Reflecting on Economic Questions

This volume includes some of the papers presented at the Inaugural Conference of the Institute for Social and Economic Studies (IESE), which took place on 19 September 2007, in Maputo. The articles contained in this volume were selected from two Conference panels, one on “Macroeconomic themes” and another on “Social and economic development and poverty.” The topics of the Conference, focused on “Challenges for social and economic research in Mozambique,” and those of the panels were broad and dependent on the papers submitted. Therefore, the current selection of papers does not address a common problematic or follow a common approach.The only common element among all the papers is that they all deal with economic issues, although they employ different methodologies and approaches. The sequence of the articles in this collection does not reflect any hierarchy. However, Carlos Pimenta’s article, which is the first in the collection, sets the tone of the debate with an epistemological discussion about the nature of inter-disciplinarity and heterodoxy in social and economic analysis, with an application to the analysis of globalization and development in Africa.
The remaining six articles discuss various macroeconomic issues, and the final article is the only one in this collection that specifically focuses on one sector, transport. Not all the articles are about Mozambique, and those that discuss Mozambique exclusively are not necessarily applicable only to this country. Nonetheless, all of them are relevant to the development debate in Mozambique.

Autores: Aldo Caliar, António Francisco, Aurélio Bucuane, Carlos José Gomes Pimenta, Carlos Leonardo Vicente, Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco, Carlos Oya, Christopher Cramer, John Sender, Luís de Brito, Pauline Dibben, Peter Mulder, Sérgio Chichava