Philip Arestis is University Director of Research, Cambridge Centre for Economics and Public Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, UK; Professor of Economics, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain; Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Utah, US; Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute, New York, US; Visiting Professor, Leeds Business School, University of Leeds, UK; and Professorial Research Associate, Department of Finance and Management Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. He was a member of the Economics and Econometrics RAE panel in 1996 and in 2001, and Quality Assessor for the quality assessment exercise in Economics of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, the Welsh Funding Councils and of the Higher Education Funding Council in England. He was a member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society (RES), Secretary of the RES Standing Conference of Heads of Department in Economics (CHUDE) and an elected member of the Executive Board of the Eastern Economic Association (EEA), USA. He is currently Vice-Chair of the ESRC-funded Macroeconomics, Money and Finance Research Group. He is Chief Academic Adviser to the UK Government Economic Service (GES) on Professional Development in Economics. He has published as sole author or editor, as well as co-author and co-editor, a number of books, contributed in the form of invited chapters to numerous books, produced research reports for research institutes, and has published widely in academic journals.

Prof Jing Chen developed a unified economic theory of life and human societies from the physical laws. A systematic introduction of the theory can be found in his 2005 book, The Physical Foundation of Economics: An Analytical Thermodynamic Theory. This new economic theory consists of three parts: Theory of production, theory of mind and theory of value. He holds a PhD degree in mathematics and is teaching finance at University of Northern British Columbia.
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Prof Korkut Erturk is a professor of economics at the University of Utah where he was the Chair of the Economics Department for six years till 2008. He holds a Bachelor Degree from New York University and a PhD from the New School for Social Research. He has been a consultant to various UN agencies over the years and is the author of numerous articles in academic journals.

Prof Giuseppe Fontana is Professor of Monetary Economics at the University of Leeds (UK); Associate Professor at the Università del Sannio (Italy); Life Member Fellow at Clare Hall (University of Cambridge, UK); and Visiting Research Professor at the Centre for Full Employment and Price Stability (University of Missouri Kansas City, USA), and the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy (University of Cambridge, UK). In 2001 he was awarded the “Special Commendation for Outstanding Teaching” by the Economics Learning and Teaching Support Network, UK; he has recently been awarded the 2008 L.S. Shackle Prize, St Edmunds’ College, University of Cambridge (UK).

He has published in numerous international journals, including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the International Review of Applied Economics, the Journal of Economic Psychology, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Metroeconomica, Revue d’Economie Politique, and the Scottish Journal of Political Economy. He has recently co-edited two books with Palgrave Macmillan and just published the monograph Money, Time, and Uncertainty with Routledge.

Prof Teresa Ghilarducci is the Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor in Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research and the Director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) in New York. She is the author of When I'm 65: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, for Princeton University Press, which investigates the effect of pension losses on older Americans. Her book Labor's Capital: The Economics and Politics of Employer Pensions, MIT Press, won an Association of American Publishers award in 1992. She co-authored Portable Pension Plans for Casual Labor Markets in 1995. Ghilarducci publishes in referred journals and testifies frequently before the U.S. Congress. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Prof Geoff Harcourt was born in Melbourne in 1931 and is a graduate of Melbourne and Cambridge universities. He has taught mainly at Adelaide, where he is Professor Emeritus, and Cambridge, where he is Emeritus Reader in the History of Economic Theory and Emeritus Fellow at Jesus College. He has authored or edited 25 books and published over 230 papers in learned journals and edited volumes. He writes on Post-Keynesian theories and policies, intellectual biography, and the history of economic theory. His latest book, co-authored with Prue Kerr, is an intellectual biography of Joan Robinson.

Prof Eckhard Hein is a Professor of Economics, in particular European Economic Policies, at the Berlin School of Economics. Having studied economics at the University of Bremen and the New School for Social Research he graduated in Bremen in 1990. He was as a Junior Lecturer at the Free University of Berlin, where he completed his doctorate in 1996, and a Senior Lecturer at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, where he obtained his post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) in 2005. In 2001 he joined the Institute for Economic and Social Research (WSI), and in 2005 he became a Senior Researcher at the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) at Hans Boeckler Foundation. He was a visiting professor at the University of Hamburg and at Vienna University of Economics and BA.

Dr John McCombie is Director of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge and Fellow in Economics, Downing College Cambridge. He is currently an editor of Spatial Economic Analysis and he was an editor of Regional Studies. His research interests include the study of national and regional growth disparities, EU regional policy, economic growth and the balance-of-payments constraint, and criticisms of the aggregate production function and conventional measures of the rate of technical progress. In 2007/8, he was a specialist advisor to the House of Lords European Union Sub-committee on Economic and Financial Affairs and International Trade, which examined EU regional policy. He has been an economic consultant to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. His most recent co-edited books are Issues in Finance and Monetary Policy, Palgrave Macmillan (2007), The European Union: Current Problems and Prospects, Palgrave Macmillan (2007), and Economic Growth. New Directions in Theory and Policy Edward Elgar (2007).

Dr David Spencer is Senior Lecturer in Economics at Leeds University Business School, the University of Leeds. His main research interests lie in the areas of work and labour. He is also interested in job quality. He is author of The Political Economy of Work (Routledge), which draws upon and develops his research output to-date. His research interests are focused on the economics of work, the history of economic thought, and political economy. He has written on the nature and development of economic ideas on work, and has engaged with broader debates regarding work, including the labour process debate and theoretical and empirical analyses of the quality of work. Currently, he is involved in a joint research project investigating the changing nature of job quality in Britain. This research was funded by an initial grant from the DTI (now BERR) and has been widely referenced and reported. A central objective of his research is to champion the case for 'political economy'. He is particularly concerned to develop a 'political economy of work'. He seeks to advance beyond the mainstream economic analysis of work and demonstrate the advantages of perspectives from outside mainstream economics. His research is interdisciplinary and aims to build bridges between economics and the other social sciences. He has published extensively across his core interests in leading scholarly journals.

Prof Irene van Staveren is Associate Professor of Feminist Development Economics, Erasmus University, Rotterdamplease see: http://www.iss.nl/iss/profile/AC1222

Prof Engelbert Stockhammer is Professor at the School of Economics, Kingston University. He is research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and member of the coordination committee of the Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policy. His research areas include macroeconomics, applied econometrics, and heterodox economics. He has worked extensively on the determinants of European unemployment, the demand effects of changes in income distribution, and the macroeconomics effects of financialization. He has published numerous articles and the book 'The rise of unemployment in Europe' (Edward Elgar, 2004).