Monetary Regimes of the Twentieth Century
本书以G5国家（美英德法日）为对象，梳理从古典金本位到20世纪末的货币体制演变，论证宏观经济理论、政策体制与经济行为三者相互影响，不存在独立于政治与制度的普适宏观理论。
There is a long and distinguished tradition of National Institute economists writing economic histories of modern Britain, with Dow (1998) being the most recent. Britton, a former director of the Institute, made important contributions to our understanding of the post‐war British business cycle, macroeconomic modelling, macroeconomic policy since the 1970s and, most recently, the economics and politics of EMU and of the ambition to regain full employment. His Monetary Regimes of the Twentieth Century is altogether more ambitious: to interweave an economic history of the G5 (USA, UK, Germany, France and Japan) since the classical gold standard with a discursive essay on the development of macroeconomic theory and policy. The objective is to demonstrate that, while theory may potentially be invariant to time and space in its applicability, in practicee, for all of the G5, the nature of the policy regimes, the behaviour of the economies and the beliefs of professional economists all interacted and influenced each other, so that, for any one time and space, there existed a number of such potential regimes. As a consequence, there can be no general theory of macroeconomics which is independent of politics, social institutions and beliefs.