Description
"THIS IS A MIND-EXPANDING, provocative treatment of a central economic problem of our times: how to deal with growing economic interdependence, spatial and temporal. Both forms of interdependence raise problems which Stewart explores with clarity, simplicity and thoroughness." ROBERT SOLOMON, Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Economic policy - the main platform for future prosperity - is in dis- array in Western countries. High interest rates and deflationary fiscal policies, adopted without regard to their effects on other countries, have led to massive unemployment and a precarious structure of inter- national debt. Longer-term environmental problems are almost entirely neglected.
Michael Stewart, a former economic adviser to the British government, argues that economic policy decisions must take account of other countries and the longer-term future. The increasing interdependence of the world economy means that one country's policies can have counter-productive effects on other countries; and looming environmental constraints mean that decisions which look no more than a few years ahead are dangerously short-sighted.
Traditional economic policy-making will prove unable to cope with the problems of the world economy in the 1980s and 1990s and this book offers new insights into some of the directions that policy will need to take.
