Describing as symptoms the stagflation, rising protectionism, and the third world dept crisis, this book provides the intellectual and empirical underpinnings for the view that the continuing crisis in the world economy is due to the microeconomic rigidities and public finance management problems of many economies.

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 sets forth both a theory and a comparative empirical analysis of stagflation, that peculiar combination of high unemployment, slow growth, and spurts of high inflation bedeviling the advanced industrial nations during the past fifteen years. The authors first construct a small macroeconomic model that takes full account of aggregate demand and supply forces in the determination of output, employment, and the price level, in both a single-economy and a multi-economy setting. They then apply the model to provide an understanding of comparative performance of industrial countries in the areas of unemployment, inflation, productivity, and investment growth. They argue convincingly that the decay of the major economies during this period resulted from the supply shocks of the 1970s, such as the two major OPEC oil-price increases, and from the consequent policy-induced decrease in demand in response to inflationary pressures. Their analysis differs markedly from similar studies in that it takes specific account of institutional differences in the labor markets of the various economies. This helps to explain in particular the divergent adjustment profiles of the United States and Europe. Bruno and Sachs make several key recommendations for the mix of demand management and incomes policies necessary to combat stagflation in individual countries as well as for the coordination of macroeconomic policies among the major industrial nations.

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

A leading political economist advances a new theory to explain the postwar shifts in the relative economic fortunes and positions of various nations and regions.

Comprising Wage-Fixing (first published 1982), and Demand Management (first published 1983) this two volume reissued set is a vital and stimulating analysis of the causes and consequences of stagflation – a paralysing combination of mass unemployment and rapid inflation which affected a variety of economies across the developed world in the 1970s and early 1980s. Wage-Fixing, written by James Meade, deals primarily with the needed reform of wage-fixing institutions, contrasting the Great Depression of the 1930s with the Great Stagflation of the 1970s. Meanwhile Demand Management is devoted to the design of fiscal, monetary and foreign exchange-rate policies for the control of the money demand for the products of labour. This volume deals with the theory of demand management, feedback control and the creation of a dynamic model of the UK economy. Written in clear and accessible language, this reissue will appeal to the general reader as well as students of economics and professional economists. It should be required reading for all those who wish to learn the lessons of the Great Stagflation of the 1970s to avoid a repetition in the current economic climate.