Political economy is a branch of political science and economics studying economic systems and their governance by political systems. Widely studied phenomena within the discipline are systems such as labour markets and financial markets, as well as phenomena such as growth, distribution, inequality, and trade, and how these are shaped by institutions, laws, and government policy. Originating in the 18th century, it is the precursor to the modern discipline of economics. Political economy in its modern form is considered an interdisciplinary field, drawing on theory from both political science and modern economics.
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American New Keynesian economist, a public policy analyst, political activist, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He is also a former member and chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support for the Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists, and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Viktor Mihály Orbán is a Hungarian lawyer and politician who has been Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, previously holding the office from 1998 to 2002. He has also led the Fidesz political party since 2003, and previously from 1993 to 2000. He was re-elected as prime minister in 2014, 2018, and 2022. On 29 November 2020, he became the country's longest-serving prime minister.
Stuart Kingsley Holland is a British economist and former politician. As a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party, Holland represented the Vauxhall constituency in Lambeth, London, from 1979 to 1989, when he resigned his seat to take up a post at the European University Institute in Florence.
Karl Paul Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.
Corvinus University of Budapest is a private research university in Budapest, Hungary. The university currently has an enrolment of approximately 9,600 students, with a primary focus on business administration, economics, and social sciences, operating in Budapest and Székesfehérvár since 1948. Corvinus University accepts students at six faculties and offer courses leading to degrees at the bachelor, master and doctoral level in specialisations taught in Hungarian, English, French or German.
Economic nationalism or nationalist economics is an ideology that prioritizes state intervention in the economy, including policies like domestic control and the use of tariffs and restrictions on labor, goods, and capital movement. The core belief of economic nationalism is that the economy should serve nationalist goals. As a prominent modern ideology, economic nationalism stands in contrast to economic liberalism and economic socialism.
János Kornai was a Hungarian economist noted for his analysis and criticism of the command economies of Eastern European communist states. He also covered macroeconomic aspects in countries undergoing post-Soviet transition. He was emeritus professor at both Harvard University and Corvinus University of Budapest. Kornai was known to have coined the term shortage economy to reflect perpetual shortages of goods in the centrally-planned command economies of the Eastern Bloc.
Economic integration is the unification of economic policies between different states, through the partial or full abolition of tariff and non-tariff restrictions on trade.
Perry G. Mehrling is professor of economics at Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He was professor of economics at Barnard College in New York City for 30 years. He specializes in the study of financial theory within the history of economics.
Takis Fotopoulos is a Greek political philosopher, economist and writer who founded the Inclusive Democracy movement, aiming at a synthesis of classical democracy with libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He is an academic, and has written many books and over 900 articles. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy and is the author of Towards An Inclusive Democracy (1997) in which the foundations of the Inclusive Democracy project were set. His latest book is The New World Order in Action: Volume 1: Globalization, the Brexit Revolution and the "Left"- Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations. Fotopoulos is Greek and lives in London.
The Hungarian People's Republic was a one-party socialist state from 20 August 1949 to 23 October 1989. It was governed by the Hungarian Working People's Party from June 12th, 1948 until being reformed into the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, both parties being under the influence of the Soviet Union. Pursuant to the 1944 Moscow Conference, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had agreed that after the war Hungary was to be included in the Soviet sphere of influence. The HPR remained in existence until 1989, when opposition forces brought the end of communism in Hungary.
Goulash Communism, also known as refrigerator communism, Kádárism or the Hungarian Thaw, is the variety of state socialism in the Hungarian People's Republic following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. During János Kádár's period of leadership, the Hungarian People's Republic implemented policies with the goal to create a high standard of living for the people of Hungary coupled with economic reforms. These reforms fostered a sense of well-being and relative cultural freedom in Hungary, giving it the reputation of being "the happiest barracks" of the Eastern Bloc during the 1960s to the 1970s. With elements of regulated market economics as well as an improved human rights record, it represented a quiet reform and deviation from the Stalinist principles applied to Hungary in the previous decade.
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
Georgios Alogoskoufis is a professor of economics at the Athens University of Economics and Business since 1990. He was a member of the Hellenic Parliament from September 1996 till October 2009 and served as Greece's Minister of Economy and Finance from March 2004 till January 2009.
Zoltan J. Acs is an American economist. He is Professor of Management at The London School of Economics (LSE), and a professor at George Mason University, where he teaches in the Schar School of Policy and Government and is the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy. He is also a visiting professor at Imperial College Business School in London and affiliated with the University of Pecs in Hungary. He is co-editor and founder of Small Business Economics.
Giorgos Papakonstantínou, is a Greek economist and politician and former Minister for the Environment, Energy and Climate Change of Greece and former Minister for Finance. Following expulsion from his party PASOK, he received a one-year suspended sentence for misdemeanours over his handling of the infamous “Lagarde list”. The court found him guilty of removing the names of three relatives of about 2,000 Greeks with money overseas. He is currently a professor at the European University Institute.
Ioannis Georgiou "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician. Since 2018, he has been Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016. Previously, he was a member of Syriza and was Greece's Minister of Finance between January 2015 and July 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during the 2009-2018 Greek government-debt crisis.
Richard E. Baldwin is a professor of international economics at the IMD Business School. He is Editor-in-Chief of VoxEU, which he founded in June 2007, and was President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) from 2014 to 2018. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was twice elected as a Member of the Council of the European Economic Association. Baldwin has been called "one of the most important thinkers in this era of global disruption".
Loukas Tsoukalis is a Greek political economist and European public intellectual with a long experience in EU affairs. He is a Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po, Emeritus Professor at the University of Athens, and President of the Board of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP).
