This book's central theme is that a policymaker's role is to enhance the public's ability to coordinate their price information, price expectations, and economic activities. This role is fulfilled when policymakers maintain inflation stability. Inflation persists less when an implicit or explicit inflation target is met. Granato and Wong argue that inflation persistence is reduced when the public substitutes the prespecified inflation target for past inflation. A by-product of this co-ordination process is greater economic stability. In particular, inflation stability contributes to greater economic output stability, including the potential for the simultaneous reduction of both inflation and output variability - inflation-output co-stabilization (IOCS). Granato and Wong use historical, formal, and applied statistical analysis of business-cycle performance in the United States for the 1960 to 2000 period. They find that during periods when policymakers emphasize inflation stability, inflation uncertainty and persistence were reduced.

Coordination and Growth: Essays in Honour of Simon K. Kuipers, addresses a rich variety of coordination issues in macroeconomics. It contains detailed studies in economic policy, monetary economics, and growth theory and uses various methodologies to address the coordination issue: from a pure theoretical to an empirical econometric approach. It is stressed that modern macroeconomics should focus on coordination issues. Imperfections of various kinds are likely to lead to coordination failures, which can lead to large welfare losses. Macroeconomists should address the causes and implications of imperfections and failures. In this book attempts are made to increase our knowledge in this field. The book is a tribute to one of the leading Dutch macroeconomists, Simon K. Kuipers. Simon Kuipers shows a major interest in the theory of capital (following e.g. Harrod), growth theory (following Solow), monetary theory (following Tobin), and disequilibrium theory (following Malinvaud and Benassy). The lines of thought have in common that they use frictions to explain the functioning of a market economy. The nature of the frictions varies from pure quantity rationing, like in the Malinvaud analysis, to imperfect substitution of various capital goods (like in the vintage models or assets (in the general monetary equilibrium models proposed by Tobin). Kuipers is not only interested in pure theoretical contributions, he also stimulates econometric work in line with the Dutch tradition initiated by Tinbergen. His applied work relates to policy analysis and policy prescriptions in many fields, ranging from monetary economics to distortions in the labour market. Kuipers can be classified as a true Keynesian, although he admires neoclassical theory for its rigour and compactness. Better still, he is an eclectic economist with an open eye for the different schools of thought in macroeconomics.