The new political economy

The aim of the New Political Economy is to understand important issues that arise in the policy sphere.1 It is not, as is occasionally hinted, an effort by economists to colonise political science. Rather, the main concern is to extend the competence of economists to analyse issues that require some facility with economic and political decision making. At the margin, the New Political Economy reverses the split that occurred between the disciplines of economics and political science at the end of the nineteenth century. This article is not a survey of the field. It is a selective and personal view of some of the themes in the literature. It is framed more as a manifesto presented in the hope that somebody who encounters these ideas for the first time here might be tempted to delve further into the literature and even contribute to it.