International Journal of New Political Economy
Volume:1 Issue: 2, Summer - Autumn 2020

Coronavirus, or Covid-19 appeared in a forestry region in China in December 2019 then spread rapidly in 216 countries. While finalizing this note, July first, 2020, this virus had killed about 508000 and infected about 10400000 as well. The speed of spreading such virus is so rapid, the domain of its effectiveness is so huge, and the impacts of that are so broad, that this work can only point out to the main topics of this unprecedented episode. In other words, mentioning the details and the magnitudes of this phenomenon is not affordable in this short article. Consequently, this work is going to highlight main dimensions, key impacts, some routes, and few remedies related to such a bizarre and weird event.

My aim in this paper is to present a series of vignettes, snapshots if you will, that when I am finished will give us perhaps a little bit better idea of the Hayek-Mises relationship. Some of these stories are well known, others less so, and some that are well known might need to be modified. After I present these stories I am hopeful that those in the audience who may have others will be encouraged to share them, and when necessary to correct my own. I should add that some of these come from research that the Viennese historian of economic thought Hansjoerg Klausinger and I have done for a planned biography of Hayek. Beginning at the beginning, Hayek has told us in his reminiscences that though he had once tried going to one of Mises’ lectures at the University of Vienna when he was a student there from 1918 to 1921, he found him not to his taste (Hayek 1994, p. 68). After finishing his first degree he went in search of a job, and found himself standing in fall 1921 before Mises at the Abrechnungsamt (which I shall henceforth refer to, given my hatcheting of the German language, as the Office of Accounts), a temporary governmental office charged with clearing war debts.

Social history is the mother of the social sciences. Economic history and the history of political economy are useful and respectable academic pursuits in their own right, just as history itself is one of the most important fields of learning and scholarship in every civilized country. Not every economist, sociologist or political scientist has to be a historian, but their work is meaningful, realistic and relevant to the extent that it is conducted against the appropriate social background and reality, which history, its logic and its sociology can provide, on the condition that these too are constructed on a realistic and relevant plain. This does not mean that every economist must be an economic historian or a sociologist. It means that economic studies, whether theoretical or empirical, whether as an academic pursuit or as a policy prescription, must have in the background the history and social framework to which they refer. So, the rules of social and economic behavior, public and private economic decision making can be, and often are, very different from the assumptions of models which are based on theories of European society and economy, irrespective of the ideology or paradigm to which they refer.

This paper argues that the goal of poverty alleviation and a decent standard of living is not attainable in Muslim communities unless the economic and social services of the Islamic philanthropic institutes are integrated and a full-fledged collaboration would be resumed among the managing boards. The first part of the paper will examine why Muslims participate in altruistic giving and what are the alternative forms of contributions that are provided by Shariah of Islam. The second part will review the potential and actual contributions of the said Islamic benevolent giving for poverty eradication and well-being of low and vulnerable income families. The third and concluding part will discuss the conditions, methods and mechanism for integration and coordination among Islamic philanthropic institutes for provision of affordable housing.

Influenced mainly from a sociology of deviance perspective, the article explores perceptions and attitudes towards immigrants in Bulgaria in the context of the intensified migration processes to Europe. Drawing on data from a set of representative surveys, the article aims to reconstruct the social distance specifics, fears and threat perceptions, radicalization and victimization associated with immigrants and to study the way they are affected by spatial and psychological proximity and personal relevance.

Energy has constantly been one of the most important economic issues of each country. Production and, consumption of energy have constantly been playing a significant role in various aspects of economy. Industry is a major part and consumer of energy, and of course industrialized countries have inviolate the great shareholder in energy consumption in the world. Awareness of the consumption of energy in industry has many applications. This is due to the fact that factors dependent on the consumption of energy are somehow well- known and hence decision making about them would be done easier. Production is a function of some factors, which definitely includes energy as one of its factors. Therefore, a Vector Auto regressive (VAR) procedure is used. These components are natural gas, oil products, coal, gasoline and their prices. The time period of this study is the annual data of 1967-2017, the structure of applied variables in equations is separately investigated. There is a weak relationship between industry value added and price and energy consumption. Energy consumption growth does not have proportional relationship with production growth. The low price of energy is one reason for energy deprivation in Iran. Calculated price elasticity indicates that relationship between price and industry value added could be in a negative level.

