Inflation

Inflation at a very high rate, or even at a moderate rate for a long period of time, is closely linked to socio-political breakdown. It is not surprising, therefore, that inflation is increasingly viewed in Western countries as a major, if not the major, challenge of the 1980's. This is particularly the case where, as now in so many countries, high inflation rates are associated with below capacity production and rather high unemployment rates, a combination which economic theory has difficulty explaining. Economic theory and political leaderships seem powerless to deal with the situation or at least to come up with a coherent policy which promises to slow down the rate of price increase. In this context, the Scandinavian Institutes for Administrative Research have initiated a long-term, comparative and multi-disciplinary project' to study inflationary processes in their concrete social structural and institutional settings in a number of industrialized countries (thus far, preliminary studies have been initiated in Belgium, England, France, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland).2 The point of departure of the project is the proposition that inflation is the result of institutionalized societal confiicts over the distribution of income and wealth. The state, unable to resolve these conflicts, accommodates them through an expansion of the money supply at a rate in excess of what is necessary to finance the actual production of marketable resources. In this perspective, inflation is a societal phenomenon which can be effectively described and analyzed only by including along with 'economic variables and relationships' political and sociological variables and relationships. In other words, there is no 'economics' as such, but social economics, political economics, economic politics, and, ultimately, social system analysis

Demographic economics · Development economics · Distribution (mathematics · Economics · Income distribution · Inequality · Inflation (cosmology · Labour economics · Microeconomics · Outcome (game theory · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Economic Theory and Policy · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Psychology · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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