ИПИ Библиотека

The purpose of this book is to enable the reader to understand haw the macroeconomy works, why it does not seem to be working as well as it once did, and what we may be able to do about it. The book presents the basic topics that all students of macroeconomics must know: national income accounting, theories of aggregate demand, consumption and investment; and the demand for money. However, because my interest in writing the book was to deal with the unresolved issues that make macroeconomics such a vibrant and contentions field today, I have given the book a policy and supply-side focus.

I have tried to make this book as simple as I could without sacrificing theoretical correctness. The student who reads it most likely will have had an introductory economics course but even that, strictly speaking, is unnecessary. All the material from the introductory course is reintroduced in the first three chapters, so the book can be read by someone with no previous economic training. Mathematically, the student needs no more than high-school algebra and the ability to work with graphs and figures.

Samuel A. Morley

Dr. Samuel Morley is a senior visiting research fellow at International Food Policy Research Institute ( IFPRI). He has published monographs on poverty and distribution in Latin America, conditioned cash transfers and the effect of CAFTA in Central America. During his 25 years at the University of Wisconsin and Vanderbilt he taught the graduate macro course and published books on inflation and macroeconomics, and wrote a number of papers on the role of finance in macro models. Since he came to IFPRI he has developed CGE models with a regional focus for Peru, a trade focus for the analysis of CAFTA, and most recently a CGE model with working capital for Honduras.