Monetary Regimes of the Twentieth Century

There is a long and distinguished tradition of National Institute economists writing economic histories of modern Britain, with Dow (1998) being the most recent. Britton, a former director of the Institute, made important contributions to our understanding of the post‐war British business cycle, macroeconomic modelling, macroeconomic policy since the 1970s and, most recently, the economics and politics of EMU and of the ambition to regain full employment. His Monetary Regimes of the Twentieth Century is altogether more ambitious: to interweave an economic history of the G5 (USA, UK, Germany, France and Japan) since the classical gold standard with a discursive essay on the development of macroeconomic theory and policy. The objective is to demonstrate that, while theory may potentially be invariant to time and space in its applicability, in practicee, for all of the G5, the nature of the policy regimes, the behaviour of the economies and the beliefs of professional economists all interacted and influenced each other, so that, for any one time and space, there existed a number of such potential regimes. As a consequence, there can be no general theory of macroeconomics which is independent of politics, social institutions and beliefs

Business cycle · Economics · Keynesian economics · Macroeconomics · Monetary policy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Space (punctuation) · Economic Theory and Policy · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US