The Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to collect for the convenience of the reader the ‘basic documents’ of a recently-developing new approach to the theory of the balance of payments and of balance-of-payments policy, the so-called ‘monetary approach to the balance of payments’, together with some avowedly highly tentative attempts to subject the new approach to empirical testing. The items included have been chosen from the work of economists associated with the Workshop in International Economics at the University of Chicago, where the new approach has been developed most persistently and systematically thus far. But, as will be documented in the Introductory Essay, the new approach is basically a return to the long historical tradition of international ...