Revolução e evolução da macroeconomia

Revolution and Evolution in Twentieth-Century Macroeconomics
Michael Woodford
Princeton University*
June 1999
The twentieth century has seen profound progress in economic thought.
This has been associated, among other things, with the progress of economics to
a fully autonomous disciplinary status, which had only begun to be established
late in the nineteenth century, and with a very substantial improvement in the
technical methods employed in the discipline, both in the elaboration of
economic theory and in the statistical analysis of economic data. Over the past
century economics has also come to play a more important role in the world at
large. Economic advisors have become more important in the formulation of
government policies and the policies of international organizations such as the
IMF and the World Bank; economic theory has proven to be of practical use in
the design and use of a world of new financial instruments; and economic ideas
have become influential in a number of areas outside the discipline’s traditional
boundaries, including sociology, political science, and legal studies.
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