Fiscal states, defined by their capacity to tax and borrow, had to negotiate the dilemma of economic interdependence – how to balance the benefits of economic interdependence with the desire for as much strategic autonomy as possible. How different governments negotiated this dilemma revealed much about their position within the international economic order. Some states sought to repatriate debt by borrowing from their own citizens, others saw advantages in borrowing abroad. Fiscal capacity was shaped by economic interdependence and became yet another site of competition between states. States compared their fiscal capacity by looking at bond yields, savings rates, and trade. New categories of comparison such as national income emerged in the context of great power competition.

This chapter tackles two additional activities of the pollster as fortune teller. The first is the assessment and prediction of government approval ratings. As we have already seen in Chapter 8, approval ratings are extremely important in predicting elections. There is both an art and science to the analysis of such measures. Here, we want to lay out an analytical framework which will allow pollsters to assess both structural and policy factors related to approval ratings and then how to utilize multiple methods to triangulate future outcomes. We will focus on the Biden administration circa August 2022. Ultimately, a fairly large component of a pollster’s workload is the continual assessment of government initiatives and their convergence (or not) with what people want.

The second is a discussion of more context-based analysis. The pollster has an important role in helping decision-makers understand the bigger picture. Here, broader demographic and social trends help gird such analysis.

Macroeconomic data is important both for macroeconomic research and for the functioning of the economy itself. In this chapter, we discuss the principles and practices of macroeconomic data construction. Emphasis is on measures of output or income (e.g., GDP), price and inflation (e.g., CPI), employment and labor participation (e.g., unemployment rate), and money supply.

This chapter provides a short introduction to the main economic approaches to the study of the long period, by focusing on the pioneer works of Malthus, Marx, Marshall, Kondratiev, Rostow and Solow. This allows us also to provide some genealogical elements to Galor's Unified Growth Theory.

Since the board game Settlers of Catan was first released in 1995 it has sold more than 25 million copies. It works like this. Play starts after tiles of different land types – mountains producing iron ore, pastures sustaining sheep, and so on – are laid out – and numbers between 2 and 12 are randomly assigned to each tile. Every player picks a spot on the board to establish his or her first village. When the dice is rolled, a player receives a resource that matches the number on the dice if his or her village is located next to that resource. So, if the pasture next to my village has 9 on it, and the two dice thrown add up to 9, I receive one sheep. Those resources I then use to buy roads and villages and cities – and so expand my empire.

The Chinese economy demonstrated significant vigor from the eleventh century to the nineteenth. This period of nine centuries achieved remarkable progress in implementing the imperial examination system, improving literacy, establishing private landownership, developing market institutions, adopting new crops and improved farming technology, strengthening the lineage order, and lifting ordinary people’s capacity to deal with risks. According to the optimistic view, this is also the period during which two economic revolutions, the Tang–Song and Ming–Qing transitions, took place, marked by continuous economic growth and improvement in living standards for the population.1 To other scholars, however, this long period of quantitative growth was largely achieved through population increase, preventing China from escaping the “Malthusian trap.” That is, while the total size of the Chinese economy may have grown due to the rising population, per capita living standards failed to rise above historical norms and might have even declined during the long period. This period’s achievement and impact were nothing comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution which started in eighteenth-century Britain.

Support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s owed much to its willingness to “stand up” against external interference in Chinese affairs, whether by Japan, the USA, or any other colonial power. This nationalist agenda may have been the decisive factor in its victory during the civil war, and it continues to be a key driver of popular support for CCP rule.

In this chapter, we describe the two components of the database of a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. The first is the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM). The SAM database reports the value of all transactions in an economy during a period of time. The data are organized in a logical framework that provides a visual display of the transactions as a circular flow of national income and spending. The SAM’s microeconomic data describe transactions made by each agent in a region’s economy. When aggregated, the SAM’s micro data describe the region’s macro economy. The SAM’s micro data can be used to calculate descriptive statistics on an economy’s structure. We describe three extensions to a SAM: non-diagonal make matrices, domestic trade margins, and multi-region input-output tables. A CGE model database also includes elasticity parameters that describe the responsiveness of producers and consumers to changes in income and relative prices. The role of these parameters in driving model results can be evaluated in a sensitivity analysis.

What was the contribution of European integration to the economic history of Western Europe? Also on this issue, the EU often claims to have been both important and successful while, in fact, there is surprisingly little research on its economic effects. This chapter argues that the EC did indeed contribute to growing material prosperity in the member states during the Cold War. However, this contribution remained rather modest, at well below half of 1 per cent additional GDP growth per annum. The European Community had greater weight in relative terms during the 1970s and 1980s than during the 1950s and 1960s, even this has been generally overlooked to date. It thus played a greater role once the post-war boom was over, and, without it, the slump would have been even worse. Those aspects aside, the location of the economic within the integration process remained curiously vague during the Cold War. Economic integration was on the one hand an end in itself to promote prosperity; on the other it was always just a means to achieve overarching political objectives.

In academic writing from Green perspectives, work on the economy is perhaps the most well developed. This is understandable given that the economy constitutes the metabolism between human society and the wider ecosystem of which it is a part in terms of materials, resources, energy and waste. This chapter explores the critiques that Greens provide of the contemporary economy before considering alternative visions of a Green economy, as well as thinking about how to get from one to the other. Hence, I first outline Green critiques of today’s global economy, in particular its ecological unsustainability and commitment to infinite growth on a finite planet. We then look at what a Green economy might look like and how this departs markedly from ideas which invoke the same label propagated by institutions like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and World Bank. Finally, we explore the range of strategies Greens employ and propose to build a green economy.

GDP is the most influential indicator in the world. It is published all over the world and there is a powerful logistical infrastructure (the "GDP multinational") which involves national statistical offices, international institutes, policy researchers, academics, media and society. Yet GDP is not a good measure of sustainability or well-being and this is why hundreds of alternatives have been proposed in the last decades. This "Beyond-GDP cottage industry" is expanding all the time but there is no sign that it is going to threaten the dominance of GDP anytime soon. Replacing GDP by 2030 provides a strategy to overcome this situation by 2030 and Chapter 1 provides an outline of the arguments made in the book.

GDP is the most influential indicator in the world. It is published all over the world and there is a powerful logistical infrastructure (the "GDP multinational") which involves national statistical offices, international institutes, policy researchers, academics, media and society. Yet GDP is not a good measure of sustainability or well-being and this is why hundreds of alternatives have been proposed in the last decades. This "Beyond-GDP cottage industry" is expanding all the time but there is no sign that it is going to threaten the dominance of GDP anytime soon. Replacing GDP by 2030 provides a strategy to overcome this situation by 2030 and Chapter 1 provides an outline of the arguments made in the book.

GDP was not always as successful as it is today. National income accounting has existed for centuries but only started to take off in the 1930s and 1940s in a handful of countries. These new macroeconomic statistics proved to be useful in managing the aftermath of the Great Depression and were invaluable in planning during the Second World War. Building on these successes, the period after the war proved to be the "Golden Age" for macroeconomics and its key indicator GDP. Growth targets were set by many governments and economists became the most influential policy advisors. A powerful institutionalised community emerged that is based on a coherent policy science (macroeconomics), accounting framework (the System of National Accounts, SNA) and a key indicator (GDP). The most important feature of any community is a common language, and the SNA serves as the dictionary and grammar book for macroeconomics. Whether you are a macroeconomist in Sri Lanka, Senegal or Slovenia, all use this common language. Macroeconomic thinking was in turmoil in the 1970s and after the 2008 financial crisis, but the underlying language has endured.