Resolving the Economic Puzzle: Two Reviews by Stephan Barton and Fred Foldvary Re‐solving the Economic Puzzle by Walter Rybeck London: Shepheard‐Walwyn, 2011, pp.xv, 238, $29.95. ISBN 978‐0‐856‐32819

Walter Rybeck makes the case for land value taxation, explains how he came to understand its importance, and describes his involvement in the Henry George movement in the United States over the last 50 years. While the book demonstrates the virtues of land value taxation, it also illustrates some of the limitations of contemporary Georgism.     

The fiscal and monetary response to COVID‐19: What the Great Depression has – and hasn't – taught us

Although some regard the New Deal of the 1930s as exemplifying an aggressive fiscal and monetary response to a severe economic crisis, the US fiscal and monetary policy responses to the COVID‐19 crisis have actually been far more substantial – and, so far, much more effective in reviving aggregate spending. Although many fear that these responses, and the large‐scale increase in bank reserves especially, must eventually cause unwanted inflation, the concurrent sharp decline in money's velocity has thus far more than offset any inflationary effects of money growth, while forward bond prices reflect a general belief that inflation will remain below 2 per cent for at least another decade. Notwithstanding the growth of the Fed's balance sheet, Fed authorities can always check inflation by sufficiently raising the interest return on bank reserves. Nonetheless, recent developments have heightened the risk of ‘fiscal dominance’ of monetary policy at some point in the future.     

Currency Unions and Trade: A PPML Re‐assessment with High‐dimensional Fixed Effects

Recent work on the effects of currency unions (CUs) on trade stresses the importance of using many countries and years in order to obtain reliable estimates. However, for large samples, computational issues associated with the three‐way (exporter‐time, importer‐time, and country pair) fixed effects currently recommended in the gravity literature have heretofore limited the choice of estimator, leaving an important methodological gap. To address this gap, we introduce an iterative poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation procedure that facilitates the inclusion of these fixed effects for large data sets and also allows for correlated errors across countries and time. When applied to a comprehensive sample with more than 200 countries trading over 65 years, these innovations flip the conclusions of an otherwise rigorously specified linear model. Most importantly, our estimates for both the overall CU effect and the Euro effect specifically are economically small and statistically insignificant. We also document that linear and PPML estimates of the Euro effect increasingly diverge as the sample size grows.     

The Atlanta Experience Re‐examined: The Link Between Agenda and Regime Change

In recent years, Atlanta appears unable to move from diffuse problem recognition to the framing of a broad program of action, despite major problems associated with a high level of poverty. With its exceptionally fragmented structure of local government, a tradition of business wariness of a strong governmental sector, and continued reliance on personal and informal collaboration, the city has failed to put together a plan to address the city's social‐investment needs. Atlanta's once‐vaunted biracial coalition shows signs of a declining ability to adapt to emergent issues and frame purposes accordingly. Récemment, Atlanta s'est révélée incapable de passer de la reconnaissance d'un problème plus ou moins identifiéà la conception d'un programme d'action d'envergure, malgré d'énormes difficultés liées à un niveau de pauvretéélevé. Compte tenu de la structure exceptionnellement fragmentée de son autorité locale, d'une tradition de défiance des milieux d'affaires à l'égard d'un puissant secteur public local, ainsi que d'une confiance persistante dans une collaboration personnelle informelle, la ville n'a pas réussi à mettre sur pied un plan capable de répondre aux besoins locaux en matière d'investissement social. La coalition biraciale d'Atlanta, autrefois si célèbre, montre des signes de défaillance quand il s'agit de s'adapter aux problèmes émergents et de définir des objectifs en conséquence.     

