Julio ha sido un mes de malas noticias para Venezuela. Su ya esquelética cadena de producción y medios de subsistencia tradicional siguen siendo vulnerados, asaltados y manejados como bodegas; con mentalidad de bodeguero y PDVSA no escapa de esa realidad. La industria petrolera está asfixiada; estrangulada. Eso lo saben sus socios extranjeros y como todo buen negociador, toman ventaja de cualquier situación de debilidad de su contraparte.

En estas líneas, se quisiera mostrar que la política económica bolivariana dista mucho de ser «socialista», e incluso «desarrollista». Lo que a las claras se observa es un proceso de desindustrialización severo en favor de una casta importadora-financiera que, con un discurso enardecido y un clientelismo popular vigoroso, ha acelerado de manera drástica la fase depresiva del ciclo económico capitalista de un proceso nacional de acumulación de capital basado en la apropiación de la renta hidrocarburífera. Estas políticas estatales han demolido por completo el ingreso obrero y han desarrollado un proceso de lumpenización vigoroso que lleva a millones de personas a una situación de insólita miseria extrema. Se tratará de explicar la forma en que se llegó a ese punto, las consecuencias de haber descendido a esos niveles y las perspectivas económicas más inmediatas.

The accumulation of knowledge required to produce economic value is a process that often relates to nations economic growth. Such a relationship, however, is misleading when the proxy of such accumulation is the average years of education. In this paper, we show that the predictive power of this proxy started to dwindle in 1990 when nations schooling began to homogenized. We propose a metric of human capital that is less sensitive than average years of education and remains as a significant predictor of economic growth when tested with both cross-section data and panel data. We argue that future research on economic growth will discard educational variables based on quantity as predictor given the thresholds that these variables are reaching.

La teoría marxista de la dependencia postuló una explicación del subdesarrollo asentada en la dinámica del valor. Con ese fundamento explicó el intercambio desigual y los ciclos industriales de América Latina, en una época previa al actual predominio del extractivismo y las maquilas. ¿Cuáles son los conceptos vigentes de esa caracterización? ¿Cómo deben evaluarse sus omisiones o insuficiencias?

Historical examination of the Bretton Woods system allows comparisons to be made with the current evolution of the EMS.

This study reveals that scientific research is produced for social and economic interests of nations (power, wealth creation, technological superiority, etc.), rather than philosophical inquiries. A main implication of this study is that the immense growth of science in modern society is not only due to activity of scientists but rather to general social efforts of nations to take advantage of important opportunities and/or to cope with environmental threats, such as war. Empirical evidence endeavors to support the sources of scientific research for nations, described here. Finally, relationships between R&D investment and productivity, and research policy implications are discussed.

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its empirical applications. Special attention is given to three phenomena and their possible empirical manifestations: The instability of social choice in the form of (1) the possibility of majority cycles, (2) the non-robustness of social choices given alternative voting methods, and (3) the possibility of various forms of manipulation of the decisions (heresthetics). These topics are then connected to the contributions to the current special issue

Facilitar el tránsito de una economía rentista a la nueva economía del conocimiento implica una creciente inversión en capital humano, en la planta física para las actividades científicas y tecnológicas, en el desarrollo de sistemas de información y en el fortalecimiento de la infraestructura de telecomunicaciones que permita el acceso sin trabas a las autopistas de la información. La mejora de la calidad de Internet es una condición básica para facilitar la creación de pequeñas y medianas empresas basadas en un uso inteligente de la información y el conocimiento en la producción y comercialización de los bienes y servicios que se requieren para satisfacer las necesidades básicas y esenciales de la población.

We demonstrate using multi-layered networks, the existence of an empirical linkage between the dynamics of the financial network constructed from the market indices and the macroeconomic networks constructed from macroeconomic variables such as trade, foreign direct investments, etc. for several countries across the globe. The temporal scales of the dynamics of the financial variables and the macroeconomic fundamentals are very different, which makes the empirical linkage even more interesting and significant. Also, we find that there exist in the respective networks, core-periphery structures (determined through centrality measures) that are composed of similar set of countries — a result that may be related through the `gravity model’ of the country-level macroeconomic networks.

The paper tries to explain the extraordinary expansion in the 20th century of the English-born neoclassical economics and at the same time the decline of the German historical tradition. Methodology used in this paper is evolutionary institutionalist, which can be called, following American political scientists, Historical Institutionalism. The link between science and university was created first in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century with the reform of Wilhelm Humboldt. At the end of the 19th century when the institutionalization of economics took place, curriculum of English and most of the American universities were dominated by classics and theology. This was the determinant factor of institutionalization of economics as abstract science with its a priori method. On the contrary, German economics was institutionalized in new research universities in which experimental approach was highly valued. The continuation and very successful development in the United States of the scientific economic tradition born in Germany in the form of the Wisconsin Institutionalism was due to the economic support of its research by the big business interested at that time to find solutions to the “labour problem”. The paper also contains the description of institutional mechanism of stability and expansion of neoclassical economics.