Call for Papers

International Sessions of the 71st Annual Conference of the Japan Society of Political Economy (JSPE)

General Theme of the Annual Conference: “How to Understand Contemporary Price Fluctuations: Their Structure, Reality, and Impact”

     The Japan Society of Political Economy celebrated its 60th anniversary four years ago. Over the six decades, the JSPE has endeavored to expand the scope of explorations, from the basic theory of capitalism to the analysis of contemporary capitalism. The JSPE has committed to a critical standpoint against capitalism and mainstream economics and directed its theoretical investigations toward elucidating various issues of capitalism. Nowadays, Marxian economics and the other schools in the heterodox political economy attempt to exert ever more influence in building analytical frameworks to address real-world issues of contemporary capitalism, such as the financial crisis, globalization, and the analysis of class and inequality. 

     After the outbreaking of the pandemic COVID-19 and in particular, since 2021, a general increase in prices has been observed around the world: the revival of a high inflation problem after a long period of progressed economic globalization and the low inflation prevailed in the advanced countries since the 1990s. Even Japan cannot be exceptional, though it has been recognized as being suffered from long stagnation and deflation during the recent 30 years. Indeed, the consumer price index grew by 4.0% in December 2022, which is the highest growth since the 2nd oil crisis. As these trends in prices are significant and had never been observed before in nearly half a century, they have attracted great attention from both mainstream and heterodox economists.

     It was also over the half-century that the great transformation of the capitalist economy has been observed, such as the regime shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism; globalization; and informatization and financialization of capitalism. Nowadays, the worldwide supply chain conducted and operated by multinational corporations becomes dominant in major sectors of production, which has been supported by the significant development of information and communication technologies, including the Internet. Moreover, the economic transactions in financial sectors are much more significant and expand faster than those in the real economy, which leads to economic crises frequently occurring due to financial shocks. Correspondingly, new idiosyncratic policy schemes, such as Quantitative Easing and expansionary physical policy, have been regularly applied to rescue such crises and even the recent shocks of the global pandemic of COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

     Given this recent transformation of the capitalist economy, one of our goals in the 71st Annual Conference of JSPE is to promote the analysis of the present worldwide high inflation from the perspective of political economy, which would encourage a comprehensive understanding of the present regime of the capitalist economy. We aim to deepen discussions about the price fluctuations in the contemporary capitalist economy, in particular, regarding the real features as well as the structural mechanism of these price movements, and their impacts on citizens' lives, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.