Analysing economic crises, and creating a new era of sustainable development

Following the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the subsequent Great Depression, Keynes (1936) set out to write a book that would change ‘the way the world thinks about its economic problems’. Published in February 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is best known for advocating active fiscal policy to get economies out of recession. Keynes also, though, reflected on the unstable nature of the capitalist economy, its reliance on the ‘animal spirits’ of investors, the dangers of herd behaviour by traders on stock markets, and that ‘when the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done’. Ten years after the 2007–2008 international financial crisis, and the consequent global recession in 2009 – the first since the one Keynes was reacting to, in the 1930s – we await a similar work that will change ‘the way the world thinks about its economic problems’. Many books and articles have analysed the crisis, and many have proposed solutions – which today need to include tackling the climate emergency, as well as economic crises. And perhaps with the huge growth of the fields of economics and political economy, no single work could today repeat the role of Keynes’s 1936 classic. Today we probably do need to build up a body of work to play that role. This issue of the International Review of Applied Economics certainly includes several contributions to such a body of work.