Category Archives: Trade

Mankiw on Obama’s weak sports analogy

Most are aware that N. Gregory Mankiw is an outstanding economist and economics educator. So this post will merely be a recommendation of his recent article in the New York Times: “Emerging Markets as Partners, Not Rivals“. Inspired by Barack Obama’s recent State of the Union address, where the US president multiple times noted that the US should “win the future”, Mankiw obviously has felt a need to explain that economics is generally not a zero-sum game. As usual, he does an excellent job!

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General Equilibrium Models are Not Utopian

Many are the times where use of general equilibrium methods is being met by harsh criticism. Mostly it happens when the associated model results concerning some policy reform do not provide politicians or voters with what they want or had expected. Sometimes it happens through more fundamentally-based reservations against the modeling strategy per se. Critics taking either point of departure support each other in envisaging general equilibrium models as fictional and idealized Utopian worlds. Hence, they are not to be taken seriously (and they are often claimed to be used merely to promote some free-market agenda). As I see it, the critics often overlook (deliberately or not) that general equilibrium … Continue reading

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