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Article: Political Economics: Explaining economic policy.
- Article from:
- Southern Economic Journal
- Article date:
- January 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Southern Economic Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. xix, 533. $55.00.
This book contains a succession of models of public sector decision making. In every case, the actors in the models are rational economic agents. In virtually every case, they play noncooperative games, the rules of which are specified by political institutions. In virtually every case, the actions chosen by the agents or the consequences of those actions are government economic policies. Anyone who wants to learn how to construct tractable models of this sort must read this book.
Why would we want to construct such models? We are economists, and ...