Economics Authors Confront Toughest Questions on Data, History, and Theory

IMF Blog, August 21, 2024

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Canonical URL: Economics Authors Confront Toughest Questions on Data, History, and Theory

Publication: The Editors, August 21, 2024.
Theme: Recent books highlighted in IMF’s quarterly magazine, Finance & Development, offer fresh perspectives on climate, China, John Maynard Keynes, civil society’s role in tax policy, gender and economic equality, and rethinking growth.
Framing: Beyond benchmark measures like employment, growth, and inflation, economics “encompasses the full spectrum of humanity” and is presented as a tool to improve people’s lives. Central bankers and interest-rate setters are noted as particularly attuned to the high stakes of economic policy.

Book: Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade by Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson.
Key points:
- Traces cultural, diplomatic, and economic factors that shaped China’s 1970s transformation and its relationship with the United States.
- Explores why China converged with US capitalism and why American capitalists incorporated China into their vision of the future.

Book: Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World by R. Jisung Park.
Findings:
- Documents how climate change affects human welfare and the global economy.
- Links higher temperatures to outcomes in standardized testing, professional tennis, manufacturing, and crime rates.
- Argues that “Hotter temperatures … may already be affecting companies’ bottom lines,” and that climate change can “significantly alter the economic playing field.”

Book: A Taxing Journey: How Civic Actors Influence Tax Policy by Paolo de Renzio.
Findings:
- Shows how nongovernmental and civil society organizations influence tax reforms through case studies across countries at various stages of development.
- Presents real-world examples, including:
- Former public officials in Guatemala holding an opaque and ineffective tax administration to account.
- A campaign for higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco in the Philippines.
- Situates the book within a broader rethinking about tax policy.

Book: Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality by Josie Cox.
Findings:
- Weaves stories and statistics in an exploration of gender, wealth, and social influence.
- Highlights longstanding structural and cultural barriers that hinder women’s economic advancement.

Book: Growth: A History and a Reckoning by Daniel Susskind.
Argument:
- Persuades readers that economic policy should broaden its focus from aiming primarily to boost economic growth to also considering the costs of such growth.
- Positioned as part of a growing literature calling for policy attention beyond income.

Book: Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace after 100 Years: Polemics and Policy (edited by Patricia Clavin, Giancarlo Corsetti, Maurice Obstfeld, and Adam Tooze).
Findings:
- Reexamines The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, a volume noted for its lasting influence a century after publication.
- Considers the 1919 book’s presaging of the wider and bloodier conflict that would engulf Europe two decades later.

Readers are invited to subscribe to Finance & Development for “agenda-setting explorations of economic and financial issues.”

Source: IMF blog post — Economics Authors Confront Toughest Questions on Data, History, and Theory, The Editors, August 21, 2024.