Economics and Politics in Global Governance

Catalog description

The political and economic dynamics at work in a country both establish the conditions leading up to crises and frame the policy choices available to resolve it. This course addresses these interactive dynamics by combining the research and career expertise of the discipline of Political Science and Macroeconomics and Financial Regulation in a team-taught course. It explores how financial crises have been managed in world history by paying particular attention to the way governance structures operate to help or hurt the outcome. The emphasis combines a sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of the intervention as well as the politics inside each International Financial Institution involved. Specifically, the course begins by reviewing the history of the Federal Reserve and the gold standard, the Great Depression and the operations of the Bretton Woods System. Next, it looks at the sovereign debt crises of the 1980s and the International Monetary Fund. It picks up the history with Japan's crisis in the 1990s and the later interventions of the International Monetary Fund, Bank for International Settlements, Federal Reserve, European Commission, and European Central Bank to the present era. Offered as POSC 370N and POSC 470N .