Charles Kindleberger, Comparative Political Economy: A Retrospective.

• Author: Eichengreen, Barry

Charles Kindleberger, Comparative Political Economy: A Retrospective, MIT Press, 2000.

Comparative Political Economy may not be Charles Kindleberger's first collection of previously published work, but it is the essential one. Its twenty-one chapters reflect the author's own assessment of his most significant contributions to scholarship and policy, written in the course of more than sixty years. The resulting volume has been carefully edited and beautifully produced, fittingly enough, by the MIT Press. That these pieces have appeared before does not diminish the pleasure of finding them all in one place.

Included are the classics on which the professor's reputation as an eminent international economist rests, like "The Case for Fixed Exchange Rates" and "The Dollar and World Liquidity." Other chapters have stimulated entire scholarly industries outside of Kindleberger's own disciplinary bailiwick. Articles like "Group Behavior and International Trade" and "The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe," for example, have set the research agenda for an entire generation of international relations specialists. "Germany's Overtaking of England" and "The Aging Economy" have provoked a large body of work on economic growth and "convergence," in this case by economic historians and theorists.

Most interesting of all are a number of less prominent items whose significance is only now coming to light. (One hesitates to call these pieces "neglected," since, given the author's stature, little that Professor Kindleberger has written is neglected.) Here are four articles of which I was ignorant but vow to keep by my bedside and, more importantly, my keyboard.

"The Formation of Financial Centers" is must reading for anyone seeking to understand the battle for financial supremacy in Europe. In Kindleberger's analysis, the politics drive the economics rather than the other way around. His specific forecast may have been wide of the mark (in this article, published in 1974, Kindleberger predicts that Brussels will emerge as Europe's financial center!), but the good burghers of Frankfurt will take heart.

"Standards as Public, Collective and Private Goods" was similarly published two decades ago, but the issues it raises have come to the fore in the wake of the Asian crisis. The international policy community is now attempting to set international standards for everything from prudential supervision to data dissemination, with the goal of making the world a...