Fiscal and Debt Policies for the Future

The conference continues the theme of previous conferences organised by the Trust in exploring the new thinking in economics, the ‘New Economics’ as the new mainstream. There will now be a focus on fiscal and debt policies, but we will look forward rather than backwards. 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. Given 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).

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

The conference will concentrate on fiscal and debt policies and will be looking at the future rather than merely reviewing policies of the recent and not-so-recent past. Contributors will concentrate on the named countries or areas as shown in the programme, and to a lesser extent on general issues of fiscal policy and debt policies.

The papers will be subsequently published in the International Papers of Political Economy (IPPE).