The economic policies of the political economy of the Australian patriot and Cambridge economist

Geoff Harcourt has been a thoroughgoing Keynesian committed to the achievement of sustainable (environmental and otherwise) and equitable (nationally and internationally) economic development and growth, and full employment of the available labour force. Achieving such an objective would require, inter alia, the maintenance of a high level of aggregate demand consistent with the full employment of labour, and the provision of sufficient productive capacity to enable that full employment, where sufficient is to be interpreted in terms of quantity, quality and geographical distribution. In this paper the ways in which fiscal policy should be used to sustain high levels of aggregate demand, necessary though not sufficient for full employment, are explored. Geoff has been a long-standing advocate of incomes policies to contain inflation without resorting to demand deflation. We argue that with the failures of inflation targeting, itself based on demand deflation, the need to develop incomes policies should again be on the policy agenda. This is an important ingredient in Geoff Harcourt’s economic policy toolkit.