A major research effort of IUI in recent years has been directed towards tracing and analyzing the causes and implications of the so-called energy crisis of the 1970s. The project - called Energy and Economic Structure - has been financed by the Energy Research Commission. It was carried out in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics. B-C Ysander has been coordinating the project at the IUI and K-G Mäler has been responsible for the Stockholm School part.
Much of this project work has been concerned with energy market projections and with estimation and simulation of impacts of energy price changes in the economy. Detailed documentation of that work has been and will be published by IUI.
The focus of interest in the present collection of papers is not on energy problems as such but on the general lessons of the 1970s for macroeconomic dynamics and policy. The papers have been presented in various combinations at IUI seminars over a couple of years. They have been revised, updated and edited to address the stability and macroeconomic policy problems of the 1980s. We have chosen to publish them in this form in our conference series.
The papers report empirical evidence, simulation results and policy suggestions. They should be useful in the ongoing reconsideration and reconstruction of macroeconomic theory. In particular, we believe that this book represents a novel way of looking at the increased levels of uncertainty, instabilities and stagflation that have characterized the disorderly economies of the 1970s.
