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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to first develop indicators for how total inequality, measured through the ANalysis Of GIni (ANOGI) framework, is mapped onto each group - i.e. indicators for each group's share of total inequality. Second, to develop indicators for the sensitivity of total inequality and its structure to changes in the composition of the population. Specifically, to develop indicators for how the Gini index and its ANOGI components react to (1) changes in the population-share of each group, (2) migration between groups, (3) changes in group incomes and (4) income transfers between groups. Design/methodology/approach: First, the expressions for these indicators are derived analytically. Following this, the indicators are applied to labour-market data from Brazil, contrasting the results to others available in the literature. Findings: The indicators described above are presented and their characteristics discussed. Empirically, it is illustrated how labour formalisation in Brazil was an inequality-reducing process between 2002 and 2011, contrary to previous incorrect measurements of the phenomenon based on income-source decompositions for Latin American countries. Originality/value: Indicators for how total inequality reacts to changes in group sizes and income were unavailable for the ANOGI framework, which this article provides. The empirical illustration shows how this leads to a reassessment of important inequality dynamics, using the example of labour formalisation in Brazil. Contrary to the existing literature, it is shown how this was a progressive development, with key implications for social and labour-market policy. This framework can be used to assess the impact of diverse processes in the ANOGI methodology.

This article explores the patterns of class inequality and capital accumulation in Brazil, showing the drivers and limits of the decline in inequality that occurred during the Workers’ Party governments. It proposes that minimum wage hikes and greater social security changed the demand pattern and kick-started a cumulative causation process. Growth and redistribution thus reinforced each other for a period, and then spelled their own limits. As growth accelerated in the 2000s, a Gini decomposition indicates that class inequality decreased, but confined to changes between workers—capitalist income and social stratification were preserved. This also endogenously led to a regressive structural change, as low-productivity, labour-intensive services grew and international trade patterns worsened. This created a medium-term dependence on commodity prices for balance-of-trade solvency, and heightened cost-push inflation, which could not be overcome under the limited policy framework in place. The constrained basis for reducing inequality and the regressive structural change underscore that developmental strategies requires broad, multi-dimensional inequality-reducing measures and an encompassing catching-up project.

Despite mounting urgency to mitigate climate change, new coal mines have recently been approved in various countries, including in Southeast Asia and Australia. Adani’s Carmichael coal mine project in the Galilee Basin, Queensland (Australia), was approved in June 2019 after 9 years of political contestation. Counteracting global efforts to decarbonise energy systems, this mine will substantially increase Australia’s per capita CO 2 emissions, which are already among the highest in the world. Australia’s deepening carbon lock-in can be attributed to the essential economic role played by the coal industry, which gives it structural power to dominate political dynamics. Furthermore, tenacious networks among the traditional mass media, mining companies, and their shareholders have reinforced the politico-economic influence of the industry, allowing the mass media to provide a venue for the industry’s outside lobbying strategies as well as ample backing for its discursive legitimisation with pro-coal narratives. To investigate the enduring symbiosis between the coal industry, business interests, the Australian state, and mainstream media, we draw on natural language processing techniques and systematically study discourses about the coal mine in traditional and social media between 2017 and 2020. Our results indicate that while the mine’s approval was aided by the pro-coal narratives of Queensland’s main daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail , collective public sentiment on Twitter has diverged significantly from the newspaper’s stance. The rationale for the mine’s approval, notwithstanding increasing public contestation, lies in the enduring symbiosis between the traditional economic actors and the state; and yet, our results highlight a potential corner of the discursive battlefield favourable for hosting more diverse arguments.

Brazil’s social structure and associated distributive policies during the PT governments did not depart from neoliberalism but rather implemented a poverty-reducing variant of it. Through minimum-wage hikes, conditional cash transfers, legislation driving financial innovation, and the subsidizing of privately provided for-profit services, state power was used to include individuals in ever-expanding formal circuits of commodity production and consumption. Deprivation in multiple dimensions was indeed reduced through these policies, but in the process social mobility came to mean exiting poverty, getting a formal low-skilled job, and accessing credit at lower interest rates to pay for state-subsidized private health and education. A estrutura social do Brasil e as políticas distributivas associadas a ela durante os governos do PT não se afastaram do neoliberalismo, mas sim implementaram uma variante de neoliberalismo redutora da pobreza. Por meio de aumentos do salário mínimo, transferências condicionais de renda, legislação que impulsionava a inovação financeira e o subsídio para serviços privados prestados com fins lucrativos, o poder do Estado foi usado para incluir indivíduos em crescentes circuitos formais de produção e consumo de mercadorias. A privação em múltiplas dimensões foi realmente reduzida por meio dessas políticas, mas neste processo a mobilidade social passou a significar sair da pobreza, conseguir um emprego formal pouco qualificado e obter crédito a taxas de juros mais baixas para pagar pela saúde e educação privadas subsidiadas pelo Estado.

