Introduction

Abstract

Fifteen years ago it is unlikely that the subject of this volume would have provoked serious controversy among leading central bankers. Confronted with the present high unemployment figures and moderate inflation rates most economists would have soon agreed that European economies need to be actively reflated. Today these same figures, however, appear to provide the grounds for precisely the opposite policies. This 180 degree turn in economic thinking, noticed by Schlesinger, marks the supersession of the Keynesian cum Phillips-curve consensus of the late 1960s by the pragmatic monetarist consensus of the early eighties. In practice this entails that countercyclical stabilisation has been abandoned and replaced by structural anti-inflation policies based on rules for monetary growth.