Here are 77 books that The Making of Economic Policy fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am an academic at the University of Oxford who specializes in international political economy, so I study this topic for a living! I am particularly interested in the politics of international cooperation and economic development. Growing up, I traveled extensively in developing countries across Asia and Africa, which inspired in me a deep curiosity about the determinants of sustained economic growth. I also spent much time in Geneva, where my father frequently worked with United Nations agencies. His anecdotes about these institutions each evening made me wonder what caused some of them to perform effectively and others to perform poorly—and how they could be improved.
I have long believed that development economists rely too heavily on reductive formal models that ignore on-the-ground realities and are backed by scant empirical evidence. This book makes a compelling case for observation—particularly in the form of randomized controlled trials that approximate scientific experiments “in the field.”
I admire its rigorous use of the scientific method to critique theoretical approaches that draw much of their legitimacy and influence from technical sophistication and abstraction.
Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics , Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two practical visionaries working toward ending world poverty, answer these questions from the ground. In a book the Wall Street Journal called marvellous, rewarding," the authors tell how the stress of living on less than 99 cents per day encourages the poor to make questionable decisions that feed,not fight,poverty. The result is a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty that offers a ringside view of the lives of…
I am an academic at the University of Oxford who specializes in international political economy, so I study this topic for a living! I am particularly interested in the politics of international cooperation and economic development. Growing up, I traveled extensively in developing countries across Asia and Africa, which inspired in me a deep curiosity about the determinants of sustained economic growth. I also spent much time in Geneva, where my father frequently worked with United Nations agencies. His anecdotes about these institutions each evening made me wonder what caused some of them to perform effectively and others to perform poorly—and how they could be improved.
Who writes the rules of the global economy? This book pulls back the curtain on what I consider one of the most profound transformations in global governance in recent decades: the delegation of regulatory authority by governments to international private-sector organizations, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Accountability Standards Board (IASB).
I was only dimly aware of this shift before I read the book, and I had wondered who its “winners and losers” were across sectors and countries. The authors provide surprising and nuanced answers based on wide-ranging data collection as well as interviews with key stakeholders.
Over the past two decades, governments have delegated extensive regulatory authority to international private-sector organizations. This internationalization and privatization of rule making has been motivated not only by the economic benefits of common rules for global markets, but also by the realization that government regulators often lack the expertise and resources to deal with increasingly complex and urgent regulatory tasks. The New Global Rulers examines who writes the rules in international private organizations, as well as who wins, who loses--and why. Tim Buthe and Walter Mattli examine three powerful global private regulators: the International Accounting Standards Board, which develops financial…
I am an academic at the University of Oxford who specializes in international political economy, so I study this topic for a living! I am particularly interested in the politics of international cooperation and economic development. Growing up, I traveled extensively in developing countries across Asia and Africa, which inspired in me a deep curiosity about the determinants of sustained economic growth. I also spent much time in Geneva, where my father frequently worked with United Nations agencies. His anecdotes about these institutions each evening made me wonder what caused some of them to perform effectively and others to perform poorly—and how they could be improved.
This book presents one of the most thoughtful and—to me—convincing accounts of the relationship between globalization and economic growth.
The author rejects the simple dichotomies offered up by “pro-globalizers” and “anti-globalizers,” arguing that successful development tends to require experimentation, pragmatism, and the adaptation of policy tools to local contexts.
This empirically grounded perspective not only explains a great deal of variation in the fortunes of developing countries but also complements and extends key principles of economics.
In One Economics, Many Recipes, leading economist Dani Rodrik argues that neither globalizers nor antiglobalizers have got it right. While economic globalization can be a boon for countries that are trying to dig out of poverty, success usually requires following policies that are tailored to local economic and political realities rather than obeying the dictates of the international globalization establishment. A definitive statement of Rodrik's original and influential perspective on economic growth and globalization, One Economics, Many Recipes shows how successful countries craft their own unique strategies--and what other countries can learn from them. To most proglobalizers, globalization is a…
I am an academic at the University of Oxford who specializes in international political economy, so I study this topic for a living! I am particularly interested in the politics of international cooperation and economic development. Growing up, I traveled extensively in developing countries across Asia and Africa, which inspired in me a deep curiosity about the determinants of sustained economic growth. I also spent much time in Geneva, where my father frequently worked with United Nations agencies. His anecdotes about these institutions each evening made me wonder what caused some of them to perform effectively and others to perform poorly—and how they could be improved.
