A Diretoria de Pesquisa do Instituto de Economia da UFRJ convida para o próximo Seminário de Pesquisa do PPGE de 2016:

“Políticas de Austeridade, Velhas e Novas: do British Treasury para o Bundesfinanzministerium”
Prof. Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho (Professor Emérito do IE/UFRJ)

Serviço:
Dia: 26 de julho de 2016 – 3ª feira – 16:30 horas
Local: sala 102 do Instituto de Economia
Av. Pasteur, 250 – Urca – Rio de Janeiro/RJ

Diretora de Pesquisa: Professora Marina Honorio de Souza Szapiro
Coordenador de Seminários: Professor Eduardo Pontual Ribeiro
Secretária de Seminários: Flávia Grumbach Mendonça

Abstract: Much of the criticism directed at austerity programs implemented after the 2007/2008 financial crisis have focused on the Anglo-Saxon critique of Keynesian ideas. New versions of Say’s law, nowadays rephrased as Natural Rate of Unemployment theories and argued in terms of General Equilibrium models and Rational Expectations hypotheses, have attracted the attention of Keynesian critics, such as Paul Krugman or Joe Stiglitz. Accordingly, UK’s policies under David Cameron (or more generally since Thatcher) are also discussed as if they were paradigmatic of austerity theories. We argue that this view is not only one-sided but it is also much less relevant than it is usually judged. The paradigm for austerity policies should not rely on the British experience but on the Eurozone experience, and the latter is inspired mostly by German economists, rather than Anglo-Saxon general equilibrium theorists. Lucas and his associates seem to be largely irrelevant to any discussion of Eurozone austerity policies, which are rooted in modern developments of ‘ordoliberal’ theses, with strong influences from Austrian economists, notably Hayek and Schumpeter. In this paper, we argue that criticisms of Cameron’s policies, based on North American neoclassical ideas miss completely the point of German proposals (supported by similarly-thinking government officials in Austria, the Netherlands, etc). We identify the fundamental tenets of “German neoclassical economics” and outline Keynesian criticism of it.