Estimates find that Africa has lost more than $1 trillion since the 1970s through capital flight. Léonce Ndikumana argues that it is time to move the global dialogue on development financing from increasing aid to Africa to preventing illicit export of African capital. The paper states that the key mechanism of capital flight is the misinvoicing of international trade, especially in primary commodities. Ndikumana proposes that combatting this problem requires increased transparency in international trade and finance, enhanced accountability in international borrowing and lending and clamping down on tax evasion and trade-based money laundering. A productive global partnership with Africa is one that helps the continent raise more domestic resources and keep its capital onshore.
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Understanding Globalization, Financialization, Competition and Crisis
Capitalism, Macroeconomics and Reality collects many of the most significant papers written by Professor James Crotty of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Economics Dept. and PERI. For over 40 years, Crotty has played a major role in building a coherent framework for macroeconomics that synthesizes Marxian and Keynesian perspectives and provides an effective critique of orthodox approaches to macro. This volume includes Crotty's early work on class conflict and the business cycle, his studies on the contradictions of the South Korean growth model, and his prescient analyses of the spread of destabilizing speculative finance on Wall Street just prior to the 2007-09 global financial crisis and Great Recession.
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An Empirical Analysis of Minsky Regimes in the U.S. Economy
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis gained widespread recognition as a basis for explaining what went wrong. Leila Davis, Joao Paulo de Souza and Gonzalo Hernandez offer a new perspective on Minsky's framework by providing an empirical analysis of Minskian dynamics in the post-1970 U.S. economy. The authors apply Minskian definitions of financial fragility to firm-level data. They highlight growth in the share of Ponzi firms concentrated among small corporations. Their findings suggest that, contrary to current opinion, Minskian dynamics do not operate at business cycle frequencies, but instead may take the form of "long waves."
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Improving Population Health by Reducing Poverty: New York's Earned Income Tax Credit
Current research links individual-level health improvements to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a broad-based income support policy. Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Peter Arno expand upon this research by examining whether the EITC has ecological neighborhood-level health effects as well. In their new study, they measure child health outcomes in New York State neighborhoods before and after the EITC policy expansion between 1997-2010. Their findings link a 15 percentage-point increase in EITC benefit rates to a .45 percentage-point reduction in low birth weight rate. The magnitude of this link suggests ecological effects, and an additional channel through which anti-poverty measures can serve as public health interventions.
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