2022

Kalmi, Panu; Auvinen, Tommi; Järvenpää, Marko

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, capitalist systems have been struggling with major challenges, such as global warming and carbon dioxide emissions, growing inequality and marginalization of large groups of population, and mass immigration of people from Africa to Europe. The economic system has scarcely recovered from the shock of the 2008 financial crisis that seems to have had long-lasting effect to financial intermediation, banking supervision and monetary policy. At the same time, there are not really that many alternatives to market economies around, when socialist experiments were discredited in the late 20th century. The debate in economic policy has lately focused on the balance between governments and markets: some would like to see more government activism, while others think free markets are the key.