The ‘reach’ of employee participation in decision‐making: exploring the Aristotelian roots of workplace democracy

This article examines the ‘reach’, or the distribution, of employee participation in decision‐making (PDM) within organisations. It makes a unique contribution to the wider employee voice literature by asking what types of employees have a ‘say’ in strategic decision‐making and, in similar vein, what types of employees are denied participation, and why. In order to answer this under‐investigated research question, the article presents an Aristotelian analysis of the concept of citizenship in the ‘best regime’. In the light of this analysis, the article concludes that some groups of employees are excluded from PDM on the basis of a perceived lack of ‘excellence’.     

The Relationship between Unemployment Benefits and Re‐employment Probabilities: Evidence from Spain*

We provide the first Spanish evidence about the effects on re‐employment probabilities of variations in benefit levels and time‐to‐exhaustion. Increases in unemployment insurance (UI) benefit levels had a small disincentive effect on the re‐employment hazard on average. Around this average, there were larger disincentive effects for men with elapsed durations between 4 and 18 months, whereas for men unemployed longer than 18 months, or for men resident in the south, the effect was negligible. Re‐employment hazards increased when UI exhaustion was imminent, but the change was small. Extensions to unemployment assistance eligibility in 1989 for men aged 45+ years lowered re‐employment probabilities.     

Regionalization as ‘experimental regionalism’: the rescaling of territorial policy‐making in Germany

The federal system of intergovernmental relationships in Germany was greatly affected in the 1990s by the increased importance of transnational rationales and by strong orientations to competitiveness in domestic political discourse. New territorial imperatives have given rise to a variety of innovative institutional approaches to policy‐making, the main focus of which is the need to jointly identify new political arenas and new territorial domains for development policies. The result has been a plurality of highly differentiated experimental approaches to regionalization, challenging nested systems of territorial jurisdictions and consolidated policy styles. German initiatives in ‘experimental regionalism’ are addressed in a perspective that highlights their dimension of institutional coevolution in the framework of emerging multi‐level governance practices at a European level: they are hence not only seen as responses to exogenous factors, but also as outcomes of endogenous factors of innovation and change, related to the need for new forms of political regulation in dealing with intergovernmental policy‐making deadlocks and new ‘local’ claims for representation and mobilization. Building on interpretations of regional governance based on a regulationist‐ and state‐theoretical perspective, elaborated in economic and political geography, recent German approaches to ‘experimental regionalism’ are interpreted as new modes of policy‐making that redefine the state's role in political‐economic regulation through a dual process involving a reframing of state‐local relationships and a rescaling of territorial policy arenas. En Allemagne, le système fédéral de relations inter‐gouvernements a énormément changé dans les années 1990 du fait de l'importance croissante de logiques transnationales et de tendances marquées pour la compétitivité dans le discours politique intérieur. De nouveaux impératifs territoriaux ont suscité un éventail d'approches institutionnelles novatrices du pouvoir politique, leur centre d'intérêt étant d'identifier parallèlement de nouvelles arènes politiques et d'autres domaines territoriaux pour les politiques de développement. Il en a résulté de multiples et très distinctes démarches expérimentales à l'égard de la régionalisation, venant défier systèmes imbriqués de prérogatives territoriales et styles de politique publique homogènes. Les initiatives allemandes de ‘régionalisme expérimental‘ sont abordées dans une perspective qui souligne leur co‐évolution institutionnelle au sein de pratiques naissantes de gouvernance à plusieurs niveaux au plan européen: elles sont donc considérées à la fois comme des réponses à des facteurs exogènes et le produit de facteurs endogènes d'innovation et de changement, liés à la nécessité de nouvelles formes de régulation politique pour résoudre les impasses de l'élaboration des politiques intergouvernementales et les nouvelles revendications ‘locales‘ en matière de représentation et mobilisation. Partant d'interprétations de la gouvernance régionale d'un point de vue théorique régulationiste et étatique, dans une géographie économique et politique, ces récentes approches du ‘régionalisme expérimental‘ sont présentées comme de nouveaux modes d'élaboration des politiques, redéfinissant le rôle de l'État dans une régulation politico‐économique via un double processus de recadrage des relations État‐région et de redimensionnement des arènes politiques territoriales.