Errol D'Souza's Macroeconomics helps students realize the connections between theoretical frameworks and the actual behaviour of the economy; enables instructors to teach macroeconomics concepts within the context of both the Indian and global economy; and provides policymakers with material from current research in macroeconomics. The focus of the book rests on the analysis of macroeconomic thought in terms of the intuition and underlying logic that forms its basis. This book has been designed to help readers think independently about real-world situations, by helping them master the basic technical tools that enable them to do this. At a conceptual level, the book focuses on the most current and relevant issues, while also understanding the fluidity of the subject.
Table of Contents Figures 9 Tables 11 Abbreviations 15 Acknowledgements 17 1 Introduction 19 1.1 Governance Structures for the Employment Relationship 19 1.2 The Evolution of Collective Bargaining in Britain 21 1.3 Research Questions and Plan of this Book 27 2 Governance Structures for the Employment Relationship 29 2.1 The Employment Relationship 29 2.2 Governance Structures 46 2.3 Optimal Governance Structures 67 2.4 Conclusions 79 3 Evolution of Governance Structures 81 3.1 Previous Theoretical Literature 82 3.2 The Evolutionary Framework to Governance Structures 106 3.3 Conclusions 129 4 Determinants of Employer Demand for Governance Structures 131 4.1 Company-Level Factors 132 4.2 Markets 164 4.3 Institutions 169 4.4 External Organisations 172 4.5 Conclusions 188 5 Governance Structures 1780-2000: Description and Analysis 191 5.1 The Emergence and Evolution of Governance Structures 1780-2000 191 5.2 The Role of External Organisations 218 5.3 Conclusions 227 6 Determinants of Employer Demand 1980-1998: Bivariate Analyses 229 6.1 Research Design 229 6.2 Company-Level Factors 236 6.3 Markets 279 6.4 Institutions 284 6.5 External Organisations 286 6.6 Conclusions 292 7 Determinants of Employer Demand 1980-1998: Multivariate Analyses 295 7.1 The Current State of Research 295 7.2 Research Design 300 7.3 The Empirical Results 318 7.4 Conclusions 348 8 Conclusions 353 8.1 Determinants of Governance Structures: The Findings 353 8.2 Whodunit? The Decline of Collective Bargaining in Britain 357 8.3 The Implications of Decollectivisation for Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations 360 8.4 Optimal Governance Structures for the Employment Relationship: A Role for Public Policy? 362 Appendix 367 Bibliography 383 Index 409
Snowdon and Vane s book is extremely welcome. Indeed the authors examine, compare, and evaluate the evolution of the major rival stories comprising contemporary macroeconomic thought, but they also trace the development and interaction of key events and ideas as they occurred in the last century. Interviews with leading economists, one or two at the end of each chapter, also greatly help to shed light on this complexity. . . In sum, this is book which is very difficult to put down. Alessio Moneta, Journal of the History of Economic Thought It is not difficult to understand why this volume commands high praise from macroeconomic theorists, practitioners and teachers. It contains many interesting features that make it an excellent companion for both students and teachers of tertiary level macroeconomics. . . The authors present the material in a way that conveys to readers that macroeconomics is a living science , continually developing and still open to debate, controversy and competing policy prescriptions. In this respect it is a book that ought to be required reading for all teachers of the subject. It is also a valuable source of background reading for professional economists involved with economic policy making. Economic Outlook and Business Review . . . a wonderful history of macroeconomic thought from Keynes to the present, with an outstanding bibliography. It should be useful to undergraduates and graduate students as well as professional economists. Highly recommended. Steven Pressman, Choice Brian Snowdon and Howard Vane are well-known for their astute understanding of the main macroeconomic schools of thought and their skilled use of interviews with major figures. Here, they deploy a depth of scholarship in explaining the different schools and their key points of departure from one another. This book will be particularly useful to students looking for a clear, non-technical explanation of the main approaches to macroeconomics. Patrick Minford, Cardiff University, UK There are two steps to learning macroeconomics. First, to see it as it is today. Second, to understand how it got there: to understand the right and the wrong turns, the hypotheses that proved false, the insights that proved true, and the interaction of events and ideas. Only then, does one truly understand macroeconomics. This book is about step two. It does a marvellous job of it. The presentation is transparent, the interviews fascinating. You will enjoy, and you will learn. Olivier Blanchard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US In 40 years of teaching macroeconomics, there has been just one textbook that I have assigned year after year after year, namely, A Modern Guide to Macroeconomics by Snowdon, Vane and Wynarczyk. That altogether admirable book made clear to students what were, and are, the main intellectual issues in macroeconomics and did so with just enough formal modeling to avoid distortion by over-simplification. That book is now ten years old and the debate in macro has moved on. So there is good reason to welcome Snowdon and Vane back with this superb updated version. Axel Leijonhufvud, University of Trento, Italy This outstanding book avoids the narrow scope of most textbooks and provides an excellent guide to an unusually broad range of ideas. Thomas Mayer, University of California, Davis, US More than a decade after the publication of the critically acclaimed A Modern Guide to Macroeconomics, Brian Snowdon and Howard Vane have produced a worthy successor in the form of Modern Macroeconomics. Thoroughly extended, revised and updated, it will become the indispensable text for students and teachers of macroeconomics in the new millennium. The authors skilfully trace the origins, development and current state of modern macroeconomics from an historical perspective. They do so by thoroughly appraising the central tenets underlying the main competing schools of macroeconomic thought as well as their diverse policy imp
According to most orthodox economists, labour market rigidities are the key culprit for such high unemployment as has been observed in Europe during the past three decades. But governments that have attempted to follow the standard prescription of removing rigidities have often faced harsh political opposition. This book looks at why labour market institutions such as employment protection, unemployment benefits, and relative wage rigidities exist, what role they play in society, why they seem so persistent, where the pressure to reform them comes from, and whether reform can be politically viable or not. The book ascribes a central role to the existence of underlying microeconomic frictions and to redistributive pressures between rich and poor, and shows how these ingredients may give rise to labour market rents, which in turn explain why a coherent set of rigidities arise as the outcome of the political process. It is also shown that, at the same time, such rents create resistance to reform, and contribute to locking society into a high-unemployment, rigid equilibrium. Finally, the basic principles exposed in the book are used to discuss various strategies for a successful labour market reform.
This graduate textbook is a primer in macroeconomics. It starts from essential undergraduate macroeconomics and develops the central topics of modern macroeconomic theory in a simple and rigorous manner. All topics essential for first year graduate students are covered. These include rational expectations, intertemporal dynamic models, exogenous and endogenous growth, nonclearing markets and imperfect competition, uncertainty, and money. The book also covers real business cycles and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, integrating growth and fluctuations, sticky wages and prices, consumption and investment, and unemployment. Lastly, it studies government policy, stabilization, credibility, and the connections between politics and the macroeconomy. Each topic is presented in the simplest model possible while still delivering the relevant answers and keeping rigorous foundations throughout the book. To make the book fully self-contained there is a mathematical appendix that gives all necessary mathematical results.
This engaging book contains a set of original contributions to the much-debated issues of long-run economic growth in relation to institutional and social progress. It explores the mutual relationships between living standards, social habits, education an
