A Keynesian view of the current financial and economic crisis in the world economy

Tony Thirlwall is Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, United Kingdom, where, after coming from the University of Leeds in 1966, he has taught ever since, albeit interspersed with spells at the University of Papua New Guinea, West Virginia University, Princeton University, Cambridge (England), Melbourne and La Trobe universities. In his early career he made contributions to regional economics, and the analysis of unemployment and inflation, but since the beginning of the 1980s his major research field has been international trade, the balance of payments and economic development. His major intellectual debts are to John Maynard Keynes and to Nicholas Kaldor (whose biography he wrote). His books include Regional Growth and Unemployment in the UK (with R. Dixon) (London: Macmillan, 1975); Balance of Payments Theory and the UK Experience (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1980); Inflation, Saving and Growth in Developing Economies (London: Macmillan, 1974); Economic Growth and the Balance of Payments Constraint (with J. McCombie) (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1994); a best-selling textbook Growth and Development (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan), now in its ninth edition; and, his most recent, Trade Liberalisation and The Poverty of Nations (with Penelope Pacheco-Lopez) (Cheltenham, Gloustershire: Edward Elgar, 2008). Between 1972 and 1991, he organised eleven Keynes Seminars at the University of Kent to commemorate the life and work of Keynes (later published by Macmillan), and he is now the editor of the Great Thinkers in Economics series published by Palgrave-Macmillan. Eleven volumes have appeared so far.