This book is about the crises of the world economy that have occurred from the 1970s to the present day. It makes the specific case that the global economy went through six crises during this period of half a century. Crises of the global economy are periods of substantial slowdown in world economic activity—as measured by investment, industrial production, trade, unemployment, etc.—in which many national economies, though not all, are technically in recession.To pose the existence of crises of the global economy implies that the world economy is a real entity with its own dynamics; it implies also that the usual view that takes national economies as proper units of economic analysis is an approach with major limitations. This book provides data illustrating the global and regional manifestations of these crises of the world economy, elaborates on the concepts of world economy and economic crisis, and discusses the theories that have been used to explain them. Its general thrust is to argue that the world economy, not national economies, is the major unit to be analyzed when trying to understand the economic reality of our time, particularly the reality of crises. These crises are discrete, countable phenomena, distinct states of an entity that can be properly called world or global economy, or world capitalism. weiterlesen