The Open Area Studies Journal

2009, 2 : 39-51
Published online 2009 December 4. DOI: 10.2174/18749143009020100039
Publisher ID: TOARSJ-2-39

Identifying Critical Junctures in Macroeconomic Policy - The Cases of Mexico and Sweden in the Early 1980s

Ana Ligia Haro Maza and John Hogan
Dublin Institute of Technology, Aungier Street, Dublin 2, Ireland;

ABSTRACT

This paper utilizes a new critical junctures framework to help understand the nature of the changes in macroeconomic policy. The framework consists of three elements which must be identified in sequence to be able to declare, with some certainty, if an event was a critical juncture. These are crisis, ideational change, and radical policy change. Utilizing the critical juncture framework, we will determine whether changes to Mexican and Swedish macroeconomic policy in the early 1980s constituted clean breaks with the past, or were continuations of previously established policy pathways, and why that was.

Keywords:

Critical junctures, macroeconomic crisis, ideational change, policy change privatization policy.