The Slump in Europe
Blackwell Publishers
Published on 4. January 1990
Book
Paperback/Softback
120 pages
978-0-631-17181-2 (ISBN)
Description
The subject of this book is the rise of unemployment in Europe during the eighties, which in 1985 reached levels that had not been seen since the Great Depression and which show no sign of falling dramatically. In its explanation of the slump in Europe, this book assigns a crucial role to the package of policy innovations in the US and introduces new theoretical elements to understand the mechanisms through which these shocks have been transmitted to Europe. The three processes which are central in explanation - the mark up on customer markets, the behaviour of contractural or indexed wages and the cost or supply effects of real interest rates - are new to the macroeconomic analyses of slumps such as the recent one in Europe. The book examines the distinctive features of the 1980s slump: the fall of labour's share, the rise of productivity, and vanished excess capacity; and reviews the implications of orthodox open economy theory. The authors develop a new theory which is consistent with the recent developments on both sides of the Atlantic and finally look at what could have been done to prevent the slump and at what can be done now to generate recovery.
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Publishing group
John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Illustrations
Index
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
209 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-631-17181-2 (9780631171812)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Author
Professor of Political Economy, Columbia University, USA
Content
Part 1 The problem for analysis: magnitude of the slump; existing explanations; new directions; plan of the book. Part 2 Stylized facts: exchange rate movements; real interest rates; user cost of capital; wage shares; mark-ups; average product of labour; investment; relative price of capital goods; (un)employment. Part 3 Orthodox theory: the standard propositions and qualifications; the essential orthodox model. Part 4 Elements of a reconstructed theory: customer markets in the transmission of foreign shocks; capital mechanisms in the transmission of real interest shocks; real investment-good prices in the transmission of shocks; the persistence of the slump in Europe - our supply-price view. Part 5 An examination of demand-side explanations: the fiscal austerity hypothesis; the tight money hypothesis; the hysteresis effect required by demand-side explanations. Part 6 Can Europe do it?.