Assorted Monetary Policy Games

Cartoon about Price Stability

Become the ruler of Finanzity! Finanzity is a web-based fast-action game specially designed to help make learning some economic concepts easier

The Great Stagnation on Kindle

Yes, I agree with Kevin Drum;

The problem with this is that the Kindle sucks at rendering tables and charts. The screen cap on the right, for example, shows a chart from Tyler's book. As Kindle charts go, it's actually not too bad. But what's on the X-axis? It appears to start with 1455, and obviously the numbers go up. I get the idea. But the actual details are completely lost. Later in the book there's another table so badly rendered that I can't make it out at all.

In the case of "The Great Stagnation," this isn't too big a deal. I know what the chart above is getting at, and the table at the end is one I've seen before. But other nonfiction books don't fare so well. Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms, for example, relies heavily on lots and lots of fairly complex charts and tables, and they're rendered so badly (unreadable graphs, table columns that don't line up, etc.) and placed so haphazardly that they made the book almost impossible to absorb properly. To this day, I'm not sure if my disagreements with his thesis are real, or mere artifacts of the fact that the e-version of the book was really hard to follow. In any case, that was the book that made me give up on the Kindle entirely for nonfiction. Until now.

Though the Kindle sucks in many ways, it is still a great way to get books for someone in a poor developing country.

Book Forum- The Great Stagnation

Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation;

I’m also persuaded by the median income numbers because they are supported by related measurements of other magnitudes. For example, another way to study economic growth is to look not at median income but at national income, gdp, or gross domestic product, the total production of goods and services. Charles I. Jones, an economist at Stanford University, has “disassembled” American economic growth into component parts, such as increases in capital investment, increases in work hours, increases in research and development, and other factors. Looking at 1950–1993, he found that 80 percent of the growth from that period came from the application of previously discovered ideas, combined with heavy additional investment in education and research, in a manner that cannot be easily repeated for the future. In other words, we’ve been riding off the past. Even more worryingly, he finds that now that we are done exhausting this accumulated stock of benefits, we are discovering new ideas at a speed that will drive a future growth rate of less than one-third of a percent (that’s a rough estimate, not an exact one, but it is consistent with the basic message here). It could be worse yet if the idea-generating countries continue to lose population, as we are seeing in Western Europe and Japan.

We will be discussing about the book for the next few weeks.

Crazy Book Pricing- Decline to Fall: The Making of British Macro-economic Policy

Decline to Fall: The Making of British Macro-economic Policy and the 1976 IMF Crisis-Douglas Wass

Kindle edition costs USD 80
Hardcover on Amazon- USD 125

Related:
A review of the book from F&D;

In the subsequent discussions between U.K. and IMF officials, the main issues were fiscal adjustment and the exchange rate. Particularly on fiscal adjustment, according to Wass, it became clear in the technical discussions that "there could be no meeting of minds on the logic," because the British officials viewed the IMF's financial programming approach as inapplicable to their economy. The officials were skeptical about the basis for targets for monetary growth, and about the assumed links between the fiscal balance and domestic credit expansion in an economy with an advanced financial system. However, the IMF had more of a meeting of minds with Chancellor Denis Healey, who agreed that monetary expansion on existing fiscal policies was likely to fuel inflation, although he disputed the scale of the adjustment that the IMF sought. Differences were eventually narrowed, partly by the IMF's agreeing to the authorities' commitment to fiscal measures to be taken only if growth in the second year of the program exceeded a certain rate.

Trinidad and Tobago- Dual Economy Growth Diagnostic

In the case of a dual, natural resource abundant economy such as Trinidad & Tobago’s, an aggregate view is not enough to understand the growth opportunities and binding constraints: we need to stress the growth opportunities of each sector and their interactions, since the
constraints may be different for non-energy and energy activities.

A major concern for Trinidad & Tobago is the diversification of economic activity, and preparing for the time when oil and gas reserves are depleted. The binding constraints to growth in the non-energy sector in Trinidad & Tobago are outlined in the following growth diagnostic tree. The rest of this work will attempt to identify which of these potential constraints to growth are binding.

-Trinidad & Tobago: Economic Growth in a Dual Economy

Belize Economic Outlook

IMF reviews Belize economy;

Key recommendations. Staff recommended a gradual increase in the primary surplus to 4½ percent of GDP, mainly through wage and pension reforms, to place the public debt on a firm downward path and reduce external financing needs. It also recommended continued actions to strengthen the financial system and welcomed improvements in the monetary policy framework. The authorities broadly agreed with the recommendations, particularly tostrengthen the banking system. They planned to seek consensus on needed fiscal reforms, but noted that, in the near term, social conditions strictly constrained the scope for fiscal consolidation.

The authorities seek to reinvigorate growth prospects and reduce the poverty
rate to 35 percent by 2013. The development plan for 2010–13 focuses on job creation and identifies sources of growth in tourism, agro-industry, and fishing. It rests on five pillars: developing small enterprises; strengthening export trade capacity; enhancing human development; addressing social dislocations and reducing crime; and managing environmental and natural disaster risk. The plan seeks to strengthen competitiveness by addressing infrastructure bottlenecks, high costs of financing, and red tape. It contains investment and social plans that will be assessed and integrated into the multiyear budget and presented to donors later this year.