Macroeconomics,   ISBN:9780716752370

Customer Rating: 

I bought this edition rather than the newer editions. I'm learning a lot from the book.

Customer Rating: 

I ordered this a month ago and it still hasn't come. luckily the library had it, so i really didn't even need to buy it.

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I bought this book for my grad school macro class because I had realtively weak macro backround.
I think this is the best book for studying a little before the original grad school text.
For the seller, I would buy from them again anytime, fast shipping and cheap price. to be honest my book is kind of abused. there are several stickers on the cover and almost every page is highlighted but the binding is very good and i paid just 4 dollars for it so it is very acceptable for the price and it is good for the job.
Altough my copy was not very good you can get a very nice one. I bought quite a few text books like this and I paid as low as 0.90 cents some of them. I had some practicly new books.
So its all about luck, you can get a really nice one if you are lucky and if not it is still perfectly usable.

Customer Rating: 

i am a second year economics student from New Zealand. I ordered the complimentary set from Amazon because I heard of its great service and the books were cheaper than what we could buy them for back in NZ. To my amazement I received the student guide quite promptly expecting the complimentary text would arrive soon after. It has been over a month into my course and I still havent received it. Whats worse is the guide is almost useless (complimentary good) with out the good. Why cant Amazon send both of them together?

Customer Rating: 

This is a clearly written and nicely organized upper-division macroeconomics textbook. Mankiw uses plain English and simple math to model the macroeconomy in the short-run (the IS/LM model), the long-run (the AS/AD model), and the very long run (the Solow growth model). He also devotes a lot of space to the Mundell-Fleming model of international trade and finance. One of the best features is the frequent use of short case studies that apply economic theory to "real world" problems such as the Great Depression or the Japanese slump of the 1990s. Mankiw's views are mainstream -- he doesn't even hint at the existence of alternatives such as Austrian economics or neo-Marxism -- but he is non-dogmatic about policy and quite candid about the limits of what economists really know about the economy. His book is a small masterpiece of clear economic writing for undergraduates.

So why did I give it only four stars? I was disappointed by the relative neglect -- in spite of the many "case studies" -- of the micro-economic, historical, and institutional realities that underlay the graphs and algebra of conventional macroeconomic analysis. Let me give two examples of what I mean:

-- According to Ben Bernanke, Asian countries responded to the financial turbulence of the 1990s by amassing huge foreign exchange reserves to defend their currencies against future attacks. These savings have for the most part been invested in the U.S., where they have financed trade deficits and fueled asset bubbles in the equities and housing markets. In other words, capital has flowed from relatively capital-poor countries to a capital-rich country, where it has paid for consumption binges.

-- According to Robert Pollin, two decades of union-bashing, downsizing and free trade have led to widespread job insecurity in the U.S. With workers too intimidated and too worried about jobs to press for wage increases, the economy was able to grow in the 1990s without triggering a round of inflation, and the benefits of this growth were skewed towards upper-income groups. In other words, extra-market power relationships in the workplace directly affected macroeconomic performance and income distribution.

I don't doubt that these developments can be captured and analyzed in the IS/LM or AS/AD framework. I'm not so sure, however, that many people steeped in this mode of analysis would have expected these developments ex ante. That would have required a knowledge of history, policy responses, and specific markets that is difficult to capture in abstract models. For my taste, any approach to economics that focuses on algebraic relationships between economic aggregates to the semi-exclusion of history and institutions is just too "otherworldly" to be satisfying. But maybe that's a problem with the way my mind works, not with macroeconomics. It certainly doesn't mean that Mankiw's book is anything less than excellent. Any student interested in learning basic macroeconomic analysis should read it.