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"Following the Civil War, large corporations emerged in the United States and became intent on maximizing their power and profits at all costs. Political corruption permeated American society as those corporate entities grew and spread across the country, leaving bribery and exploitation in their wake. This alliance between corporate America and the political class came to a screeching halt during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when the U.S. workers in the railroad, mining, canal, and manufacturing industries called a general strike against monopoly capitalism and brought the country to an economic standstill. In The St. Louis Commune of 1877 Mark Kruger tells the riveting story of how workers assumed political control in St. Louis, Missouri. Kruger examines the roots of the St. Louis Commune-focusing on the 1848 German revolution, the Paris Commune, and the First International. Not only was 1877 the first instance of a general strike in U.S. history; it was also the first time workers took control of a major American city and the first time a city was ruled by a communist party"--

The International Monetary Fund (IMF, or the Fund) has undergone a number of significant policy changes and reforms in the wake of the global financial crisis. Most notably, in December 2015, the United States approved long-delayed legislation to increase the representation of developing countries in the Fund's governance structure. The vital progress on quota shares has finally allowed for a resumption of wider and increasingly critical discussion of the strategic role of the IMF in the post-crisis world. This paper aims to relaunch the debate by assessing the recent reforms and changes, identifying areas where progress is still needed and proposing solutions. Our findings suggest that, while much has been accomplished by the Fund's management and staff since the global crisis, there is still a pressing need for member countries to push for further reforms if the IMF is to remain a relevant player in the rapidly evolving global economic and financial system. Emerging-market economies remain under-represented at the Fund and continue to perceive the IMF as biased against them, undermining the influence of its advice, despite the increase in their quota share and changes to improve the quality, efficiency and even-handedness of the IMF's surveillance and lending. In advanced economies, where the Fund has traditionally had little traction on national policies, the institution faces the challenge of managing and communicating its independence in programs involving large shareholders. We propose reforms aimed at improving country representation, granting the IMF real operational independence and enhancing its catalytic role.

AbstractGiven its size and importance for global commodity markets, the question of how fast China can grow over the medium term is an important one. Using a Cobb–Douglas production function, we decompose the growth of trend GDP into those of the capital stock, labour, human capital and total factor productivity (TFP) and then forecast trend output growth out to 2030 using a bottom‐up approach based on forecasts that we build for each one of these factors. Our paper distinguishes itself from existing work in that we construct a forecast of Chinese TFP growth based on the aggregation of forecasts of its key determinants. In addition, our analysis is based on a carefully constructed estimate of the Chinese productive capital stock and a measure of human capital (based on Chinese wage survey data) that better reflects the returns to education in China. Our results suggest that Chinese GDP growth will slow from around 7% currently to approximately 5% by 2030, consistent with a gradual rebalancing of the Chinese economy characterized by a decline in the investment rate. Moreover, our findings underscore the growing importance of TFP growth as a driver of Chinese growth.

Given China's complex monetary policy framework, the People's Bank of China's (PBOC) monetary policy rule is difficult to infer from its observed behaviour. In this paper, we adopt a novel approach, using text analytics to estimate and interpret the unknown component in the PBOC's reaction function. We extract the unknown component in a McCallum-type monetary policy rule for China through a state-space model framework using a set of summary topics extracted from official PBOC documents. Then, using a set of sectional topics extracted from the same set of PBOC documents, we provide this component with its rightful interpretation. Our results show that this unknown component is related to the Chinese government's agenda of supply-side structural reforms, suggesting that monetary policy is used as a tool to achieve structural reform objectives. Structural vector autoregression (SVAR) results confirm these findings by providing evidence of the importance of the government's supply-side reform objectives for the conduct of monetary policy.