World Economy

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize joins a leading expert on the global economy to present an incisive narrative of the risks and opportunities that are emerging as the balance of power shifts around the world between governments and markets—and the battle over globalization comes front and center. The Commanding Heights is essential for understanding the struggle over the "new rules of the game" for the twenty-first century. Also a PBS Series.

This book is about the crises of the world economy that have occurred from the 1970s to the present day. It makes the specific case that the global economy has experienced six crises during this 50-year period. Crises of the global economy are periods of substantial slowdown in world economic activity—as measured by investment, industrial production, trade, or unemployment—in which many national economies are technically in recession. To pose the existence of crises of the global economy implies that the world economy is a real entity with its own dynamics; it implies also that the usual approach that views national economies as the appropriate units of economic analysis has major limitations. The author provides data illustrating the global and regional manifestations of these crises of the world economy, elaborates on the concepts of world economy and economic crisis, and discusses the theories that have been used to explain them. The book shows how these recurrent global crises are discrete, countable phenomena, distinct states of an entity that can be appropriately referred to as the world or global economy, or world capitalism.

The World Economy brings together two reference works by Angus Maddison: The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, first published in 2001 and The World Economy: Historical Statistics, published in 2003.

What is blockchain? What is Bitcoin? How can central banks be instrumental in guiding a nation's economy? What are the underlying causes of trade deficits? Do trade wars actually help the domestic economy? How has the behavior of millennials and Generation Z affected the global economy? Find out all this and more in this definitive guide to the world economy.