We start by introducing the key ingredients in macroeconomic modelling: investment, production, income and consumption, and explain the corresponding equilibrium conditions. Modelling these quantities in discrete time, we describe the multiplier-accelerator model, a classic model of macroeconomic dynamics, and an example of a second-order recurrence equation. We then embark on describing how to solve linear constant-coefficient second-order recurrence equations in general. The general solution is the sum of the solution of a corresponding homogeneous equation and a particular solution. There is a general method for determining the solution of the homogeneous equation, involving the solution of a corresponding quadratic equation known as the auxiliary equation.

The Introduction opens the book by presenting the key issues at stake and explaining the structure of the book. The purpose of this book is to advance the understanding on the macroeconomic fundamentals of decarbonisation. It identifies the major economic transformations and the roadblocks requiring policy intervention. It develops a macroeconomic policy agenda for decarbonisation that would achieve the climate goals of the international community.

In this chapter, Michael McKinnie explores how methods drawn from the social sciences can help theatre scholars formulate different, and more systematic, ways to think about theatre and its place in the world. Social scientists make ‘moves’ with their material that theatre scholars are unlikely to make with theirs. When transposed to analysis of theatre, these moves suggest different, sometimes counter-intuitive, approaches. ‘Tricks’, an idea taken from sociologist Howard S. Becker, are formal procedures that help draw out theatre’s relationality at subsequent stages of the research process. Thinking about theatre’s place in the world poses a wide variety of problems that TaPS is not always equipped to tackle. Theatre scholars need to make different moves, and formulate new tricks, to begin to address them.

This chapter provides an overview of macroeconomics, which is the study of the economy as a whole. We first discuss what macroeconomics is about. Then we describe how different types of economies (market economy, planned economy, and mixed economy) work to solve economic problems in human society. Then we discuss how economic modeling helps to understand economic phenomena. Finally, the chapter provides a brief history of macroeconomic thought.

Chapter 5 provides a fragmentary introduction to macroeconomics that shows that highlights some of the philosophical questions macroeconomic models raise and relates them to equilibrium theory. Section 1 discusses how growth theory is linked to equilibrium theory. Section 2 considers how growth theory can be adapted to address questions about economic fluctuations, including recessions. Section 3 focuses on a simple influential Keynesian model of economic fluctuations. Section 4 discusses a specific relationship between employment and the rate of inflation (the Phillips Curve) that highlights methodological issues concerning causal inference and microfoundations that have led many economists to reject Keynesian economics. Section 5 develops these methodological issues further, highlighting the role of identities in macroeconomics.

The government of Shinzo Abe represents an important turning point in Japanese politics and political economy. Abe became the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, and his government enacted important reforms under the banner of “Abenomics.” In this introductory chapter, we provide a broad review of the Abe government and its policies and point out several apparent puzzles to motivate the volume. We argue that the Abe government is the clearest manifestation of a new Japanese political system that represents a full transition away from the 1955 system. The new system is characterized by a strong prime minister with centralized authority, careful management of the prime minister’s popularity, and a focus on policies with broad, popular appeal. Abe utilized and strengthened Japan’s new political institutions to implement significant policy changes across a wide range of issue areas, including monetary and fiscal policy, the labor market, corporate governance, agricultural reforms, and national security.

focuses on longer-term life planning and the role of learning involved in it, drawing specifically on the work of the macroeconomist Robert Lucas. Taking one ethnographic example from Taiwan, the author asks questions about Lucas’s account of human capital, examining among other things questions about fate in economic life and processes of modernisation in seemingly traditional societies.

In the framework of a critical illustration of the contemporary history of economics, this chapter illustrates the development of the neoclassical synthesis, from Hicks to Modigliani; its appropriation of the Phillips curve, some Marshallian varieties of the neoclassical synthesis, the developments of growth theory since Solow’s model, stressing the theoretical limits of these developments. A brief appendix synthetically provides an algebraic representation of these developments, while stressing their limits. A final section surveys the variegated field of development analysis.

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.