This book develops what I regard as the most important and insightful theory of why states pursue cooperation through international institutions.
The author’s argument, which innovatively brings insights from transaction cost economics to bear on the study of international cooperation, explains how such institutions deliver mutual benefits to states and why they are so enduring—even when the power structures that gave birth to them have crumbled.
This book is a comprehensive study of cooperation among the advanced capitalist countries. Can cooperation persist without the dominance of a single power, such as the United States after World War II? To answer this pressing question, Robert Keohane analyzes the institutions, or "international regimes," through which cooperation has taken place in the world political economy and describes the evolution of these regimes as American hegemony has eroded. Refuting the idea that the decline of hegemony makes cooperation impossible, he views international regimes not as weak substitutes for world government but as devices for facilitating decentralized cooperation among egoistic actors.…
I’m a Brazilian economist working in Paris and dedicated to historical scholarship. I have always been deeply impressed by the political weight carried by economic arguments across Latin America. Debates on economic policy are typically contentious everywhere, but in Latin America, your alignment with different traditions of political economy can go a long way to determine your intellectual and political identity. At the same time, our condition as peripheral societies – and hence net importers of ideas from abroad – raises perennial questions about the meaning of a truly Latin American political economy. I hope this list will be a useful entry point for people similarly interested in these problems.
The most recent entry on my list is already a landmark achievement.
Margarita Fajardo’s authoritative monograph places the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America – the incubator for the cepalinos who successfully challenged the postwar consensus on developmental policy – into the broader geopolitical history of the 20th century. This richly detailed study retraces the emergence of an intellectual and political movement that channeled discontent with the structural biases inherent in the global economic order into a cogent agenda of political economy for the peripheries of capitalism.
It also reveals how the fragmentation of the fragile postwar liberal consensus, in both North and South, eventually pushed this movement toward the high-powered framework of dependency theory, and thence into anti-establishment activism across the world.
How a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world.
After the Second World War demolished the old order, a group of economists and policymakers from across Latin America imagined a new global economy and launched an intellectual movement that would eventually capture the world. They charged that the systems of trade and finance that bound the world's nations together were frustrating the economic prospects of Latin America and other regions of the world. Through the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL, the Spanish and Portuguese acronym, cepalinos…
I developed a strong interest in current events, especially politics, in high school. What the government does, or does not do, struck me as a vital piece of the puzzle in trying to explain why things are the way they are. That soon led, however, to seeing how the past continues to influence the present. No decade is more important than the 1960s for understanding our current political climate.
Presidents matter, but they do not have magical powers.
Zelizer persuasively recounts how the Great Society reforms of the 1960s would not have been passed without the work of legislators whose names are largely forgotten today. Democrats achieved many of their goals, but Zelizer also surveys how they faced stern resistance from Republicans on Capitol Hill. A window of opportunity to transform the nation opened in the mid-1960s, and then soon closed.
A majestic big-picture account of the Great Society and the forces that shaped it, from Lyndon Johnson and members of Congress to the civil rights movement and the media
Between November 1963, when he became president, and November 1966, when his party was routed in the midterm elections, Lyndon Johnson spearheaded the most transformative agenda in American political history since the New Deal, one whose ambition and achievement have had no parallel since. In just three years, Johnson drove the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; the War on Poverty program; Medicare and Medicaid; the National Endowments…
Rich Weiner co-edited this featured volume with Francesca Forno. He is a political sociologist with a strong foundation in the history of political and social thought. He has served for twenty-two years as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. His focus has been on non-statist political organizations and social movements with a perspective of middle-range theorizing enriched by three generations of Frankfurt School critical theory of society.
Countering a drifting away from an appreciation of the demos, the book encourages us to build a democratic constitutional political economy that renews traditions of egalitarianism and social rights rather than the recent neoliberalism’s imagined market-based orientation of freedom alone.
