Event Date: December 6, 2023 - 11:30am to 1:00pm
Location: FSS 5028, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS and the International Political Economy Network (IPEN)

As inflation has spiralled upwards in recent months, central banks have rushed to reimpose strict inflation targeting policies, pivoting away from their brief flirtation with paying more attention to the politically fraught problems of unemployment, inequality and climate change. Faced with this renewed enthusiasm for orthodox monetary practices, it is hard not to see this return to the depoliticized strategies of narrow, rules-based economic policy as natural and inevitable. Depoliticization is immensely appealing as both a set of policy practices and as an analytic concept. Yet it is easy to overstate both its prevalence and its effectiveness. Drawing on recently declassified material, I argue that since the early 1980s policies that aim at depoliticizing monetary policy have encountered as many failures as successes and confronted significant skepticism from monetary policy officials. This raises serious questions about the sustainability of central banks’ recent strategy for coping with renewed inflation.

The event will be in English.

Speaker:

Jacqueline Best is a Full Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research is at the intersection of international relations, political economy and social theory.

Chair: 

Pascale Massot is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies. Her research interests include the global political economy of China’s rise, China’s impacts on the governance of global extractive commodity markets, Canada-China relations, Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy and Canadian public opinion on China.