The Theory Of Economic Policy

Concepts -- Issues -- Interdependence -- Fiscal policy -- Monetary policy -- Financial stability -- International financial integration and foreign-exchange policy -- Tax policy -- Growth policies

The Making of Economic Policy begins by observing that most countries' trade policies are so blatantly contrary to all the prescriptions of the economist that there is no way to understand this discrepancy except by delving into the politics. The same is true for many other dimensions of economic policy. Avinash Dixit looks for an improved understanding of the politics of economic policy-making from a transaction cost perspective. Such costs of planning, implementing, and monitoring an exchange have proved critical to explaining many phenomena in industrial organization. Dixit discusses the variety of similar transaction costs encountered in the political process of making economic policy and how these costs affect the operation of different institutions and policies. Dixit organizes a burgeoning body of research in political economy in this framework. He uses U.S. fiscal policy and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as two examples that illustrate the framework, and show how policy often deviates from the economist's ideal of efficiency. The approach reveals, however, that some seemingly inefficient practices are quite creditable attempts to cope with transaction costs such as opportunism and asymmetric information. Copublished with the Center for Economic Studies and the Ifo Institute

Drawing on their experience as government insiders, the authors of this book show how economic policy is shaped at the highest levels of government. They reveal the interconnections between economic, social and international policy, covering such issues as the advocacy system.

Uno, who proposes to study capitalism at three distinct levels of abstraction, insists that there should be a mid-range theory of its developmental stages (dankaïron) between the pure theory of capital, which must be couched in the form of Hegelian dialectic (genriron), and capitalist histories which must be recounted with full empirical detail. In this book he illustrates how he would himself expose that mid-range theory, by summarising the three types of economic policy that the bourgeois state successively adopted: mercantilism, liberalism and imperialism. He moreover indicates that economics can relate and cross-fertilise with other branches of social science, such as law and politics, only at this level of abstraction, thus achieving an adequate theory of the bourgeois state. Nowhere else is Marx’s insight into ‘the state as the epitome of bourgeois society’ more vividly endorsed than in this book. First published in Japanese as Keizai-Seisakuron by Kobundo, Ltd. in 1936. The current work is a translation of the enlarged and revised edition of 1971.

Economic Policy and the Great Stagflation discusses the national economic policy and economics as a policy-oriented science. This book summarizes what economists do and do not know about the inflation and recession that affected the U.S. economy during the years of the Great Stagflation in the mid-1970s. The topics discussed include the basic concepts of stagflation, turbulent economic history of 1971-1976, anatomy of the great recession and inflation, and legacy of the Great Stagflation. The relation of wage-price controls, fiscal policy, and monetary policy to the Great Stagflation is also elaborated. This publication is beneficial to economists and students researching on the history of the Great Stagflation and policy errors of the 1970s.

This book is an English language version of Politique économique, previously published in French by De Boeck & Larcier. It fills a major gap by presenting stylized facts and key questions for modern economic policy together with the essential theoretical tools in major policy fields: fiscal policy, monetary policy, international finance, tax policy, and long-term growth. The causes and lessons of the financial crisis are addressed comprehensively.

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