Under favorable external circumstances, the pragmatic political and economic strategy of Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) helped to secure short-term political stability, boosted growth, and supported an unprecedented distribution of income. However, it also meant that the PT had to accommodate to rather than transform the constraints on growth in Brazil and that stability would involve unwieldy political alliances preventing deeper reforms. When it was confronted with deteriorating global economic conditions and increasingly ineffectual economic policies, the PT’s strategy immobilized the party, facilitated the dissolution of its base of support, and expedited its ouster from power. The Brazilian experience suggests that political pragmatism can, within limits, support progressive economic change but that the outcomes depend heavily on external circumstances and the stability of the political coalitions supporting the administration. Em circunstâncias externas favoráveis, a pragmática estratégia política e econômica do Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) ajudou a assegurar a estabilidade política no curto prazo, impulsionou o crescimento e apoiou uma distribuição de renda sem precedentes. No entanto, isso também significou que o PT teve que se acomodar a, em vez de transformar, as restrições ao crescimento no Brasil, e que a estabilidade envolveria alianças políticas comprometedoras, impedindo reformas mais profundas. Quando foi confrontada com a deterioração das condições econômicas globais e apresentando políticas econômicas cada vez mais ineficazes, a estratégia do PT imobilizou o partido, facilitou a dissolução de sua base de apoio e acelerou sua saída do poder. A experiência brasileira sugere que o pragmatismo político pode, dentro de certos limites, apoiar a mudança econômica progressista, mas que os resultados dependem muito das circunstâncias externas e da estabilidade das coalizões políticas que apóiam a administração.

This thesis analyses the achievements and shortcomings of the 'Pink Tide' - the left-of-centre governments elected around the turn of the millennium in Latin America - through a comparative study of Brazil and Argentina. The main argument is that the policies these governments implemented did promote growth and reduce income inequality, but they were incapable of transforming the deeper constraints of the economies: as a result, growth and redistribution led to an accumulation of fragilities that the development strategies could not overcome in the first years of the 2010s. Specifically, higher minimum wages, greater pension coverage and conditional cash transfers, implemented under a permissive international scenario, changed the pattern of demand and initiated a cumulative-causation process that explains key features of growth, income redistribution, and the economies' growing constraints. This cumulative-causation process was based on greater demand for wage-goods and services, the domestic employment of low-skilled labour to produce them, and rising income at the bottom of the distribution. This furthermore constituted a regressive structural change, as the rise of low-productivity service sectors decreased the international competitiveness of the economies, whilst wage gains in these same sectors led to cost-push inflation, endogenously defining the balance-of-payments and the inflation constraints. Therefore, the very success of promoting growth and redistribution along these lines would exhaust itself over a longer period, requiring a different set of policies to raise productivity and attack other causes of inequality - i.e. transitioning to a new pattern of accumulation. The argument is explored empirically with the use of data from national accounts, the composition of exports and imports, the components of inflation, and a class-based decomposition of inequality using household surveys. Comparing the experiences of the two countries, this thesis contributes to the development and inequality literature by indicating that, if reformist development strategies can indeed lead to a propoor, equality-driven growth pattern in the short term, embarking on a sustainable path to development requires a transformative approach to economic, distributive and political structures.

This paper investigates the specificity of a modern capitalist economy as a complex system. This investigation is based on a review of the literature to understand complexity in the physical and biological worlds, to learn the bases of complexity and self-organization, and to locate the tools used to identify and measure them. An economy has different layers and levels of organization, based upon human beings, agents that think, have intentions and change all the time. This paper presents a new model to replicate the workings of a capitalist economy that endogenizes the introduction of innovations and institutional change, and it runs a simulation. The analysis of those results indicate that a modern capitalist economy is a complex system, and that this complex system changes its level of self-organization over time. This finding highlights the peculiarity of a capitalist economy vis-à-vis other complex systems.

What really matters to understand capitalist dynamics in the long run are the countertendencies to the tendential fall of the rate of profit. For researchers in 2015, with all historical and statistical information on capitalist dynamics (not available to Marx, Schumpeter or Bain), capitalism can be seen as an engine for the creation of countertendencies to the fall of the rate of profit. Since classical political economy (Smith, Ricardo, Mill) and Marx the behavior of the rate of profit is a key subject of investigation, that has been also investigated by Schumpeter, evolutionary economist and modern industrial economics. Contemporary debates on the rate of profit would have three advantages vis-à-vis previous rounds of this long-lasting discussion: 1) the MEGA Project has provided more information Marx's works; 2) there are data on the long-term behavior of the rate of profit; 3) there are new tools to investigate the logic of capitalism as a complex system - a dialogue with physics is useful for this analysis. This paper combines different approaches and methods: a short review of the history of economic thought, lessons from economic history, data analysis of the movements of the rate of profit and a simulation model to test our understanding of those movements - a model based on two very simple rules, inspired on an interpretation of Marx's insights about the contradictory interaction between the tendency and the countertendencies to the fall of the rate of profit. These different approaches and methods organize this paper.

This work presents a data-driven framework for early detection of polymer melt instability in industrial injection moulding using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) time-series models. The study uses six months of continuous production data comprising approximately 280,000 injection cycles collected from a fully operational thermoplastic injection line. Because melt behaviour evolves gradually and conventional threshold-based monitoring often fails to capture these transitions, the proposed approach models temporal patterns in torque, pressure, temperature, and rheology to identify drift conditions that precede quality degradation. A physically informed labelling strategy enables supervised learning even with sparse defect annotations by defining volatile zones as short time windows preceding operator-identified non-conforming parts, allowing the model to recognise instability windows minutes before defects emerge. The framework is designed for deployment on standard machine signals without requiring additional sensors, supporting proactive process adjustments, improved stability, and reduced scrap in injection moulding environments. These findings demonstrate the potential of temporal deep-learning models to enhance real-time monitoring and contribute to more robust and adaptive manufacturing operations.