Volatility and Macroeconomic Paradigms for Rich and Poor

Abstract

Michael Bruno has left us with legacies that include an empiricism free of ideology, a curiosity about what the real facts are, a scepticism about the conventional wisdom, and a willingness to listen to a wide range of opinions. His interest in macroeconomics resulted in one of the most influential books of the 1980s, The Economics of Worldwide Stagflation, which examined why the conventional Phillips curve had been turned on its head by institutional mechanisms. His interest in macroeconomic policy was applied to real life when he led the successful Israeli heterodox inflation stabilization effort of 1985, first as adviser and then as central bank governor. As Chief Economist of the World Bank, he emphasized research and economic and sector work relative to lending activities and external relations. In research, while Chief Economist, he showed how high inflation was robustly and negatively related to economic growth, while there was little evidence of a robust relationship between inflation and growth at low rates of inflation (say below 40 per cent a year). Michael Bruno’s legacy lives on in the many people whom he inspired by being a good and curious listener and a thoughtful and non-ideological researcher. While inflation was the central macroeconomic issue of the 1980s,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 57 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.