These original contributions by some of today's leading macroeconomists and political economists explore a broad spectrum of social, political, and technological variables that encourage or impede economic growth. What political and economic factors stimulate growth and make an economy expand? These original contributions by some of today's leading macroeconomists and political economists explore a broad spectrum of social, political, and technological variables that encourage or impede economic growth. Topics range from economic reform and price flexibility to the economic effects of political coups and include both theoretical analysis and empirical results.During the past decade, economists have seen important new developments linking growth and business cycles to government policy. These contributions provide a clear understanding of these processes and their effect in shaping economic policy. They look at the welfare side of economics and offer strong economic models to explain the connection between social policies and economic growth. For example, John Londregan and Keith Poole address the economic effects of political coups, Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini explore the question of whether inequality is harmful for growth, and Stephen Parente and Edward Prescott look at the role of technology adoption in stimulating growth.The essays cover a wide range of approaches. Several focus on the interaction between growth and the choice of policy, where policy reacts to economic and distributional considerations through a majority rule process. Others take the policy as given and focus on the empirical estimation of the speed of convergence of rates of growth across states and regions and the importance of externalities and knowledge spillovers for rates of growth. Essays about the business cycle fall into two broad categories. One, arising from the new political economy tradition, examines the effects of elections and price decontrols on the business cycle. The other explores the implications of optimal economic policies in a representative agent framework for the cyclical behavior of the economy.

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by periods of vigorous economic growth and periods of slow or even negative growth. This book draws on the classical political economy approach to consider both economic cycles and economic growth and draw conclusions about the inherent instability of the modern economy. The book shows that the work of the old classical economists (Smith and Ricardo) and Marx is theoretically sound and capable of providing answers to both growth and cycles. It also demonstrates the potential and natural integration of growth and cycles in a single model. The microeconomic foundation of this model is the labor theory of value, which continues with the General Law of Capital Accumulation, the Law of the Falling Rate of Profit, and the movement of the Industrial Reserve Army of Labour. Finally, a dynamic model of growth-cum-cycles is constructed consisting of the evolution and interaction of five key variables, namely, the rate of profit, the propensity to invest in fixed capital, technological change, the reserve army of labour, and the rate of capital devaluation. The analysis demonstrates that economic growth and cycles are not disconnected from each other, as they have been treated in the literature, but rather interdependent aspects of the same evolutionary process of a capitalist economy. This book will interest readers in the history of economic thought, economic growth and development, macroeconomics, and political economy.

This book examines how electoral laws, the timing of election, the ideological orientation of governments, and the nature of competition between political parties influence unemployment, economic growth, inflation, and monetary and fiscal policy. The book presents both a thorough overview of the theoretical literature and a vast amount of empirical evidence.

This volume gathers together key new contributions on the subject of the relationship, both empirical and theoretical, between economic oscillations, growth and structural change. Employing a sophisticated level of mathematical modelling, the collection contains articles from, amongst others, William Baumol, Katsuhito Iwai and William Brock.

These original contributions by some of today's leading macroeconomists and political economists explore a broad spectrum of social, political, and technological variables that encourage or impede economic growth.

Business Cycles in Economic Thought underlines how, over the time span of two centuries, economic thought interacted with cycles in a continuous renewal of theories and rethinking of policies, whilst economic actions embedded themselves into past economic thought. This book argues that studying crises and periods of growth in different European countries will help to understand how different national, political and cultural traditions influenced the complex interaction of economic cycles and economic theorizing. The editors of this great volume bring together expert contributors consisting of economists, historians of economic thought and historians of economics, to analyse crises and theories of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This is alongside a comprehensive outlook on the most relevant advances of economic theory in France, Germany and Italy, as well as coverage of non-European countries, such as the United States. Several of the highly prestigious Villa Vigoni Trilateral Conferences formed the background for the discussions in this book. This volume is of great interest to students and academics who study history of economic thought, political economy and macroeconomics.

"A Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy book." Includes bibliographies and index.