis (GFC), there have been calls for
changes in the credit ratings industry. The American and European responses were
new regulation and supervision of the rating agencies’ activities and resolving issues
on an “as-needed” basis. Are these efforts enough? Building on the discussion in M.
Ahmed Diomande, James Heintz and Robert Pollin (2009), this paper puts forth a
template for a public credit ratings agency. This agency’s functions include the
validation of the ratings of private rating agencies and the examination of the
relationship between ratings changes and the business cycle. A public credit rating
agency could be split into divisions, each of which focuses on particular types of
borrowers: financial firms (banks and non-bank financial institutions), nonfinancial
firms (corporations and SMEs) and households. These divisions could
liaise with relevant agencies such as, for instance, the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission. The paper concludes by arguing that national public credit rating
agencies are not enough, and there needs to be an international credit rating
agency, possibly housed at the United Nations, designed to validate sovereign
ratings created by private agencies.

Abstract: John Tomasi’s 2012 book, Free Market Fairness, has been well received. On the dust jacket, Tyler Cowen proclaims it “one of the very best philosophical treatments of libertarian thought, ever” and Deirdre McCloskey calls it a “long and friendly conversation between Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls — a conversation which, astonishingly, reaches agreement.” The book does present an authoritative state of the debate across the spectrum from right libertarianism, on one end, to high liberalism (that shares some ideas with democratic socialism), on the other end. My point is not to question Tomasi’s own version of “market democracy” as a remix of Hayek and Rawls, but to use his sympathetic restatements of views across the liberal spectrum in order to show the basic misframings and common misunderstandings that cut across the liberal-libertarian viewpoints surveyed in the book. The heart of the debate is not in the answers to carefully framed questions, but in the framing itself.

Recently, along with the emergence of food scandals, food supply chains have to face with ever-increasing pressure from compliance with food quality and safety regulations and standards. This paper aims to explore critical factors of compliance risk in food supply chain with an illustrated case in Vietnamese seafood industry. To this end, this study takes advantage of both primary and secondary data sources through a comprehensive literature research of industrial and scientific papers, combined with expert interview. Findings showed that there are three main critical factor groups influencing on compliance risk including challenges originating from Vietnamese food supply chain itself, characteristics of regulation and standards, and business environment. Furthermore, author proposed enablers to eliminate compliance risks to food supply chain managers as well as recommendations to government and other influencers and supporters.

ABSTRACT This article discusses consumption as a social process that is part of social provisioning and is in an evolutionary interplay with other social processes. The analysis provides grounds for a context-specific research that explores consumption in the context of a culture-nature life process, and draws on material from various disciplines. The article seeks to contribute to the literature on social provisioning as an organizing concept in heterodox economics. The first section explains what is meant by social process and delineates its elements. The second section formulates a categorization of social processes, and locates a consumption process within a system of culture-nature life processes. The rest of the article delineates the elements of the consumption process, providing illustrations based on literature from various disciplines. Specifically, the third section discusses consumption activities. The fourth section discusses institutions and systems of provision of goods and services. The fifth section applies the concept of habits of life and thought to the consumption process. Finally, the article concludes that the formulated analysis transcends dualisms such as social-economic, cultural-material, society-nature, and micro-macro, and draws implications for heterodox economics.

This paper uses the Near East as a case study to describe how religious identity became a source of preference formation and a cause of social cleavage.  It formulates the concepts of identity-sharing groups and resource-sharing groups to bridge between religious identity’s social-psychological aspects and its socioeconomic effects.  The paper then argues that social cleavages among religious identity-sharing groups generated informal institutions that are incompatible with the abstract formal institutions of the nation-states of Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.  That incompatibility hobbles efforts of formal state institutions to promote economic development, and instead restrains economic growth by intensifying existing conflicts among groups.  It suggests that a state that could promote economic development would be the one that recognizes and supports the informal, localized institutions and allows those of them with common features to evolve into abstract formal institutions.

... The physicists, such as Albert Einstein, Walther Nernst, Max Planck and Ernest Rutherford, who attended the Solvay conferences appar-ently overlooked the ... social theorists at the turn of the century, to the extent that Max Weber felt impelled to write an essay explicitly attacking ...

Abstract Polanyi’s concept of “embeddedness” has been the subject of debate. Various authors have argued that it reveals a contradiction. They contend that Polanyi states that all economies are always embedded, while simultaneously maintaining that the modern market economy is exceptional because it is disembedded. Others claim that there is no contradiction in Polanyi’s thought but that he is merely describing a contradiction of the market economy. In this text, I argue that both sides fail to discern two different concepts: “institutedness” and “embeddedness.” “Institutedness” denotes the idea that economic behavior is always dependent on and the result of certain forms of social organization. In turn, the distinction between embeddedness and disembeddedness is inspired by the Aristotelian distinction between natural and unnatural economic behavior. This distinction refers to the finality of economic behavior: is it directed at the thriving of an ethical community or is it instead directed at wealth acquisition as an end in itself? I argue that both institutedness and (dis)embeddedness fulfill a crucial, though different, role in Polanyi’s critique of market capitalism. I conclude by giving a preliminary outline of what could be the implications for a (neo-)Polanyian political economy of my analysis.

This paper presents and evaluates Don Lescohier's contribution to labor economics, and specifically to labor market policy. Lescohier, a prominent member of the Wisconsin Institutional School, put the labor market in the center of his investigations and tried to examine many of the factors that determine its efficient functioning, differentiating his study from the labor studies that focused on the individual — mainly union — worker. His analysis was essentially influenced by the progressive political climate of his time, the heterodox thought of some "non-Marshallian" British economists like Beveridge, and the newly emergent field of personnel management. Lescohier ardently proposed the creation of a federal-state centralized system of employment offices, which would undertake the difficult task of organizing the American labor market after the end of World War I. His work constituted both an interesting and significant case study, and thus deserves a higher position in the history of labor economics.

Tourism is a field that is highly vulnerable to current market trends. The latest Covid-19 (New Coronavirus) outbreaks have impacted the whole globe. This disease, which is causing chaos in countries' social and economic structures, is also affecting the tourism industry. The destination's appearance and perceived protection are the primary reasons tourists choose a city. Since the coronavirus outbreak presents a danger to countries, it is expected that it would alter perceptions of tourism destinations' appearance and protection. This report contained general knowledge about the Covid-19 epidemic, explored the impact of Covid-19 on the tourism industry, and made assumptions regarding future reforms and developments in the tourism sector in the aftermath of Covid-19. The study concludes that since the pandemic's consequences would be profound and long-lasting, tourism should be restructured, especially in disaster management, through the use of technical applications, new regulations, and precautionary measures to ensure the process's effectiveness. Additionally, Covid-19 will help redefine many facts of tourism, reestablish balances, and foster a more responsible and ethical view of tourism. It has been stated that a new period of tourism will begin, with contactless digital transfers, social distance tours, and independent vacations taking center stage.

In 1972, the Nixon administration proposed a pension reform bill, HR 12272, which died in the House. Then, in 1973, the Senate passed S 4, which set minimum fiduciary, funding, portability, and vesting standards; established plan termination insurance; and extended ...