Do neoliberal economic policies help or hinder human development? Many have argued that such policies promote economic stability and growth, which may have indirect positive effects on human welfare. Others claim that neoliberal policies retard human development. We argue that neoliberal economic policies may improve the human welfare in ways that are independent of their effects on economic pe...

Feedback into the broader policy debate in macroeconomic and related structural areas remains limited. However, when a more informed debate and broadening of the policy space did take place on these issues, the policy outcome was generally positive. In contrast, when controversial issues involving difficult trade-offs were avoided during the PRS process, the consequences for “downstream” polici...

Top-down and bottom up development policies have been generally sold as two irreconcilable ends of the development intervention spectrum. Top-down policies, solidly based in microand macroeconomic theories, but lacking the adequate flexibility and ‘place-awareness’ to respond to local complexity; bottom-up approaches much more responsive to diverse territorial needs, but devoid of a clear conce...

This chapter develops a toolkit of neoclassical macroeconomic models, and applies these models to the U.S. economy from 1929 through 2014. We first filter macroeconomic time series into business cycle and long-run components, and show that the long-run component is typically much larger than the business cycle component. We argue that this empirical feature is naturally addressed within neoclas...

The literature on employment protection has largely ignored the influence that such policies may have on macroeconomic dynamics. Also, the manner in which exit has been modelled heretofore may understate the effects of these policies. Finally, industrial subsidies to failing plants have largely been ignored as an important element of employment protection. To address these issues, I develop a g...

This paper analyzes the design of macroeconomic policies for Slovenia on its way into the Euro Area. We simulate different policy scenarios, distinguishing in particular between different exchange rate regimes. For this purpose, we use the model slopol4, a macroeconometric model for Slovenia. We determine ‘optimal’ exchange rate and fiscal policies for Slovenia as solutions of optimum control p...

197 Words) Since all macroeconomic policies are enacted within a certain set of distributive relations and institutional structures, the employment intensity of growth is likely to vary for men and women depending on the nature and context of output growth. The gendered nature of this growthemployment nexus is examined by analyzing the differential impacts that macroeconomic policies and struct...