Category: Labor / Economics

Dr Thomas Palley reflects on the debate over tenure following The New School’s dismissal of several tenured professors amid financial distress and institutional reorganization. He argues that the controversy should prompt a broader examination of how higher education is governed. Palley proposes replacing tenure with academic unions, strengthening faculty governance, limiting administrator pay, and requiring…

Empirical inquiry has its place in economics, but economists must not let the pursuit of causality displace the pursuit of explanation.

Skand Priya examines why sections of the working class support right-wing authoritarian regimes despite their pro-capitalist policies. Drawing on Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, Imperial Japan and Pinochet’s Chile, the article argues that authoritarian regimes reorganise rather than simply suppress working classes. They combine selective material benefits with a psychological wage of belonging, dignity…

Germany’s statutory minimum wage was introduced only in 2015, but legal protections have not prevented widespread wage theft. The article examines how employers evade minimum-wage obligations through unpaid overtime, off-the-clock work, inaccurate time records, illegal deductions, worker misclassification and other practices. Drawing on German trade union estimates, it reports that workers may have lost up…

Tension between American control and Venezuelan sovereignty lies at the heart of a broader geopolitical struggle over who will shape the country’s economic and strategic future.

Bolivia’s new era has also produced a powerful image: the exile of Morales in the Chapare, the subtropical region of the Cochabamba Department known for its coca leaf crops. Coca-growing peasant unions, which function like militias, are protecting the former president from arrest stemming from several ongoing judicial proceedings—including one involving the alleged abuse of…

So far in 2026, Cuba has received a single shipment of oil: some 100,000 metric tons of crude donated by Russia—and nothing else.

Brazil holds around 23 percent of the world’s known rare-earth reserves but produces only a small share and lacks the industrial capacity to process these minerals into high-value products. As foreign companies move to secure Brazilian deposits, the country risks repeating a familiar pattern of exporting raw materials while retaining environmental costs and limited economic…

Bolivia’s persistent fuel shortages are exposing the limits of an economy built on hydrocarbon extraction. Long queues for gasoline, diesel and propane are affecting households, farmers and rural communities, while preferential access for agro-industrial businesses highlights unequal distribution. At the center of the debate is the Tariquía Flora and Fauna Reserve, where the government is…

Why should 5, 7 or 9 per cent growth ultimately matter unless sustained growth gives us more productive jobs, greater investment in education and health, rising real incomes, greater household savings and asset ownership, better public services, declining vulnerability and a progressively wider distribution of economic security?