Digital Commons Network^™

Towards Improved Competitiveness Of The Economies Of The West African Economic And Monetary Union, E. O. Akinnifesi

CBN Occasional Papers

As is well known, a monetary union with a common currency confers on its members the advantage of fixed exchange rate and consequent relative price stability. While these advantages held sway up to the mid-1980s in the case of the seven member countries of the CEA franc zone in West Africa, the vulnerability of the zone to external shocks became manifest from the second half of the 1980s. Fairly persistent overvaluation of the CEA franc over time had weakened the competitiveness of the export sector leading to several economic problems including domestic and external debt arrears, capital flight, and negative …

The Importance Of The Tax System In Determining The Marginal Cost Of Funds, Shaghil Ahmed, Dean D. Croushore

Economics Faculty Publications

Examines the effect on the marginal cost of public funds of 2 alternative ways in which the tax schedule can be altered: one that maintains the progressivity of the tax schedule and another that rotates the tax schedule. Calculates values of these marginal-cost-of-funds concepts for plausible ranges of key parameters.

What's Wrong With Exploitation?, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Abstract: Marx thinks that capitalism is exploitative, and that is a major basis for his objections to it. But what's wrong with exploitation, as Marx sees it? (The paper is exegetical in character: my object is to understand what Marx believed,) The received view, held by Norman Geras, G.A. Cohen, and others, is that Marx thought that capitalism was unjust, because in the crudest sense, capitalists robbed labor of property that was rightfully the workers' because the workers and not the capitalists produced it. This view depends on a Labor Theory of Property (LTP), that property rights are based ultimately …

In Defence Of Exploitation, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

The concept of exploitation is thought to be central to Marx's Critique of capitalism. John Roemer, an analytical (then-) Marxist economist now at Yale, attacked this idea in a series of papers and books in the 1970s-1990s, arguing that Marxists should be concerned with inequality rather than exploitation -- with distribution rather than production, precisely the opposite of what Marx urged in The Critique of the Gotha Progam.

This paper expounds and criticizes Roemer's objections and his alternative inequality based theory of exploitation, while accepting some of his criticisms. It may be viewed as a companion paper to my What's …

An Economic Analysis Of Trade Measures To Protect The Global Environment, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Professor Howard Chang addresses the role of trade restrictions in supporting policies to protect the global environment and proposes a more liberal treatment of these environmental trade measures than that adopted by dispute-settlement panels of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT Secretariat has recommended that countries like the United States rely on "carrots" rather than "sticks" in order to induce the participation of other countries in multilateral environmental agreements. Professor Chang defends the use of sticks on the ground that they encourage more restrained exploitation of the environment pending a multilateral agreement. First, …