I like the way the book revives the American constitutional tradition of discourse emphasizing how constraint of the concentration of wealth is necessary to preserve a democratic republic.
A bold call to reclaim an American tradition that argues the Constitution imposes a duty on government to fight oligarchy and ensure broadly shared wealth.
Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the "republican form of government" the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a…
I am an anthropologist of development who has conducted ethnographic research in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. Throughout my career I have grappled with questions of how power works in development, particularly in and through processes of self-making. I seek new theoretical tools to examine these questions, but always grounded in the realities of the everyday. I came of age when post-development critiques were dominant, but both my idealism and cynicism have been tempered by working alongside local development actors. In my work I try to give readers a sympathetic portrait of their lives, beliefs, and hopes, and how these shape practices, relationships, and consequences of ‘development’.
The Will to Improve is most celebrated for its explanation of ‘rendering technical’: the ways complex, political factors contributing to poverty are reduced to those amenable to technical intervention.
But I have found Tania Li’s concept of ‘trustee’ the most useful in my work on local development actors: understanding how they come to take on the role of trustee, their desire to ‘improve’ others, and the prickly subjects that resist their efforts.
Li traces the ‘will to improve’ through 200 years of Indonesian history, but it is most powerfully elucidated through her rich ethnographic description from the province of Sulawesi.
Her analysis weaves together Marx, Foucault, and Gramsci, showing how theory can illuminate description. It is a masterclass in storytelling and the power of theory.
The Will to Improve is a remarkable account of development in action. Focusing on attempts to improve landscapes and livelihoods in Indonesia, Tania Murray Li carefully exposes the practices that enable experts to diagnose problems and devise interventions, and the agency of people whose conduct is targeted for reform. Deftly integrating theory, ethnography, and history, she illuminates the work of colonial officials and missionaries; specialists in agriculture, hygiene, and credit; and political activists with their own schemes for guiding villagers toward better ways of life. She examines donor-funded initiatives that seek to integrate conservation with development through the participation of…
When I was contemplating a topic for my PhD thesis, it struck me powerfully that American economics was severely under-studied, and that this applied even more so to those associated with “American institutional economics.” My research soon indicated to me that the literature that did exist was lacking in coverage and badly misleading. During my research in archives, I uncovered some real gems—just one example was the archives of the Robert Bookings Graduate School, an institution largely forgotten, but famous at the time. This was exciting and inspired me to continue on to provide a major re-evaluation of American economics in the interwar period.
Mary Furner’s book presents what is the common view of progressives as liberal reformers, but there is another side to progressive social science that is less liberal.
The progressive era social science literature is replete with racism and with arguments about racial and other forms of inferiority derived from eugenics.
The vast amount of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe gave rise to concerns about the undermining of American standards, both biological and economic, including theories of “race suicide.”
Leonard’s book has generated a great deal of discussion, and while there is no doubt that many progressives displayed eugenic and racist ideas, it needs to be stressed that such views were not limited to progressives, but included many of those with conservative and even free-market views in other areas.
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic…
As Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Lucas put it, "Once you start thinking about economic growth, it's hard to think about anything else." That's why I am eager to share the best books on economic development with you! I am a Senior Economist at the World Bank, the world's premier development institution. Over the years, I have developed a deep interest in what makes countries prosper, have published extensively on the topic in academic journals, and earned a PhD in Economics along the way. As a development practitioner, I have been supporting sustainable growth across the globe, with working experience in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific.
I found this book to be a brilliant analysis of how nations can achieve peace and development, stressing the importance of political institutions.
With mathematical precision, quite literally, the book nicely illustrates the fundamental drivers of development: inclusive political institutions and a shared belief in the common good. The absence of those elements can explain the existence of very different development clusters in fragile states that are troubled by poverty, violence, and weak state capacity.
I feel the book does an excellent job of disentangling deeper causes from symptoms of underdevelopment.
"Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bird's-eye view of the data, this book reinterprets Smith's pillars of prosperity to explain the existence of development clusters - places that tend to combine effective state institutions, the absence of political violence, and high per-capita incomes.…
