Emerging Economies during and after the Great Recession

The conference will look at emerging economies and their experiences in the great recession. The first four papers will provide a general analysis of the recession’s causes and impact and the policy responses, along with examples from three regions: Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The other four papers will provide an overview of the recession in emerging countries along with the country-level impact, with three case studies from China, India and Turkey. A main focal point of all eight papers is to analyse how prevention and intervention were in varying degrees used to diminish the impact of the recession.

The conference will be held under the aegis of the The Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics and is intended to explore further the contributions to New Thinking in Economics – ‘New Economics’ – as the new mainstream.  New Economics is concerned with institutional behaviour, expectations and uncertainty as opposed to traditional economics with its emphasis on equilibrium, mathematical formalism and deterministic solutions. With the financial crisis brought on by the unrestrained pursuit of personal and corporate profit, sanctioned by traditional economics, this is an opportune time to establish a new way of approaching economic understanding, based on new economic theory. It is also a good time to bring forward new ideas on the approach to economic policy across a wide range of areas (for example, macroeconomic and global governance, employment and unemployment, social security and pensions, as well as environmental issues).

New thinking in economics is an interdisciplinary approach to economic problems that acknowledges and respects the insights and analysis of other disciplines, e.g. those of political science, ethics, history and engineering. It also recognises complexity and evolutionary theory as relevant to understanding economic systems and economic behaviour. We wish to emphasise the new thinking in economics that goes beyond the traditional approach, which arguably is no longer mainstream economics.