This research aims to analyze the potential and challenges of a particular branch of the State in promoting a successful sustainable development strategy in Mexico: public banking. To this end, we use Mexico’s progress toward meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as established by the 2030 Agenda, as our frame of reference. Specifically, we study Banobras’ participation in fulfilling SDG-6, the goal that deals with “ensuring availability of water, its sustainable management, and sanitation for all”, particularly those related to universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water (6.1), access to sanitation and hygiene (6.2), and the improvement of water quality through wastewater treatment and pollution reduction (6.3). The text is divided into four parts, the first of which is a discussion based on heterodox economic literature on the importance of multilateral, national, and subnational public banking in achieving the SDGs. In the second part, we analyze indicators related to the fulfillment of SDG-6 in Mexico. In the third section, we study Banobras’ actions in financing SDG 6. Finally, we offer our conclusions.
This is a response to Aspromourgos (2026) regarding the role of the structured Sraffian branch, cost-plus pricing, and the convergence of market prices towards production prices.
Studies revealing the economics discipline’s gender gap—under-representation of women— have focused on mainstream (conventional) women economists holding academic positions, their publications in economics journals, and the editorial positions they perform. There is limited awareness if there is a gender gap for heterodox women economists. To address this lacuna, we examined the authorship rates, editorial positions and reviewers (if available) of 14 heterodox economics journals—comprising 376 journal issues, nearly 3,700 articles, almost 5,900 authors, and 1,100 editorial positions—over the seven-year period of 2017 to 2023. We find persistent under-representation of heterodox women economists akin to their mainstream counterparts. It is our contention that a dynamic complexity of institutional barriers and social structures—mirroring those of mainstream economics—causes the exclusion and marginalisation of the contributions of women heterodox economists and thus the heterodox gender gap. These barriers and structures include men dominating gatekeeper editorial positions, and evaluation bias if author-gender identity is known by those choosing reviewers and men-dominated networks comprising reviewer pools. Exclusion and marginalisation of heterodox women’s scholarship are epistemic injustices with sequential negative consequences for academic appointments, career progression, intellectual recognition and research collaborations. Moreover, this delimitation of knowledge production leads to the published content—research field topics and ideational development—of heterodox journals setting default benchmarks for what ‘counts’ as being heterodox economics. Enduring actions to break perpetuation of the heterodox gender gap also need to be informed by understanding the extent of interlocking editorial positions, the research field topics for rejected women-authored articles, processes and criteria for editorial appointments and reviewer selection, and extent of diversity in reviewer pools. All heterodox journals could immediately, however, transparently acknowledge the need for multiple mechanisms to address the gender gap including dogged vigilance to eliminate and prevent sources of bias.
Drawing on newly discovered material in the Stephen Bodington Papers (Labour History Archive, Manchester) and on the Sraffa Papers, this essay reconstructs the early Marxian reception of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities in the early 1960s. Its archival entry point is the review Bodington published in Società under the pseudonym John Eaton, and the exchanges it prompted with Maurice Dobb, Ronald Meek and Sraffa himself. The reviews by Banfi, Macchioro and Napoleoni are read alongside that exchange, together with Sraffa’s different reactions to each. The essay gives a reading of the documents, leaving the crypticism and contradictions of the episode intact. Sraffa’s unsent rejoinders to Eaton and Napoleoni show him presenting the Standard commodity as the device that makes exact Marx’s approximate passage from values to prices, and document the contrast between his private engagement and his public reticence. My interpretation, in the Conclusion, grounded in my past contributions, is that the elements many interpreters later turned against Marx (the continuity with Ricardo, the statistical reading of the value hypothesis, the rate of surplus value at prices) Sraffa used for Marx’s labour theory of value, in his own interpretation of it. The Standard commodity, a ‘type’ rather than a measure, cannot pave the road from Sraffa to Marx. That road runs through Sraffa’s 1940 note on surplus value, to be read within the long solitary path to the book, and compatible with my interpretation of the labour theory of value as a theory of the constitution of the givens through the extraction of living labour from living labour power over and above necessary labour. An appendix for the first time tentatively discusses Sraffa’s 1962 correspondence with Garegnani, where Sraffa denies that the quantities produced are among the givens of the book: only the methods of production are given; the quantities are an empirical correlate, not a datum.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly diffusing across firms, yet its labor-market consequences remain poorly understood. Existing theories of skill-biased and routine-biased technological change explain how new technologies complement skilled workers or substitute for routine labor, but they only partially account for the emerging evidence on AI. Recent worker-level studies indicate that the earliest employment effects of AI are concentrated among highly educated, entry-level workers in prediction-intensive occupations, materialize primarily through hiring rather than wages, and coexist with limited aggregate employment effects. This paper develops a conceptual framework to interpret these patterns by combining the task-based automation literature with the decision-theoretic view of AI as a technology of cognitive augmentation. The resulting synthesis links the reallocation of tasks to the reorganization of prediction, judgment, and expertise within firms, providing a common framework for studying how AI adoption propagates from organizational change to aggregate labor-market outcomes. This perspective sets the stage for a formal research agenda investigating how AI shapes the labor market and drives macroeconomic trends in employment, wage inequality and economic growth.
