Six Crises of the World Economy: Globalization and Economic Turbulence from the 1970s to the COVID-19 Pandemic

This book masterfully analyzes the last six crises of the global economy. It evidences that the crises are the most important phenomenon in economic life, and it highlights how crucial it is for economists to understand their causes and development. The book coherently combines a thoughtful theoretical analysis of crisis theory with a profound empirical analysis of their stubborn occurrence. Readers will be convinced of the relevance of the global economy as the righteous unit of economic analysis despite the dominance of the national economies. Sergio Cmara Izquierdo, Professor of Political Economy and Head of the Department of Economics, Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco 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 activityas measured by investment, industrial production, trade, or unemploymentin 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. Jos A. Tapia Granados is Professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, USA. He teaches courses on international political economy, political economy of climate change, and social development. Trained in medicine, public health, and economics, his work and research experiences include positions at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Michigan and the World Health Organization. His papers have appeared in PNAS, Journal of Health Economics, Demography, Research in Political Economy, and other journals

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Evidence of Six Crises -- Capital Formation and Output of the Global Economy -- Consumption -- Unemployment -- Monetary Aggregates -- Economic Activity as Measured by a Chemical Index -- Profitability -- Stylized Facts -- How Many Crisis years and How Many Crises? -- 3 Globalization, National Economies, and Global Crises -- From World War II to the "First Oil Crisis" of the Mid-1970s -- The "Second Oil Crisis" of the Early 1980s -- The Crisis of the Early 1990s and the Demise of the Soviet Bloc and the USSR -- The Crisis of the Turn of the Century -- The Great Recession and the 2010s -- The International Synchronization of Business Cycles -- The Demographic Globalization -- 4 Conceptual Issues-Depressions, Recessions, Crisis Cycles, Business Cycles -- Marx and Engels -- The Marxists and the NBER -- Mainstream Economics-Keynesians and Monetarists -- 5 A World Economy -- The World Economy as a Historical Notion -- The Management of the World Economy in the Twenty-First Century -- 6 Why Do Crises Occur? Causal Theories -- Say's Law and the General Glut Controversy -- Karl Marx on Crises of Overproduction -- From Crises Commerciales to Astronomical and Biological Cycles -- Wesley Mitchell -- Economic Orthodoxy Before and During the Great Depression -- From the Great Depression to Keynesian Economics and Monetarism -- Economic Data and Macroeconomic Theories -- Business Cycles Persist -- Income Distribution as Cause of Recession -- Macroeconomics in the Dark Age -- Marxists and Radicals -- The Revival of Keynesianism -- Economics on Recessions Since the 1990s -- An Outline of a Causal Model -- Cycles and Tendencies -- Concluding Remarks -- 7 Nature, Oil, Crises -- Climate Change, the Global Economy, and the Oikeios of Jason Moore -- Peak Oil.