An update of the macroeconometric model of the Polish economy NECMOD

The paper presents an update of the structural macroeconometric model of the Polish economy NECMOD. The updated version of the model is, similarly as its predecessor, used at the National Bank of Poland for forecasting and policy simulation exercises. NECMOD is a hybrid, medium-scale and partially forward-looking quarterly model with its structure rooted in the economic theory. Great emphasis has been put on modelling of the supply side of the economy and mechanisms that introduce high persistency of shocks. The present version of NECMOD was estimated on the data covering a period from 1995 to 2008. Its main advantage, as compared to the previous version, is a more detailed and coherent approach to the modelling of the external sector block. Now, secular changes in the exchange rate and foreign trade dynamics are explained jointly with reference to the taste-for-variety theory. Moreover, the current version of the model better reflects interdependencies between domestic and external sector, i.e. via exchange rate - wealth channel.Polish economy, macroeconometric model, macroeconomic model

The political economy machinery: toward a critical anthropology of development as a contested capitalist practice

This article discusses anthropology’s current mainstream understandings of development and offers a historical materialist alternative. According to these, development was and is either a discourse-backed anti-politics machine that strengthens the power of postcolonial governments or a category of practice, a universal that generates frictions when it clashes with local historical–cultural formations. The approach proposed here reintegrates the analysis of development into the anthropological analysis of capitalism’s uneven and contested histories and practices. A reassessment of World Bank reporting on Lesotho and an analysis of the Bank’s impact on the wider policies of development in postcolonial Mauritius, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent success stories of capitalist development, underlines that development is best understood as a political economy machinery that maintains and amends contested capitalist practices in an encounter with earlier global, national, and local historical–cultural formations