Analytical Political Economy

1 ANALYTICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Roberto Veneziani

School of Economics and FinanceQueen Mary University of London

Luca Zamparelli

Department of Social and Economic SciencesSapienza University of Rome

This special issue collects 11 surveys on recent developments in Analytical Political Economy. Originally a branch of moral philosophy, political economy emerged as an autonomous discipline during the early stages of the industrial revolution, thanks to the analyses of French physiocrats and British classical political economists. It can be loosely defined as the social science that studies the production and distribution of wealth in a capitalist market economy. Abandoned in favour of the more neutral ‘Economics’, nowadays the term is still used to indicate approaches to economic analysis that lie beyond the boundaries of mainstream, neoclassical analysis rooted in the Walrasian general equilibrium tradition.

Contributions gathered in this volume survey a wide variety of topics and belong to different schools of thought. They are grouped together as they all review recent formal, rigorous economic research – both theoretical and empirical – that rejects at least some of the defining features of neoclassical economics; hence the name Analytical Political Economy.

Despite the heterogeneity, we can use some broad categories to describe the surveys comprised in this special issue. Papers by Reiner Franke and Frank Westerhoff, Corrado Di Guilmi, and Michalis Nikiforos and Gennaro Zezza ...