Since its first issue in 2004, EJEEP has provided a platform for pluralist debates. The current issue can serve as a prime example of this approach. One way or the other, all the contributions to this issue stress the importance of engaging constructively in controversies.
The Forum starts with an interview with Mario Seccareccia, who highlights the importance of heterodox economics and interdisciplinary research to his academic life. The following note by Martin Watts comments on a recent paper published in this journal on interest-rate policy rules by John Smithin, who has taken the opportunity to reply to the note. The next four papers are all related to discussions on previous conferences of the Forum for Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM), a network with which this journal has close ties. A session of the 2019 conference of the FMM was devoted to a conceptualisation of saving and investment by Carl Christian von Weizsäcker and Hagen Krämer that combined neo-Austrian and post-Keynesian ideas. Eckhard Hein, one of the co-editors of this journal, discusses the book on this topic by von Weizsäcker and Krämer which was published in English in 2021. In their contribution, von Weizsäcker and Krämer reply to Hein’s assessment. The last two articles of this Forum section also go back to an FMM conference. We would like to thank Andrea Terzi for organising not only a lively and very topical session on recent developments in the understanding of the phenomenon of inflation at the last 2020 FMM conference, but also for having induced two of the panellists to contribute to this issue. In his article, Karl Whelan critically discusses the evolution of both theory and empirics since the 1960s and demonstrates the shortcomings of some of the views on them over the decades. Frances Coppola, too, argues from a historical perspective when she highlights the political nature of inflation.
The contributions to the Articles section also aim for productive debates. Emiliano Brancaccio, Andrea Califano and Fabiana De Cristofaro contrast the economic consequences of free movement of capital with restrictions on migration. In their article, Simon Theurl and Dennis Tamesberger apply to Austria the idea of a job guarantee, currently quite popular among the advocates of modern monetary theory. John Marangos analyses in his article to what extent the conditionalities of the Troika (or as they are now known, The Institutions) in the aftermath of the global financial crisis resemble the (old and new) Washington Consensus.
The Editors
