In the 1930s, when the Great Depression hit, Michal Kalecki and John Maynard Keynes respectively put forward their own theories of effective demand. This article starts from Michal Kalecki to compare the two economists, explore their disputes, and examine the similarities and differences. Regarding Kalecki and Keynes, due to different perspectives in existing literature, the understanding is naturally different. Kalecki’s followers emphasize more on “Kalecki’s criticism of Keynes”, thereby highlighting Kalecki’s superiority. However, this is only one side of the coin; the other side is “Keynes’ criticism of Kalecki”. Ignoring the latter aspect may lead researchers to have a biased evaluation of Kalecki. Kalecki and Keynes have differences in theoretical construction, argumentation methods, and ideology. Nevertheless, their relationship should be complementary rather than competitive. For researchers, what is truly important is how to integrate Kalecki and Keynes to enable economic theory analysis to have a more complete picture. This is the common intellectual legacy left by the two economists to future generations.

During several decades and until the end of the 1990s, the theory of structural economic dynamics has been absent in the field of so-called mainstream economic analysis. The literature included only either empirically oriented contributions or developments that were related to so-called critical theoretical approaches of structural change. At the end of the twentieth century, however, mainstream economic theorists changed this situation and began to investigate the field of structural dynamics, often using the Solovian theory of economic growth. During the last two decades, they contributed to change substantially the state of the theory of structural change. This contribution first provides an assessment of the advances realized by these theorists. It then confronts these advances with the so-called alternative or critical theoretical approaches of structural dynamics—namely, Luigi Pasinetti's contribution and “evolutionary” approaches—in order to provide a more complete picture of structural dynamics in the short and the long run.

Michal Kalecki is an “isolated” economist. On the one hand, isolation makes Kalecki's economic thought has its unique value, on the other hand, isolation makes Kalecki's economic thought not easy to be accepted by modern economics. Based on Jan Toporowski's two-volume biography of Michal Kalecki, this paper hopes to present a more complete Michal Kalecki. This paper focuses on Kalecki's 1933 pamphlet and 1939 collection, reflecting on Kalecki's argumentative methods while pointing out his contributions, and further examining Kalecki's argumentative methods through Keynes' criticism. This paper gives a general review of Kalecki and briefly discusses how to view Kalecki today. Kalecki's economic thought has its unique value, but it needs to be viewed objectively and comparatively. Kalecki needs to strengthen his links with modern mainstream economics and other schools of economics, to enrich the missing elements of his research, and to relax the relatively strict assumptions.

This article examines the enduring debate sparked by Asimakopoulos′ 1983 paper Kalecki and Keynes on finance, investment and saving in post-Keynesian economic theory during the 1980s. The origins of this debate can be traced back to the liquidity preference-loanable funds controversy of the 1930s, wherein Keynes explicitly argued that finance is independent of saving, countering the view that interest rates are determined by credit supply and demand. While operating within different theoretical frameworks, Kalecki endorsed Keynes′s position. Nearly five decades later, Asimakopoulos revisited Keynes′s and Kalecki′s perspectives on investment finance, reasserting the connection between finance and saving. Post-Keynesian economists at the time emphasized that the crux of the matter lay not in saving but in liquidity. Although Asimakopoulos erroneously centered on saving over liquidity and overlooked the banking system′s role, his criticism regarding long-term interest rate dynamics was insightful. Asimakopoulos challenged the universal applicability of Keynes′s and Kalecki′s intuitions on interest rates, deeming them special cases building on Kaldor′s work. Subsequent to the 1980s debates, post-Keynesians gained a clearer understanding of the three interrelated components underlying Keynes′s and Kalecki′s investment finance analyses: the investment multiplier process, liquidity preferences, and endogenous money supply. Building on this, they further reflected on the robustness of Keynes′s and Kalecki′s conclusions which is the pivotal contribution of Asimakopoulos′s paper. This historical discussion informs current perspectives and debates surrounding the Chinese economy. Although Keynes′s and Kalecki′s Depression-era insights was somewhat oversimplified, reflecting on the views of these two economists is still relevant for comprehending China′s contemporary economic landscape.