Political Aspects of ‘Buffer Stock’ Employment: A Reconsideration

Peter Kriesler, Joseph Halevi () and Mark Setterfield
Additional contact information
Joseph Halevi: International University College of Turin

No 2009, Working Papers from New School for Social Research, Department of Economics

Abstract: Advocates of Job Guarantee (JG) or Employer of Last Resort (ELR) schemes have suggested that if the state provides ‘buffer stock’ employment to workers displaced from private employment, then full employment can be maintained over the course of the business cycle. Kalecki was sceptical about the prospects for maintaining full employment in capitalist economies, without fundamental institutional change that would alleviate certain political constraints on the maintenance of full employment. We argue that in and of themselves, JG/ELR schemes do not create the fundamental institutional change required to address Kalecki’s concerns and so ensure that full employment becomes achievable as a permanent state.

Keywords: Employer of last resort; job guarantee; buffer stock employment; political aspects of full employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E12 E61 J64 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/econ/2020/NSSR_WP_092020.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:new:wpaper:2009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from New School for Social Research, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Setterfield ().