What’s Right with Macroeconomics?

Global crises are very rare events. After the Great Depression and the Great Stagflation, new macroeconomic paradigms associated with a new policy regime emerged. This book addresses how some macroeconomic ideas have failed, and examines which theories researchers should preserve and develop. It questions how the field of economics – still reeling from the global financial crisis initiated in the summer of 2007 – will respond.

The contributors, nine highly-renowned macroeconomists, highlight the virtues of eclectic macroeconomics over an authoritarian normative approach, and illustrate that macroeconomic reasoning can still be a useful tool for carrying out practical policy analysis. As for emerging research programmes, their wide-ranging chapters remind us that there are positive approaches to and reasons to believe in old-fashioned macroeconomics.

This challenging and thought-provoking book will prove a stimulating read for researchers, academics and students of economics, as well as for professional economists.