This volume contains twenty papers presented at the IX AISPE Conference, which was held in June 2006 at the University of Padua, Faculty of Political Science. The conference examined the theory and practice of "economic policy", focusing on both historical aspects and present experiences.
The volume divides into six sections. The first, "State and Market in the History of Economic Thought", deals with two classic themes: 1) the notions of 'government' and 'institutions' espoused by the main schools of thought; 2) the intertwined relations among government, market and anti-trust agencies. These two broad surveys also serve to introduce the following five thematic sections. The first of them is entitled "Economic Policy and Knowledge", given the salience which the articles in the section give to the various types of knowledge presumed by economic theories.
Examination then moves to the 'great themes' of economic policy. The third section, entitled "Distribution and Poverty", reprises an issue addressed traditionally by public policies, from antiquity until the present day, and which concerns both redistribution within individual countries and the dynamics among groups of countries at different stages of development. The fourth section, "Monetary Policy and Banking", briefly reconstructs some features of the American and Italian banking systems, and then dwells on the monetary policy theory which gave rise to the 'monetary circuit approach'. The fifth section, entitled "Wage Policy", treats aspects concerning the reception in Italy of Walras' mathematical applications to economics and the wage laws in the late nineteenth century, and considers the recent debate on wages, policy and full employment. Finally, the sixth section - "Current Issues" - deals with topics central to the current theoretical and political debate: from the interweaving between 'new' economic theory and 'new' economic policies, through innovation polices, current 'third-way' schemes, fiscal and budgetary public decisions in the United States during the Clinton administration, to reflection on the international coordination of economic policies.