Macroeconomics [antikvár]

Preface The past three decades have been challenging ones for macroeconomists. Key variables in macroeconomics—the levels of output, inflation, and unemployment; interest rates; and for-eign exchange rates—have proved difficult to explain and predict. This period also has been an active one in macroeconomic theory, a period of controversy but also of progress. The years since the late 1960s saw a growing number of challenges to Keynesian économies, which was the dominant paradigm of the early 1960s. The 1970s witnessed a growing interest in monetarism and the emergence of the new classical économies. In the 1980s, Keynesian pol-icy prescriptions came under attack from a group called the supply-side economists. The 1980s also witnessed the development of two contrasting lines of research on the business cycle: the new Keynesian économies and the real business cycle theory. However, there has been progress as well as controversy. During the past 25 years there have been significant im-provements in the handling of expectations, in our understanding of labor market institutions, in accounting for the macroeconomic implications of various market structures, in the modeling of open économies, and in accounting for the ultimate sources of economic growth. In this book I have tried to explain macroeconomics, inclusive of recent developments, in a coherent way but without glossing over the fundamental disagreements among macroeconomists on issues of both theory and policy. The major modern macroeconomic theo-ries are presented and compared. Important areas of agreement as well as différences are dis-cussed. An attempt is made to demónstrate that the controversies among macroeconomists center on well-defined issues that are based on theoretical différences in the underlying models. FEATURES Distinguishing features of the approach taken here include the following: • An up-to-date summary of the Keynesian position, including research that has come to be called the new Keynesian économies. • A detailed analysis of the challenges to the Keynesian position by the monetarists, new classical economists, and real business cycle theorists. • An extensive treatment of monetary policy that considers the optimal strategy for monetary policy, including intermediate targeting on aggregates versus targeting on interest rates. • An analysis of the post-1970 slowdown in U.S. output growth, capital formation, and growth in labor productivity. Within this context of intermediate-run growth the views of the supply-side economists and their critics are examined. • A considération of the déterminants of long-run economic growth. Both the neoclassica! growth model and recent models of endogenous growth are discussed.