Comprising a series of unique and informative interviews, this original book focuses on the evolution and current state of the economic literature on the Great Depression. Renowned economists assess the status of the remaining debates, evaluate what economists do and do not know about the economics of the interwar era, and examine the new directions economic research is taking in attempting to better understand this important economic epoch. Every generation of economists tries to understand the Depression, but the interwar generation of economists who lived through it left several issues unresolved. Often scholars from the generation that follows a particular event are the ones who provide fresh and disinterested evaluations of the historical period. We are now at that point in our evaluation of the economics of the interwar era. This book contains interviews with 12 American economists who have made substantial contributions to our understanding of the economics of the Great Depression: Peter Temin, Ben Bernanke, James Hamilton, Robert Lucas, Lee Ohanian, Christina Romer, Barry Eichengreen, Stephen Cecchetti, James Butkiewicz, Michael Bordo, Charles Calomiris and Allan Meltzer. Together and individually, they provide an enlightening account of what we have learned about the Great Depression from the post-World War II generation of economists. This accessible, highly readable book continues and extends the discussion of the Great Depression, appealing to students and scholars of both economics and history.

Bringing together the latest research on the neglected area of second-hand exchange and consumption, this book offers fresh insights into the buying and selling of used goods in western-Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and seeks to re-examine and redefine the relationship between modernity and the second-hand trade.

Popularizing Classical Economics analyzes the theoretical contributions of two British Economists, Henry Brougham and William Ellis, and describes how they popularized economic ideas from the early 1800s through the 1860s. Efforts to spread economic ideas to the lay public have been little studied and few individuals have been recognized for their efforts. This book traces the efforts of Brougham and Ellis to spread classical economic ideas through education of both adults and children.

The book examines the problems that Nixon faced during his presidential term, focusing on economics but the role of politics is also highlighted. The convergence of the gold-dollar crises, oil crises and Watergate imbroglio posed a unique political and economic threat to global stability.

This timely volume provides a second collection of Thomas Humphrey's papers in the area of the history of economic thought and is a long-awaited companion to his critically acclaimed first volume of essays Money, Banking and Inflation. Unlike the first volume, this book does not focus specifically on traditional central bank concerns but addresses key concepts, theories and tools in the area of money, exchange and production which have proved indispensable to the development of economics. Each essay focuses on a prominent theory or tool, examines its essential elements, identifies its origins and traces its development across a succession of economists, problems, controversies and applications. In this way, the book shows how the history of economic thought can be illustrated through the development of tools and concepts rather than through schools of thought and prominent individuals. This outstanding collection will be invaluable to historians of economic thought as well as to students and scholars of methodology, philosophy and monetary and financial economics.

Throughout the ages money was a prerogative of national sovereignty. Currency management was the responsibility of governments.;After World War 2 Bretton Woods provided the framework for intergovernmental monetary cooperation until, in the early seventies, the banking community, using the Eurodollar as an international medium of exchange, forced governments to adopt a regime of floating rates.;The book describes how, in the 1950s, through an improbable chain of events, Soviet-owned banks established in Paris and London spawned the Eurodollar market, which has come to dominate world finance.;The Euromarket has given rise to a new breed of financiers and currency traders who radically changed the nature of international banking. The book relates the collision between sovereign states and stateless economic forces, the struggle for supremacy between the political authorities and the international financial community, their strategies and tactics, their strengths and weaknesses.

The functioning of the gold standard has recently been at the heart of explanations of the interwar depression, particularly as a result of the research of Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin. In The World Economy and National Economies in the Interwar Slump the interaction between the gold standard and the Great Depression in seven countries is examined by an international team of economists and economic historians.

