This paper discusses the reasons for Brazil.s high policy real interest rates by considering two opposing views, the orthodox and heterodox approaches. While orthodox authors defend the position that bad domestic policies are the cause of the high interest rate, heterodox economists claim that...

In Africa’s least developed countries (LDCs), escape from poverty and convergence to livingstandards of more advanced economies depends critically on structural transformation and theemergence of productive entrepreneurship that would accelerate growth and job creation. So far,however,...

This paper discusses social protection initiatives in the context of developing countries and explores the opportunities they present for promoting a gender-equality agenda and women's empowerment. The paper begins with a brief introduction on the emergence of social protection (SP) and how it...

This paper argues that the limited ability to help developing countries in a crisis should shift the focus to policies helping in reducing the ex ante probability of crises. Indirectly, such policies would also alleviate the depths of realized crises. Two specific ideas are explored:...

Up to the financial slump of the second quarter of 2008 commodity prices grew fast for several consecutive years in a highly volatile context. Recent commodity fluctuations have raised both policy concerns and a prolific academic debate. This paper offers a coherent theoretical and empirical...

Against the background of continued growth disappointments, depressed inflation expectations, and declining real equilibrium interest rates, a number of central banks have implemented negative interest rate policies (NIRP) to provide additional monetary policy stimulus over the past few years....

This paper analyzes the relationship between functional income distribution aggregate demand and economic growth in five Central American countries; Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama for the period 1970-2016. It estimates the effects of a change in the wage share on...

Demand and Growth Regimes (DGR) and Macroeconomic Policy Regimes (MPR) frameworks have taken prominence within the post-Keynesian literature. However, the majority of studies based on these conceptual frameworks have focused on developed economies. The main contribution of this paper is to...