Political economy is the study of production and trade and their relations with law, custom and government; and with the distribution of national income and wealth. As a discipline, political economy originated in moral philosophy, in the 18th century, to explore the administration of states' wealth, with "political" signifying the Greek word polity and "economy" signifying the Greek word οἰκονομία. The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats, such as François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781). There is also a tradition which is almost as long, of critique of political economy.
Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science". Its content includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways – using standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economy.
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and public policy analyst, who is University Professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is a former member and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support of Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists, and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Protectionism is the economic policy of restricting imports from other countries through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, import quotas, and a variety of other government regulations. Proponents argue that protectionist policies shield the producers, businesses, and workers of the import-competing sector in the country from foreign competitors; however, they also reduce trade and adversely affect consumers in general, and harm the producers and workers in export sectors, both in the country implementing protectionist policies and in the countries protected against.
The Washington Consensus is a set of ten economic policy prescriptions considered to constitute the "standard" reform package promoted for crisis-wracked developing countries by Washington, D.C.-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and United States Department of the Treasury. The term was first used in 1989 by English economist John Williamson. The prescriptions encompassed free-market promoting policies in such areas as macroeconomic stabilization, economic opening with respect to both trade and investment, and the expansion of market forces within the domestic economy.
Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth-creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline.
The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) is a division of Johns Hopkins University based in Washington, D.C., United States, with campuses in Bologna, Italy, and Nanjing, China. It is consistently ranked one of the top graduate schools for international relations in the world. The institution is devoted to the study of international affairs, economics, diplomacy, and policy research and education.
Government failure, in the context of public economics, is an economic inefficiency caused by a government intervention, if the inefficiency would not exist in a true free market. It can be viewed in contrast to a market failure, which is an economic inefficiency that results from the free market itself, and can potentially be corrected through government regulation. The idea of government failure is associated with the policy argument that, even if particular markets may not meet the standard conditions of perfect competition required to ensure social optimality, government intervention may make matters worse rather than better.
International economics is concerned with the effects upon economic activity from international differences in productive resources and consumer preferences and the international institutions that affect them. It seeks to explain the patterns and consequences of transactions and interactions between the inhabitants of different countries, including trade, investment and transaction.
Randall S. Kroszner is a former member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System of the United States. He was chairman of its Committee on Supervision and Regulation of Banking Institutions during the global financial crisis. He took office on March 1, 2006 to fill an unexpired term, and stepped down on January 21, 2009. Kroszner has been professor of economics at the University of Chicago since the 1990s, with various leaves, and named Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2009, and serves as a senior advisor for Patomak Partners.
Helen Dolly Hughes was an Australian economist. She was Professor Emerita at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney. Hughes has been described as Australia's greatest female economist.
Warner Max Corden AC is an Australian economist. He is mostly known for his work on the theory of trade protection, including the development of the dutch disease model of international trade. He has also been active in the fields of international monetary systems, macroeconomic policies of developing countries and Australian economics. Corden, originally German, emigrated from Nazi Germany to Melbourne in 1939.
Sho-Chieh Tsiang was a Chinese-American economist. He was born in China but resided primarily in the United States from 1949 until his death. He also resided in Taiwan in 1948 and in the 1980s.
Sharyn O’Halloran is the George Blumenthal Professor of Political Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs and serves as the Senior Vice Dean and Chief Academic Officer at the School of Professional Studies at Columbia University in New York City. A political scientist and economist by training, O’Halloran has written extensively on issues related to the political economy of international trade and finance, regulation and institutional reform, economic growth and democratic transitions, and the political representation of minorities.
Malcolm D. Knight is a Canadian economist, policymaker and banker. He is currently Visiting Professor of Finance at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation. From 2008 to 2012, Knight was Vice Chairman of Deutsche Bank Group where he was responsible for developing and coordinating the bank's global approach to issues in financial regulation, supervision, and financial stability. He served as general manager of the Bank for International Settlements from 2003 to 2008 and as Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada (1999-2003), after holding senior positions at the International Monetary Fund (1975-1999).
The Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is also the economic counsellor and director of the fund's Research Department and is responsible for providing independent advice to the fund on its policy issues, integrating ideas of the research in the design of policies, conveying these ideas to the policymakers inside and outside the fund and managing all research done at IMF.
Rakesh Mohan is an Indian economist and former Deputy Governor of Reserve Bank of India. He is the Vice Chairperson of Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He was appointed in November 2012 as an Executive Director of the IMF for a three-year term, and in April 2010, he joined Nestlé India, as a non-executive director.
Carlos A. Végh is a Uruguayan academic economist who, since 2013, is the Fred H. Sanderson Professor of International Economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and holds a joint appointment with Johns Hopkins' Department of Economics. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1998. He was the World Bank Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean from February 1, 2017 to June 30, 2019, while on leave from Johns Hopkins. He was previously a Professor of Economics and Vice-Chair of Undergraduate Studies at UCLA (1996-2005) and Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland (2005-2013). His research work on monetary and fiscal policy in emerging and developing countries has been highly influential in both academic and policy circles. In particular, his work on fiscal procyclicality in emerging markets has been instrumental in generating a copious literature on the subject, which has influenced the adoption of fiscal rules in many emerging markets.
John Phillip Lipsky is an American economist. He was the acting Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from May to July 2011. He assumed the post of Acting Managing Director after Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in May 2011 accused of sexual assault. After the appointment of Christine Lagarde he returned to his post as the First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF. He retired from the IMF in November 2011 and is currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Adriana Kugler is a Colombian-American economist and professor of public policy at Georgetown University. She served as the Chief Economist to U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis from September 6, 2011 to January 4, 2013.
