Central bank mandates have evolved with time beyond price stability and economic growth objectives to include financial stability, financial inclusion, and, more recently, climate change in some jurisdictions. This chapter analyses the potential role of central banks in dealing with increasingly significant climate risk. Existing literature suggests that physical and transition risks from climate change are key risks to macroeconomic and financial stability. The chapter argues that central banks should, therefore, at a minimum, incorporate climate risk in their macroeconomic and financial stability risk assessments to determine appropriate policy and regulatory tools for addressing them within the boundaries of existing mandates and underpinned by a transparent framework of decision-making and accountability. Central banks should avoid mission creep by remaining focused on achieving clear statutory objectives, while at the same time avoiding possible legal and credibility risks from doing nothing or too little, too late. The chapter further argues that central banks in emerging and developing economies face peculiar challenges in assessing the dynamics of climate risk, estimating potential impacts, and calibrating tools to address potential impacts on price or financial stability. It concludes by recognising progress at the international level and calls for additional guidance, particularly for central banks in emerging and developing economies, to help design proportional and effective central bank policy and regulatory measures to help contain significant climate risks they face.

Inflation is introduced as a possible resolution of the flatness and horizon puzzles. Scalar field dynamics are discussed, and both exact constant-equation-of-state solutions and slow-roll inflationary solutions are presented. This chapter also includes a description of quadratic, Starobinsky, and Higgs inflation, before discussing the end of inflation and reheating. A rather drastically different alternative, ekpyrosis, is also presented. The associated cyclic model of the universe is introduced, and the difficulties in describing cosmic bounces from a contracting to an expanding phase are analyzed.

Describes the major research project on stagflation led by Meade from 1978 to 1987 and his concurrent activities, especially his involvement with the new Social Democratic Party.

Climate change presents significant risks to economic and financial stability, compelling central banks to address its impacts on inflation and output. As climate-induced disruptions – such as extreme weather events and carbon taxes – affect price stability, central banks must adapt their monetary policies to mitigate these risks. Climate change can trigger inflationary pressures, alter labor productivity, and impact capital stocks, influencing the natural interest rate and overall supply. The ecological transition also poses challenges, potentially causing stagflationary episodes that complicate central banks’ dual mandates of price and output stability. Consequently, central banks are increasingly integrating climate risks into their frameworks, with the aim of maintaining their inflation-targeting objectives while supporting the green transition. Effective policy responses require a deep understanding of climate-related risks, enabling central banks to adjust their monetary tools and align their operations with sustainability goals. Addressing these challenges becomes essential to strengthening economic resilience in the face of climate change.

United States sanctions undermine Iran’s ability to import critical agricultural products, especially wheat. Despite long-standing exemptions for humanitarian trade, sanctions have fragmented Iran’s wheat-supply chain, deterring major commodities traders, interrupting payment channels, and delaying shipments. While Iran does continue to import wheat to meet its food security needs, commodities traders can extract a higher price from Iranian importers, citing the unique challenges of exporting to the country. In this way, sanctions contribute to structurally higher prices for wheat in Iran. The country’s growing dependence on wheat imports, driven by demographic changes and worsening climate conditions, has made these disruptions more acute. Efforts to mitigate these effects, such as humanitarian trade arrangements launched by multiple US administrations, have largely failed due to bureaucratic inefficiencies and financial sector overcompliance. As a result, Iranian households have had to contend with significant food inflation, even for staples such as bread. Considering that the negative humanitarian effects of sanctions are both persistent and systemic and have been long known to US officials, it is difficult to conclude that the effects are truly unintended.

Chapter 3 tackles issues that are not necessarily directly related to the business cycle but will be important at various points in the historical section of the volume that covers every US business cycle since 1954. These include inflation, monetary policy, fiscal policy, tradeable securities, and secular stagnation. Because it is so poorly understood and since it will play a key role in the cycles of the 1970s and 1980s, more than half of this space is devoted solely to understanding inflation. The idea that it is a function of money supply growth is challenged, and a new set of definitions and classifications is offered.

This chapter focuses on past literature on resource-wealthy countries and examines how alluvial diamond wealth may present unique challenges for states. State theory is discussed, and the “opaque” state concept is compared and contrasted with these. Then, an overview of different arguments that have been made to explain the relative decline of Zimbabwean institutions is given. Most of these can fall into three central categories: the psychology of leaders in ZANU-PF, the failure of economic policy, and external sanctions. The large diamond find in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006 is presented as a “critical juncture” for Zimbabwean institutions. Thus, this chapter places Zimbabwe in the overall population of cases when it comes to resource wealth and compares and contrasts how past approaches to resource politics, which have heavily focused on the oil sector, provide a roadmap for examining alluvial diamond wealth. However, this research must also be built upon as different resources, particularly a rapid increase in alluvial diamond wealth in the case of Zimbabwe, bring various challenges to state capacity and democratization.

