Distributional Conflict And Inflation

There has been relatively little work applying the conflict inflation approach in different theoretical and historical settings. This book remedies this gap by treating private-sector distributional conflicts as well as government budgetary pressures on the money supply and the price level. Attention is drawn to the costs of non-accommodative policies in a conflict setting - and to the additional difficulties of non-accommodation likely associated with the use of exchange rate pegging as a disinflation device.

There has been relatively little work applying the conflict inflation approach in different theoretical and historical settings. This book remedies this gap by treating private-sector distributional conflicts as well as government budgetary pressures on the money supply and the price level. Attention is drawn to the costs of non-accommodativepolicies in a conflict setting - and to the additional difficulties of non-accommodation likely associated with the use of exchange rate pegging as a disinflation device.

Structuralist macroeconomics has emerged recently as the only viable theoretical alternative for economists and practitioners in developing countries. Lance Taylor's innovative work represents a landmark in this field. It codifies a new generation of structuralist macroeconomic models that incorporate the economic power relationships of key institutions and groups, integrates both finance and real macroeconomics, and covers a diverse range of experience in the developing world over the past three decades. In an introduction Taylor explains his methodology, describes assumptions underlying the models used, and reviews theories that relate economic growth and the role of financial assets. He then takes up basic structuralist models of a closed economy and moves on to consider the open economy cases. He incorporates the latest developments in the field (inflation, financial crisis, exchange rate management, increasing returns, and the like) in a treatment that departs substantially from economic orthodoxy. Taylor first addresses the question of how to specify "closure" or define the causal structure of macro models. He also considers how income redistribution influences growth and output and how income redistribution interacts with inflation. Next, an investment-driven non-full employment growth model draws on ideas introduced earlier to illustrate how different sorts of macroeconomic policies affect short-run adjustment and growth prospects over time. Taylor then turns to the problems proposed by economic openness in a stylized semi-industrialized country, starting with international trade. A fix-price/flex-price model is developed, and additional models demonstrate cases of policy relevance as well as interactions between class conflict and growth.

This book demonstrates that 'monetary analysis', as contained in Post-Keynesian monetary theories, but also in the Neo-Ricardian monetary theory of distribution and in Marx's monetary analysis, can be integrated into Post-Keynesian models of distribution of growth in a convincing way.

Why did many emerging countries pursue risky financial opening policies in a reckless manner, even after the painful example of the Latin American debt crisis? Unlike trade liberalization, which has mostly been beneficial in emerging countries, the removal of capital controls has led to boom-bust patterns in many countries. It is not simply driven by class or sectoral interests, nor is it just a result of ideational changes in policy-making circles, or international pressure. Gemici argues that to fully understand the motivation for these policies, we need to take into account distributional struggles prior to their enactment. In this book, Gemici shows that conflictual distributional relations significantly increase the likelihood of capital account liberalization. Through in-depth comparative case studies, he also demonstrates that countries which liberalize in the most comprehensive manner tend to be the countries characterized by a high degree of distributional conflict. The case studies – Argentina, Chile, South Korea , and Turkey – have been chosen to maximise variation in distributional relations and to escape regional clustering, showing quite different trajectories of capital account liberalization. This will be of great interest to readers in sociology, international political economy and heterodox economics, as well as specialists in the countries examined.

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.