South Africa was one of the fastest growing economies of the 1930s. This paper seeks to identify the roots of this macroeconomic outperformance and reconcile it with the country's delayed departure from the gold standard, such departure having typically been the event inaugurating recovery from the slump. It emphasizes South Africa's dependence on gold production, which gave the economy an additional boost from currency depreciation, over and above that felt in other countries, when depreciation finally took place. This highlights the paradox of South African policy makers' resistance to currency depreciation, as epitomized by the report of the Select Committee on the Gold Standard in 1932.

Over time, there has been a tendency for political jurisdictions and residents to converge on a single currency. Monopoly over seigniorage is a source of political power and a valuable lifeline when sovereignty is threatened. Moreover a uniform currency, insofar as it is free of counterparty and liquidity risk, facilitates economic activity. But will digital currencies now reverse this trend toward uniformity, given the apparent ease with which they can be created? The information sensitivity of those units, evident in the fact that they trade at varying prices, suggests that they do not yet provide the core functions of money. So-called stable coins are intended to bridge this gap, but whether they can be successfully scaled up and maintain their stability is doubtful. The one unit that can clearly meet these challenges is central bank digital currency. But there would be both costs and benefits of moving in this direction.

I ask whether President Donald Trump's tariffs are fit for purpose: that is, whether they are appropriately designed to advance his goals. My answer is negative.

Greece’s third economic programme has been relatively successful, but before it can return to private market financing, the country will require more official debt relief. This column introduces a new CEPR Policy Insight which asks how much debt relief is required and how it should be delivered. Any debt relief package for Greece that wishes to avoid shifting the burden of repayment several generations into the future will need to include some degree of face-value debt relief.

The recent reversal of capital flows to emerging markets has pointed up the continuing relevance of the sudden stop problem. This paper analyzes the sudden stops in capital flows to emerging markets since 1991. It shows that the frequency and duration of sudden stops have remained unchanged, but that the relative importance of different factors in their incidence is now different. Global factors appear to have become more important relative to country-specific characteristics and policies. In addition, sudden stops now tend to affect different parts of the world simultaneously, rather than bunching regionally. Stronger macroeconomic and financial frameworks have allowed policy makers to respond more flexibly, but these more flexible responses have not mitigated the impact of the phenomenon. These findings suggest that the challenge of understanding and coping with capital-flow volatility is far from fully met.

In this paper I ask not how scholarship on the Great Depression informed the policy response to the Great Recession, but rather how the experience of the Great Recession will inform scholarship on the Great Depression. "Every generation writes its own history of the past," the historian H.M. Stephens of the University of California, Berkeley observed in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1916. In this spirit, I will ask how the current generation is likely to rewrite the history of the 1920s and 1930s given the crisis through which we just lived.

In his speech at the Gaidar Forum 2016 author for the most urgent problems of the world economy. According to him, will be observed the acceleration of growth in developed countries and slower - in developing countries. Consider the economic difficulties that could face the major players in the global economic field -. United States, EU, Russia, China, Brazil, Turkey, etc. However, the author believes that the current economic situation is unlikely to result in a massive political backlash.

Economic analysis of the world crisis of the 1930s, known as the Great Depression in the United States, continues to expand more than 80 years after its onset. Similarly, the Great Recession (2007-2009 in the United States) shows every sign of joining it as a major focus of economic historians. Barry Eichengreen’s book, Hall of Mirrors, sets a new standard by combining the two into a set of chronological parallel histories focused on policies and policy makers and the ways they used and misused history. He explores the lead ups to the two crises, the passage of regulations and the omission of regulations that enabled the crises, and most centrally, the reasons why policy makers in 2008 were able to avoid another Great Depression but still allowed a deeper and longer recession than necessary. The histories are told with attention to the details of economic analysis and the contexts of domestic and world politics. Eichengreen’s work is qualitative but informed by quantitative analysis and his own extensive research on the Great Depression and financial crises of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Remembering Inflation. ByBrigitte Granville. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. xvi + 272 pp. Figures, tables, references, index. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN: 978-0-691-14540-2. - Volume 88 Issue 4

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