Food shortages impacted some countries more severely than others. They also did not affect everyone equally within societies. Access to food determined new social hierarchies in wartime. Rising costs of living everywhere meant that a higher part of household income had to be devoted to food. Worsened material conditions sharpened old social divisions and created new ones. In many cases, it was easier for the rich to still obtain food despite rationing, which fed resentment against the comparatively better-off. The term ‘profiteer’ and its equivalent in other languages came to define the perceived enemy, which lived in opulence during times of scarcity and took advantage of the reduced circumstances of others. Employees on fixed incomes were particularly hit by the changing economic conditions. For middle-class people whose identity was linked to their class status, the struggles they experienced to obtain basic consumption goods were experienced as déclassement. Hunger both weakened and strengthened the spirit of community: outsiders, including a growing number of war refugees, were increasingly perceived as additional mouths to feed in a context of dwindling food supplies. Hunger thus transformed the self-perceptions of many Europeans and their positions within established social hierarchies.

Chapter 5 shows that German housing programs reached a turning point in the mid-1970s. Initially, these programs reinforced the postwar export-oriented growth regime by alleviating housing shortages and creating low-cost housing that limited wage demands and inflation. However, as housing shortages abated, policymakers started criticizing them for contradicting the growth regime by increasing public debt, diverting capital from manufacturing, and fueling inflation. Unlike American policymakers who expanded housing support in response to post-Keynesian challenges, German policymakers began scaling down housing programs. By the late 1980s, they had gradually reduced large-scale rental housing programs. At the same time, they protected homeownership support, including through Chancellor Helmut Kohl's 1986 tax reform, not as a growth strategy but as policies for family support, wealth creation, and old-age security. However, key actors in the German growth regime critiqued homeownership programs for limiting labor mobility, inflating prices, and shifting capital away from manufacturing. For the time being, German politicians prioritized political factors and ignored macroeconomic critiques.

Exploring the economic ramifications of climate change, this chapter features insights from financial experts such as Sara Jane Ahmed, Managing Director and V20 Finance Advisor of the CVF-V20 Secretariat. It discusses the adverse effects on GDP growth, inflation, debt, and credit ratings, particularly in vulnerable economies. The chapter highlights the crucial role of financial markets, insurance, and climate finance in addressing these challenges. Innovative financing solutions such as Green Bonds and pre-arranged and trigger-based financing, including loss and damage finance, are explored as means to build economic resilience. The importance of sustainable economic policies and international cooperation is emphasised, with case studies from countries successfully integrating climate resilience into their economic planning. The chapter calls for increased investment in climate adaptation and mitigation to safeguard economic stability and promote sustainable development.

This chapter examines the military and economic centrality of granary networks to the Nationalists’ war effort. The centralization of land tax and its collection in kind restored the granary’s historic importance as the storehouse of state wealth. However, the chapter moves away from the dominant portrayal of granaries as economic stabilizers and disaster relief mechanisms to emphasize their strategic significance for an agrarian state at war. In examining the government’s establishment of a national grain reserve scheme and its construction of granary networks throughout its territories, the chapter presents the granary as an integral part of wartime economic policy and military logistical organization. It also studies the amassing of grain reserves in southwestern Yunnan for the Chinese Expeditionary Force after the fall of Burma, a significant but forgotten effort. Unlike most studies, it pays close attention to day-to-day operations, such as checking the quality of delivered grain and preventing spoilage. These everyday procedures are a window into how the demands of war concretely shaped civilian life and illustrate that granaries were key sites of state-society interaction.

This chapter argues that the risks of deflation and inflation and the financial crises at the start of the twenty-first century led to a “crisis,” with declining public confidence in money and the institutions that govern it, primarily the central banks. We describe the alternation of stability ad instability phases in the last half century. The postwar stability phase based on the Bretton Woods system ended in 1971. The end of the Great Inflation in the early 1980s opened the way to another stability phase, lasting until the Great Financial Crisis of 2008–09. A trait of this period was the liberalization and expansion of global capital markets. In the subsequent period – 2008 to today –the boom of digital and crypto finance took place. This period coincides with unprecedented activism of central banks aimed at supporting economic activity, fending off the risks of deflation and, in Europe, preserving the cohesion of the euro under threat from sovereign debts and a fragile banking sector. Lax monetary conditions, inflation, debilitated banks – these factors created an easier ground for competitors to challenge a traditional financial sector in a state of crisis.