Macroeconomic policy involves government action intended to influence the overall operation of the economy and to deal with such important public problems as economic growth, inflation, unemployment, and recession. In this first comprehensive treatment of presidential management of such policy for any presidency, authors James E. Anderson and Jared E. Hazleton focus on four tasks: developing and maintaining an information and decision-making system; coordination of policies in different macroeconomic areas; building support or consent for presidential policies; and administrative leadership. Drawing extensively upon presidential documents and interviews with Johnson administration officials, the authors pay particular attention to fiscal, monetary, wage-price, and international economic (especially balance of payments) policies during Johnson’s terms.

The authors use the concept of the subpresidency, as defined by Redford and Blisset in Organizing the Executive Branch: The Johnson Presidency (University of Chicago Press, 1981), to show how Johnson managed the macro-economic institutions of the council of Economic Advisors, the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget), the Department of the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Board in pursuit of his economic goals. What emerges is a vivid portrait of an activist president.

In evaluating management of macroeconomic policy in the Johnson administration, the authors focus on how presidential policies are developed and adopted rather than on the substance of the policies themselves. They conclude that the Johnson administration competently managed policy development during its presidential years.

This book is a volume in the Administrative History of the Johnson Presidency Series sponsored by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, the first two volumes of which were published by the University of Chicago Press. Managing Macroeconomic Policy: The Johnson Presidency was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Prior to the millennium, economists and policy makers argued that free trade between the United States and Mexico would benefit both Americans and Mexicans. They believed that NAFTA would be a “win-win” proposition that would offer U.S. companies new markets for their products and Mexicans the hope of living in a more developed country with the modern conveniences of wealthier nations. Blending rigorous economic and statistical analysis with concern for the people affected, Mexican Women in American Factories offers the first assessment of whether NAFTA has fulfilled these expectations by examining its socioeconomic impact on workers in a Mexican border town.

Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women’s stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization.

For five months in 2013–2014, Dušan Pavlović took time off from teaching to accept a senior position in Serbia’s Ministry of Economy. This short period was long enough for him to make a penetrating diagnosis of the economic activity of the postcommunist government. He found that a coterie of tycoons and politicians live off the wealth of the majority of citizens and smaller entrepreneurs, while the economy performs below its capacities. In academic terms, extractive economic institutions create allocative inefficiency.

Vivid, suggestive, and even entertaining accounts depict how privatization is administered and foreign investment projects are handled, and how party members, relatives, and friends are hired into public administration and state-owned companies. They show how the managers of firms that queue for state subsidies resist the systematic screening of their businesses. The principles of Keynesian economics are distorted and misused to conceal deliberate fiscal mismanagement. Huge ill-conceived development projects siphon taxpayers’ money from “non-economic” activities like social services, health, education, science, and culture.

What Pavlović found in Serbia is acutely symptomatic of many other European post-communist regimes of our time, lending his book singular importance.