Coordinador

Coordinador

Prof. Dr. Felix Fuders

Professor of Microeconomics, Monetary and Fiscal Policy and Ecological Economics at the Universidad Austral de Chile. Until October 2019 he served as Director of the Economics Institute as well as Director of SPRING Latin America, a master-of-science program in development planning for growing economies jointly offered with Universities in the Philippines, Ghana, Tanzania and Germany. In January 2020 he took over the coordination of the RLC Campus Austral. Currently, he also serves as director of the Economic Policy chapter of the Transdisciplinary Research Center of Socio Ecological Strategies for Forest Conservation (TESES). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Applied Sciences Münster, Germany and visiting researcher at the RLC Campus at University of Bonn, Germany.

In his research Felix combines Microeconomics with Ecological Economics and Monetary Policy in order to propose solutions that aim to improve the livelihood of people. He is co-author of the book “La Evolución Sostenible II – Apuntes para una salida razonable”, which was elaborated in cooperation with researchers form Universidad Mondragón (Spain) and Manfred Max-Neef (Right Livelihood Award 1983) and which was published by the Club of Rome. Felix has authored a series of papers and book chapters on the subject of regional currencies as instrument for a decentralized and prosperous regional development, three of them together with Manfred Max-Neef. Inspired by the work of Manfred Felix designed an endogenous development index that builds on the Human-Scale-Development–approach (Max-Neef et al. 1991) measuring development based on the subjective perception of the satisfaction of fundamental human needs.

Lastly Felix focused his research on studying economic as well as moral-ethic problems inherent in our financial system that he believes to be the most relevant but least recognized reason for market failure. He is convinced that the effect that the money interest rate exerts on money supply and aggregate demand is not fully understood, and that many social, economic and especially ecological problems find their roots in an inadequate monetary policy. In this context, he currently works on explaining why the privatization of natural resources is neither a sustainable nor an allocative efficient solution to what Hardin once called the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, and why we should distinguish between man-made products and pure natural resources concerning the assignation of property rights.

Felix Fuders is the chairman of the Foundation Natural Economic Order, Frankfurt, member of the Association for Sustainability, Berlin and the Network Sustainable Economics, Berlin. He has published in internationally renowned publishing houses such as Palgrave MacMillan, Springer, HART Publishing or Duncker & Humblot and is a regular speaker at congresses and scientific meetings at national and international levels.