Oriol Vallès Codina
Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
I am an ecological macroeconomist working in the classical tradition of political economy. My research returns to the questions the nineteenth-century classical economists raised and left unresolved — whether the limits to growth are set by scarce natural resources or by social inequality, and how growth, distribution and the environment shape one another — and asks them of an economy now facing climate and geopolitical risk.
I answer them with formal, quantitative tools: stock-flow-consistent macroeconomics, multi-regional input–output analysis, dynamical systems, network theory, statistical inference and machine learning. At the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab I develop the Clean Value Chain Explorer, a platform that maps the inputs, trade and competitiveness of clean technologies worldwide.
- Do climate policies centred in the Global North benefit or harm the Global South? When the carbon-importing core decarbonises, who bears the macroeconomic cost in the carbon-exporting periphery?
- Can states steer a multi-sector economy towards sustainability while keeping employment and prices stable — through price caps, tax-subsidy schemes and industrial policy in strategic sectors?
- How do shocks and investments propagate through production networks, and what in the structure of an input–output system governs how fast the multiplier process converges?
- Are the limits to accumulation set by nature or by distribution? Is degrowth the classical tendency of the rate of profit to fall asserting itself — and does the labour theory of value yield a conservation law of value alongside the irreversibility of production?