Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE's missing macroeconomy

Mark Blyth and Matthias Matthijs

Review of International Political Economy, 2017, vol. 24, issue 2, 203-231

Abstract: Britain's BREXIT vote and Trump's victory in the US presidential elections sent shockwaves through the Western liberal establishment, including academia. Both events suggest yet another ‘rethinking’ of International Political Economy (IPE). Yet we have been here before. After the global financial crisis of 2008, ‘Open Economy Politics’ (OEP) was criticized for being unable to either anticipate or adequately explain the global financial crisis. Now that IPE has been caught short twice in a decade, any rethinking must go beyond critique and beyond OEP. To stop being surprised, we argue that IPE needs to shift its focus from micro-foundations back to macro-effects. IPE today strangely lacks an appreciation for the global macroeconomics that drives the outcomes it has such difficulty explaining, such as recurring financial bubbles, increasing levels of inequality, and the global rise of populism. Bringing the global macroeconomy back into the IPE, we argue, is a necessary corrective.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2017.1308417 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:24:y:2017:i:2:p:203-231

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rrip20

DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2017.1308417

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Political Economy is currently edited by Gregory Chin, Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Kevin Gallagher, Ilene Grabel and Cornelia Woll

More articles in Review of International Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().