A ‘New Bretton Woods’: Kaldor, and the Antipodean Quest for Global Full Employment

In 1949 Nicholas Kaldor co-authored a report that, if implemented, would have revolutionised international economic policy-making. National and International Measures for Full Employment (NIFE) had been commissioned by the United Nations. A capstone to efforts throughout the 1940s to transform international economic policy-making along Keynesian lines, NIFE was without precedent in the importance it accorded global effective demand in determining employment and trade outcomes, and in the commitments it required of governments – not only to their own people, but in enunciating their responsibilities to those of other nations as well. For this it earned the enmity of many, including some prominent economists. In the end NIFE fell victim to the independence of nations within the UN as well as changing world circumstances, and the report was quietly shelved. Today it is little known, and to the extent that NIFE continues to be commented on, its ideas are presented as originating from Kaldor as just another step in his progressive thinking from national to global macroeconomics. But while Nicholas Kaldor was the principal author of NIFE, we argue that the origin for this global Keynesian macro policy should equally lie with his Australian co-authors.