Monetary, Financial and Macroeconomic Adjustment Policies: An Overview

The survey articles that make up this special issue cover a set of interconnecting topics: financial markets and economic development; financial crises; macroeconomic adjustment (e.g. in response to crises) and its impact on the poor; and the asymmetric effects of monetary policy and the zero bound to interest rates. While the topics clearly interconnect, they do not fit neatly into a standard sub-field of economics, as is reflected in the somewhat cumbersome title of this special issue. This appears to reflect a general trend in economic analysis and, more particularly, applied and policy analysis, which increasingly appears to transcend standard sub-field boundaries. A simple indication of this is the increasing difficulty of classifying articles in Journal of Economic Literature categories. One consequence of this trend is the need for researchers to keep abreast of a wider range of literature in a variety of sub-fields, highlighting the importance and usefulness of good survey articles.