Politicians, social administrators, economists, biographers and historians have shared the belief that the Charity Organisation Society effectively rationalized relief to the Victorian poor and illustrated the advantages of caring voluntarism over impersonal state handouts. Evidence has shown how, in provincial England, these impressions were illusory. The alleged sinful profligacy of other charitable bodies was persistently condemned by the Charity Organisation Society for fostering latent sin amongst the poor. By exposing how they failed in practice to satisfy their own prescriptions for appropriate poor relief, this volume asks whether the members of the Charity Organisation Society were themselves morally equipped to castigate other about sin.

In this volume, continuities and discontinuities between Historical School of Economics and Old Institutional Economics are examined with regard to common research objectives and methods. Similarly, those between these two economic movements and New Institutional Economics as well as new economic sociology are discussed. The following questions functioned as a guideline for the contributing economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers: Can we meaningfully speak of the Historical School of Economics (HSE) as an economic research program? What are the commonalities between the HSE and American old economic institutionalism? Does the HSE represent a part of the "lost anteroom" of New Institutional Economics and new economic sociology? How and why should the HSE matter to how we do economic and social theory today?

This study examines the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the family and questions the extent to which ordinary working men and women shared the "Victorian values" of their middle-class countrymen. The book focuses on the industrial town of Bradford, West Yorkshire in the second half of the 19th century and traces how men and women and their families adapted to the new life brought by the rise of the mill and the city. The book combines social history and quantitive population analysis and is based on a database of 3000 individuals.

This book is a comprehensive reconstruction of the successful attempt by rural professionals in late imperial Russia to engage peasants in a common public sphere. Covers a range of aspects, from personal income and the dynamics of the job market to ideological conflicts and psychological transformation. Based on hundreds of individual life stories.

This book reveals the business history of the Australian Government Clothing Factory as it introduced innovative changes in the production and design of the Australian Army uniform during the twentieth century. While adopting a Schumpeterian interpretation of the concept of innovation, Anneke van Mosseveld traces the driving forces behind innovation and delivers a comprehensive explanation of the resulting changes in the combat uniform. Using an array of archival sources, this book displays details of extensive collaborations between the factory, the Army and scientists in the development of camouflage patterns and military textiles. It uncovers a system of intellectual property management to protect the designs of the uniform, and delivers new insights into the wider economic influences and industry linkages of the Government owned factory.

This book is an introduction to the history of - and current measurement practice of - inflation for the United Kingdom. The authors describe the historical development of inflation measures in a global context, and do so without using formal mathematical language and related jargon that relates only to a few specialist scholars. Although inflation is a widely used and quoted statistic, and despite the important role inflation plays in real people's lives - through pension uprating, train tickets, interest rates and the work of economists - few people understand how it is created. O'Neill, Ralph and Smith mix historical data with a description of practices inside the UK statistical system and abroad, which will aid understanding of how this important economic statistic is produced, and the important and controversial choices that statisticians have made over time.

Tax "justice" has become an increasingly central issue of political debate in many countries, particularly following the cardiac arrest of global financial services in 2008 and the subsequent worldwide slump in trade and production. The evident abuse of tax systems by corporations and rich individuals through tax avoidance schemes and offshore shadow banking is increasingly in the public eye. Above all, the political challenges of recovery and structural reform have raised core issues of burden-sharing and social equity on the agendas of both civil society groups and political elites. Democratic states need tax revenue to fund public goods and combat public "bads" with any degree of legitimacy. The contributions to this book discuss the haphazard evolution of contemporary taxation systems, their contradictory effects in a globalized economy, and the urgency of their reform as a precondition for social justice.

