Transformation of the World Economy

This revised, extended and updated edition of Robert Solomon's well-received The Transformation of the World Economy, 1980-93, assesses the remarkable changes in the world economy in recent decades. The impact of marketisation and globalisation in both industry and finance at regional and global levels are analysed and discussed. Dramatic changes in economic policy and philosophy have occurred in most areas of the world's economies. The United States and Britain experienced Reaganomics and Thatcherism, followed by Clintonomics and Blair's 'New Labour'. Continental Europe moved, with some traumas, to the Euro. Eastern Europe and Russia have become, painfully, countries in transition to market economies. China now calls itself a 'socialist market economy'. Japan experienced a 'bubble economy' followed by its worst postwar recession. Japan's Asian neighbours, after a growth 'miracle', fell into crisis in 1997. Latin America experienced a debt crisis and a 'lost decade' in the 1980s, attracted capital again in the 1990s, and then felt the contagion effect of the Mexican and Asian crises. Meanwhile the world economy became more highly integrated - globalised - under the impact of computer technology and the information revolution. These and other transformations are analysed in their political contexts in this wide-ranging book.