Robert Eisner has made a seminal contribution to the development of macroeconomic analysis in the latter half of the twentieth century. This carefully edited selection of his essays traces the development of economic thought in the wake of the Keynesian revolution and offers a critique of the neoclassical contribution to economic analysis and major macroeconomic policy issues.Professor Eisner is fundamentally concerned with the determinants of employment and growth in a market economy. In this book, he provides a rigorous analysis of the permanent income hypothesis, the multiplier, interest rates, the liquidity trap, consumption and saving, depreciation, unemployment and growth models. He goes on to examine fiscal and monetary policy and the measurement and effects of budget deficits over the post-war period, challenging the view that budget deficits should necessarily be avoided. Professor Eisner also offers new measures of saving, investment and national income and product, which provide new insights into the economic factors affecting current welfare and future growth. Finally, he discusses the importance of full employment and criticises the idea that there is a natural rate of unemployment.

This carefully edited selection of Robert Eisner's essays ties together his authoritative contributions to economic analysis and macroeconomic policy issues, particularly business, investment and tax policy. He offers a trenchant analysis of the fundamental issues of employment, investment and economic welfare in an advanced market economy, offering a challenge to the conventional wisdom on macroeconomic theory and policy.Professor Eisner first examines the determinants of business investment and criticizes neoclassical theories on investment. He goes on to assess the role of tax incentives in investment and finds that tax policy is a flawed way of attempting to encourage investment. He also analyses national income accounting and offers some alternative measurements for calculating national product. Professor Eisner then examines the implications of war for the economy and explores the macroeconomic consequences of disarmament including its possible effects on unemployment. Lastly, he addresses the conflict between economic policy and principle; particularly concerning the environment, insurance and the theory of choice, academic freedom and the elderly.

Studies In Business Expectations And Planning, No. 2. University Of Illinois Bulletin, Volume 53, Number 43, February, 1956.

Studies In Business Expectations And Planning, No. 2. University Of Illinois Bulletin, Volume 53, Number 43, February, 1956.

Conventional measures of national income and product and its components have proved enormously useful as indexes of economic activity and as the empirical foundations of much of macroeconomic analysis. Robert Eisner's The Total Incomes System of Accounts (TISA) brings critical new dimensions to those measures. It offers systematic extensions and expansions in an effort to count all of the output that goes into economic well-being, now and in the future.
Eisner counts nonmarket as well as market production, including vast amounts of services produced by housewives and others in the home, capital formation by government and households as well as business, human and intangible capital invested in education, R&D, and health care, as well as tangible capital. He offers measures of net revaluations of tangible assets, redefines the critical boundaries between final and intermediate outputs, and presents separate sector accounts for business, nonprofit institutions, government, government enterprises and households, which make clear the major contributions of nonbusiness sectors to our total national income.
For these and other extensions, Eisner's TISA offers detailed and comprehensive income and product accounts in current dollars and product accounts in constant dollars for all of the years from 1946 to 1981, along with measures of capital stocks. Estimates of consumption, investment, and production functions with the new data sets, a review of other sets of extended accounts, and a detailed description of sources and methods are also provided.