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Modern political-economic theory explains the postwar evolution of macroeconomic policy in developed democracies.
Examines why some countries have much higher unemployment rates than others. Explores wage bargaining institutions, macro-economic policy regimes, and the welfare state. Argues that unemployment is the outcome of interaction between the centralization of the wage bargaining system and the character of the monetary policy regime.
MERG has become convinced that a sea change in economic policy is essential to generate growth in the next few years. It can demonstrate that its proposed policy framework is both coherent and affordable. The MERG proposals offer a radically different vision of the future of South Africa. They have been designed to address the current imbalances, through direct intervention, in a way which would benefit all sections of the South African population within a short period of time. MERG took the objectives of the democratic movement as its starting point. The aim of the MERG framework is, therefore, to secure a rapid improvement in the quality of the daily lives of South Africa's poorest, most oppressed and disadvantaged people. The strategy stresses programmes to: initiate job creation and training programmes for the unemployed; improve the status of the poorest women in the rural areas; improve the availability and quality of education, health, housing and electrification; raise the level of wages of low-income workers, and; dramatically improve the skills of employed workers.
A growing literature concludes that modern democracies have not adopted policies that benefit the majority to the extent predicted by social conflict theory. The most prominent reason is that globalization ties the hands of policymakers, making it hard for them to redistribute. Yet while progressive taxation has declined, we find that redistributive spending is higher in many democracies than would be expected by today's high levels of capital mobility. We also find that democratic countries that tend to appeal to the majority of the population, which we proxy for with the adoption of their own constitution after transition, use redistributive macroeconomic policies as an endrun around fiscal constraints. While popular democracies adopt flexible exchange rates that give them monetary autonomy, exhibit higher levels of inflationary finance, and incur more foreign debt, elite-biased democracies are more restrained. The latter also have smaller governments and engage in lower levels of redistributive spending.
This book raises and addresses questions about the consequences of democratic institutions for economic performance.
What explains the spread of both democracy and financial openness at this time in history, given the constraining impact of financial market integration on national policy autonomy? International policy coordination is part of the answer, but not all. Also important is the presence of cost-effective redistributive schemes that provide insurance against the risk of financial instability.
Employing macroeconomic performance as a lens to evaluate democratic institutions, the author uses models of political behavior that allow for opportunism on the part of public officials and shortsightedness on the part of voters to see if democratic institutions lead to inferior macroeconomic performance. We have learned more about how and why democracy can work well or badly in the years since the first edition was published. It was not previously apparent how much the good performance of democracy in the United States was contingent on informal rules and institutions of restraint that are not part of the definition of democracy. Since that first edition, the United States has experienced soaring indebtedness, unintended adverse consequences of housing policy, and massive problems in the financial system. Each of these was permitted or encouraged by the incentives of electoral politics and by limitations on government, the two essential features of democratic institutions.
Copublished with the Brookings Institution, Washington D.C. and the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, and edited by Ralph Bryant, David Currie, Jacob A. Frenkel, Paul Masson, and Richard Portes, this volume considers economic interdependence among well developed countries as well as between them and the developing regions of the world.