Finance and the Macroeconomics of Environmental Policies

The conference will be held under the aegis of the ‘The Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics’ and is intended to explore further the contributions to New Thinking in Economics – ‘New Economics’ – as the new mainstream. This particular conference will focus on finance and the macroeconomics of environmental policies. New Economics is concerned with institutional behaviour, expectations and uncertainty as opposed to traditional economics with its emphasis on equilibrium, mathematical formalism and deterministic solutions. With the financial crisis brought on by the unrestrained pursuit of personal and corporate profit, sanctioned by traditional economics, this is an opportune time to establish a new way of approaching economic understanding, based on new economic theory. It is also a good time to bring forward new ideas on the approach to economic policy across a wide range of areas (for example, macroeconomic and global governance, employment and unemployment, social security and pensions, as well as environmental issues).

New thinking in economics is an interdisciplinary approach to economic problems that acknowledges and respects the insights and analysis of other disciplines, e.g. those of political science, ethics, history and engineering. It also recognises complexity and evolutionary theory as relevant to understanding economic systems and economic behaviour. We wish to emphasise the new thinking in economics that goes beyond the traditional approach, which arguably is no longer mainstream economics.

The proposed conference will concentrate on finance and the macroeconomics of environmental policies. The range of areas to be addressed include:

• Absence of finance and environmental policies in the current macroeconomics paradigms;
• The development of a macroeconomic analysis, which takes environmental constraints seriously;
• The impact of the operations of the financial sector, financialisation and the financial crisis on the environment and climate change;
• The redesign of the financial sector and the development of institutions and policy arrangements to foster environmentally friendly investments.

The papers will appear in the eleventh volume of the new series of International Papers in Political Economy (IPPE). The series consists of an annual volume with five to eight papers on a single theme. The objective of the IPPE will continue to be the publication of papers dealing with important topics within the broad framework of Political Economy.