The transition to sustainability will be difficult. Environmental sustainability entails living within the Earth’s limits, yet the majority of scientific studies indicate a condition of overshoot. For mainstream economists sustainability means perpetuating economic growth. Consequently, environmental and economic sustainability are incompatible in the present institutional context. This paper s...

Western societies have developed into a historically new stage in the evolution of capitalism, one which is characterized by corporations exercising monopolistic power and sustaining demand by advertising through the media. While this theme has been emphasized e.g., by J. A. Schumpeter in Business Cycles; A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, chapter III,...

The food regime concept is a key to unlock not only structured moments and transitions in the history of capitalist food relations, but also the history of capitalism itself. It is not about food per se, but about the relations within which food is produced, and through which capitalism is produced and reproduced. It provides, then, a fruitful perspective on the so-called ‘world food crisis’ of...

Abstract This Special Issue of the Cambridge Journal Economics (CJE) marks and celebrates forty years since publication Keith Cowling’s (1982) seminal Monopoly Capitalism, which synthesised, updated, extended earlier work scholars such as Steindl (1952), Baran Sweezy (1966), Hymer (1970, 1972) Kalecki (1971). Since critical transformative event has been latest (fourth) technological revolution ...

Are IPRs institutions meant to foster innovative activities or conversely secure appropriation and profitability? Taking stock of a long-term empirical evidence on the pharmaceutical sector in US, we can hardly support intended as an innovation rewarding institution. According our analysis, pharma patents have constituted legal barriers protect intellectual monopolies rather than incentive rewa...

Two features of the capitalist world economy in the early years of the new century must be noted at the outset. The first is the continuing, indeed overwhelming, significance of imperialism as the defining feature of global economic relations, with imperialism broadly defined as the struggle by large capital over control over economic territory of various types. The second is that this current ...

21st century capitalism undermines health outcomes in myriad ways. Structural economic changes have had negative effects on medical innovation and public are poorly aligned with social goals. Key features of the contemporary political economy include both monopoly capitalism, based upon stringent intellectual (IP) protection that suppresses competition, Wall Street or financialization, prioriti...

This paper critiques the notion that unfettered inequality is an inevitable consequence of contemporary capitalism, and provides an alternative, new framework for analyzing changes in income and wealth distribution. By thinking of these distributions as the result of changing centrifugal and centripetal economic and political forces, we can identify changes in our economic and social structure ...