This paper examines the long run and short run relationship between population, GDP growth and capital stock in OIC countries during 1980 to 2016. Using panel Cointegration and causality techniques, the results show that there is the long run relationship, when per capita income and per capita capital stock are dependent variables. In the long run the impact of population on economic growth is positive and statistically significant. Also, the bidirectional relationship between Population and economic growth in the short-run has been accepted for OIC countries. Theoretically the population growth is a national savings that create additional capacity in the economy. Given these points, from a policy perspective, it can be argued that population growth is a stimulus for economic growth and not an obstacle to it. Therefore, rather pessimistic view of the population and its control, economic policymakers must reduce important economic barriers through a structures reform, increasing management capability as well as implementing proper monetary and fiscal policies.

Inflation targeting is a prevalent economic policy that is applied increasingly by countries. In addition, the effect of inflation targeting on macroeconomic variables is also been considered recently which mostly uses econometric models. One of the most important issues in this regard is that evaluating the effectiveness of inflation targeting usually confronted with bias in econometric models. In order to solve this problem, it is suggested the Propensity Score Matching Method (PSM) which has been used recently by economists. In this paper, it is tried to investigate the impact of inflation targeting on direct taxes and its components in a selected collection of two groups of oil importer and exporter countries by Propensity Score Matching Method (PSM) during 1990- 2016 years. The results show that adopting inflation targeting framework has a positive and significant effect on tax revenue in oil importer countries; whereas the impact of this policy in oil exporter countries is statistically insignificant and its direction is also ambiguous.

Taxation of petroleum products is one of the value-added tax (VAT) which imposed on seven provinces in Iran. Taxation of petroleum products is because oil and petrochemical companies in these provinces generate revenues from the sale of oil, oil extraction, and petrochemical products. This study seeks to provide a comparison between the impact of taxation on petroleum products and direct taxation on economic growths in the mentioned provinces. For this reason, statistics during 2008-2016 together with Panel VAR method are used. Results for impulse-response functions and variance decomposition show that the major origin of the most changes in economic growth rate could traced back to the government expenditure, as well as taxation of petroleum products during the defined period. It also can realize that taxation of petroleum products in the above provinces has a greater impact than direct taxation on economic growth rate.

Public choice theorists evaluate the government’s behavior within the framework of political business cycles. Considering the significant role of macroeconomic factors such as inflation and unemployment in voters’ behavior, governments with politically beneficial behaviors seek to increase voter satisfaction and the probability of their re-election through adopting economic policies. Thus, the long-term welfare of the current and future generations will be sacrificed to governments' short-term beneficial policies. This study analyzed the political business cycles within the framework of the Nordhaus (1975) approach by using the optimal control method and maximizing the social voting function. The results indicated that the election-winning government increases the unemployment rate to control inflation. However, by approaching the next election period, the elected government reduces the unemployment rate close to the point corresponding to short-term policy, resulting in increasing the inflation again. In the long-term, the policymaker selects a policy with lower unemployment and higher inflation with respect to the optimal point.

Islamic revolution of Iran (1979) was accomplished by notably various contributors, including law income groups. Suburbanites and squatters are their main representatives in Tehran. They were mostly immigrants to the capital in 1960s and 1970s that chose margins due to Improving communication routes and implementation of settlement limitation in main part of Tehran, however some of them merged to the poorest neighborhoods. Like every other group in those years, the urban poor in Tehran were incited by their own situation and conditions and were considering their own demands and motives on which this research focuses. We make a model according to retroductive methodological strategy in a reciprocal relation with data that is gathered through exploring newspapers, unsolicited documents and three supplementary interviews with a reputable merchant of Bazar, an active clergyman and a main member of Islamic charities. Researchers conclude that Tehran suburbanites and squatters were incited by economic dissatisfactions, ties with Islamic and revolutionary charities, religiosity and spread of Islamic Ideology. They eventually were brought into political tensions by leftists’ violent way of fight and great greeting ceremony for Ayatollah Khomeini. Finally we provide some suggestions to other researchers.

The entire planet lives in a global crisis. It started as a local health problem in a Chinese city and became rapidly a world pandemic. Yet, pandemics are far from new throughout history. Bubonic Plague (known as Black Death) also arrived from China and decimated half of Europe’s population from 1346 to 1351. Cholera pandemics occurred seven times from 1817 to 1961. Spanish Flu of 1918 killed almost 40 mn people within three years, twice as much as the First World War. AID Syndrome started in 1982 and killed some 1 m people only in 2018, according to the WHO. More recently, in 2014 the Ebola virus disease terrified the world with a fatality rate of 50%. What is new about the actual health crisis is not its duration, neither the number of cases, nor the number of deaths. Coronavirus hits 213 countries (20 more than the UN member states) creating socio-economic problems to all of them, to a different extent. Overall, the negative impact of corona-crisis refer both to the supply side (due to the broken international chains of value) and the demand side (due to the income losses of all those who lost their jobs or incomes).