Most macroeconomists agree that we live in the age of microfoundations. The recent worldwide financial crisis may have emboldened critics of this microfoundational orthodoxy, but it remains the dominant view that macroeconomic models must go beyond supply and demand functions to the level of individual decision-making, taking into account the general dynamic environment where agents live. Microfoundations Reconsidered seeks to reassess how the relationship of micro and macroeconomics evolved over time. The highly regarded contributors to the book argue that the standard narrative of microfoundations is likely to be unreliable. They therefore re-examine the history of the relationship of microeconomics and macroeconomics, starting from their emergence as self-consciously distinct fields within economics in the early 1930s. They seek to go beyond the conventional history that is often told and written by practicing economists. From different perspectives they challenge the association of microfoundations with Robert Lucas and rational expectations and offer both a more complete and a deeper reading of the relationship between micro and macroeconomics. Microfoundations Reconsidered is a valuable addition to the macroeconomic research literature. It is ideally suited to students, scholars, researchers, and practitioners with an interest in macro and microeconomics and the history of economics. Contributors: M. De Vroey, P. Garcia Duarte, D.W. Hands, K.D. Hoover, R. Leonard, G.T. Lima, P.E. Mirowski

In Managing the British Economy in the 1960s Sir Alec Cairncross, who was Economic Adviser to HMG in 1961-64 and Head of the newly-created Government Economic Service in 1964-69, tells the inside story of the making of economic policy under four Chancellors of the Exchequer between 1960 and 1970, first under a Conservative government then under a Labour government. He describes how the Treasury dealt with a whole succession of crises and experimented with many new departures of policy over the decade: for example, the efforts to engage in long-term planning, form a workable incomes policy, make use of new taxes for new purposes and enter the European Community. In parallel with the 1990s, the story is dominated by the effort to avoid devaluation followed by the struggle to make it work and keep the pound from sliding further.

"The State Economic Handbook" is a new annual reference book profiling the economy, demography, political environment, and business climates for each of the 50 states. This information, gathered from a variety of sources and clearly presented in one volume, will be of great value to researchers, businesses, news media, and government agencies.

This book considers the role played by co-operative agriculture as a critical economic model which, in Australia, helped build public capital, drive economic development and impact political arrangements. In the case of colonial Western Australia, the story of agricultural co-operation is inseparable from that of the story of Charles Harper. Harper was a self-starting, pioneering frontiersman who became a political, commercial and agricultural leader in the British Empire's most isolated colony during the second half of the Victorian era. He was convinced of the successful economic future of Western Australia but also pragmatic enough to appreciate that the unique challenges facing the colony were only going to be resolved by the application of unorthodox thinking. Using Harper's life as a foil, this book examines Imperial economic thinking in relation to the co-operative form of economic organisation, the development of public capital, and socialism. It uses this discussion to demonstrate the transfer of socialistic ideas from the centre of the Empire to the farthest reaches of the Antipodes where they were used to provide a rhetorical crutch in support of purely pragmatic co-operative establishments.

This book provides a comprehensive knowledge of the Asian crisis from an economic, political and social point of view, and suggests possible scenarios which could take place in the future. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first includes area studies of the main Asian countries during the crisis, beginning with China, Japan and Southeast Asia, followed by South Asia and Central Asia. The second focuses on international variables, including environmental, political, and regional issues.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Tenth Keynes Seminar held by Keynes College at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1991. The purpose of the seminars is to examine for the student and the layman, as well as for the professional economist, the varous aspects of Keynes's life and work.

How did Tunisia succeed in eliminating the threat of militant Islamic fundamentalism? Borowiec examines the actions, which begin with the removal of the senile President Habib Bourguiba in 1987, known in Tunisia as the change. Today, while its next door neighbor, Algeria, is in the midst of an upheaval threatening modernization and a secular government, Tunisia is the only Muslim country to ban polygamy and to introduce state-funded contraception. Borowiec begins by sketching Tunisia's history from the Phoenician era onward. He provides a detailed analysis of the country's Islamic movement, and then examines the efforts of Bourguiba's successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to liberalize the economy, foster a Western orientation, and make education accessible to all. Interviews with leading government officials as well as educators, writers, and average Tunisians puts a human face on a process that may allow Tunisia to make the transition to become a young developed nation at the beginning of the next millennium. This book is important to scholars, researchers, and the general public concerned with events in North Africa and the Arab world.