LIBRI DI SERGIO CESARATTO

It is not easy to untangle the logic that in the past led to creation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and that is currently guiding the prevailing Eurozone (EZ) policies. Although lacking the right institutions, which can be seen as the ultimate root of its crisis, the ten years of the EMU could be celebrated in 2008 with some fanfare. The EMU even seemed a success, judged from the point of view of imbalanced growth of some peripheral countries that masked its deflationary stance. This imbalanced growth was the proximate cause of the EZ financial crisis. In the paper we shall review the main causes of the EZ financial crisis, interpreted as a balance of payments crisis; the role of the European payment system TARGET 2 in buffering its violent blast; the Classical-Kaleckian rationale of the German malevolent mercantilism; the inadequate EZ policy measures to respond to the crisis; possible alternative solutions. Unfortunately, rather than pushing towards the creation of a different set of European institutions, the prevailing crisis resolution philosophy resembles a late vindication of the original deflationary Euro-bias.

This volume contains the papers presented at the VIII AISPE conference dealing with the relationship between economic theory and economic institutions in historical perspective. The organizing Committee felt this was an area of the history of economics that contained numerous opportunities for new and interesting research in the following areas: the influence of economic ideas or of single economists upon the creation and the governance of specific institutions; the way the actual working and organization of institutions may have influenced the growth of economic theory and knowledge; the economic theory of institutions in historical perspective.

The paper deals with the economic impact of the process of population ageing which is taking place in most of the developed world. It focuses on the impact of this process on the labour market and on the sustainability of pension spending. The demographic developments are occurring simultaneously to the great changes brought about by the process of globalisation. The labour market is affected by both. Using the concept of Industrial Reserve Army (IRA), it is argued that the demographic changes lead to a contraction of the IRA on the one hand, while on the other hand the entrance of the big Asian economies into the world market with their immense labour reserves, leads to an enlargement of the IRA. This might result in weakening the bargaining power of the working class in the developed world. It is finally argued that the viability of public pension systems is mainly a question of income distribution and not of lack of real resources.

The dominant opinion is that we are facing a serious crisis of the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system. The proposal is the progressive substitution of PAYG with a capitalisation system (CS). The paper begins with a reconsideration of the controversy between Samuelson (1958) and Lerner (1959) on the economic interpretation of PAYG. Samuelson based his interpretation of PAYG on an insurance fiction. Lerner argued that PAYG is a a "tax-pay" system. The paper concludes that the actuarial configuration actually taken by PAYG does not depend on any endogenous logic, but on exogeneous social and economic circumstances. The second half of the paper traces the roots of the CS in the marginalist notion of capital as a fund of consumption goods whose utilisation is postponed. The often ill understood difficulties of the so-called "transition" from PAYG to CS are briefly recalled. Even if these difficulties were solved, the CS would meet the keynesian criticism to the neoclassical relation between saving and investment later reinforced by the results of the capital theory controversy. JEL Classification: E1, H55