This book reassesses Western Europe's miraculous economic recovery from World War II, exposing the role of international institutions.

Central banks have emerged as the key players in national and international policy making. This book explores their evolution since World War II in 20 industrial countries. The study considers the mix of economic, political, and institutional forces that have affected central bank behavior and its relationship with government. The analysis reconciles vastly different views about the role of central banks in the making of economic policies. One finding is that monetary policy is an evolutionary process.

Austria played a prominent role in the worldwide events of 1931 as the largest bank in Central and Eastern Europe, the Viennese Credit-Anstalt, collapsed and led Europe into a financial panic that spread to other parts of the world. The events in Austria were pivotal to the economic developments of the 1930s, yet the literature about them is sparse. This book tries to fill this gap. Aurel Schubert analyzes the crisis using the leading theories of financial crises, identifies the causes of the crisis, examines the market's efficiency in predicting events, analyzes how the crisis was...

In this reexamination of Canada's balance of payments experience under the gold standard, the authors develop and empirically test a new portfolio approach to the mechanism of balance of payments adjustment. This adjustment mechanism responded to massive inflows of foreign capital during a critical period of Canada's economic growth in the early years of this century. The authors show that the existence of international mobility of capital requires a fundamental revision of the price-specie-flow theory that has traditionally been used to explain adjustment when the balance of payments was...

This important contribution to comparative economic history examines different countries' experiences with different monetary regimes. The contributors lay particular emphasis on how the regimes fared when placed under stress such as wars and/or other changes in the economic environment. Covering the experience of ten countries over the period 1700-1990, the book employs the latest techniques of economic analysis in order to understand why particular monetary regimes and policies succeeded or failed.

This volume provides a new interpretation of the operation and macroeconomic repercussions of the international monetary system during the interwar years. Each of the eleven essays is explicitly concerned with the role of exchange rates in macroeconomic fluctuations from the American and European perspective. The final essay examines interwar experience from a long-run perspective.

This work establishes the existence of a sophisticated and smoothly functioning system of financial markets in the mercantile states of northwestern Europe throughout the 1700s. Based on computer analysis of thousands of price quotes from the financial press of the eighteenth century, the results should force both historians and economists to reevaluate their understanding of the evolution of financial markets and their importance for the economic developments of that era.

This book reassesses Western Europe's miraculous economic recovery from World War II and the crisis of 1947. The contributors expose the role of international institutions and contrast the very different national experiences. Their historical analysis has policy relevance--to the debate over the Maastricht Treaty and the Single Market Programme, to the difficulties of adjustment in formerly centrally planned economies, and to reform of the Bretton Woods institutions. This book will be of interest to students of modern European history and to economists.

In Japan, as in other parts of the world, banking plays an essential role in economic development. Studying key industries such as banking provides an important tool for genuinely understanding a country. This book gives that understanding of Japan for the first time in English. It thoroughly documents Japanese banking during a crucial one-hundred years--from the opening of her borders to the world in 1859 through two world wars--from which the Japanese economy finally emerged as one of the most powerful global forces.

Defense of the franc Poincare; dominated French economic policy during the Depression. While most countries took their currencies off gold to permit a wider range of domestic policies to foster recovery, in France policy makers resolved to preserve the gold parity of the franc by balancing the budget and lowering domestic prices. Novelty and experimentation were rejected in the conviction that a durable recovery was possible only through a return to strict neoclassical orthodoxy. Managing the franc Poincare examines French monetary management from 1928 to 1936 in order to explain this...