This chapter argues that Chapter Two of the Economic Consequences contains a much more important piece of economic analysis than is generally recognized, namely the Ramsey model of economic growth. It is well known that Keynes helped Ramsey to explain that model in the Economic Journal in 1928. But I show here that Keynes had himself given an exposition of the model, nearly a decade earlier, in this chapter. What is more, Keynes then generalizes this model in order to help him think about Europe’s growth process within the global economy, and why it was so fragile. I claim that the analysis in this chapter provides the underpinning for Keynes’s famous criticism of the reparations imposed on Germany. The chapter also makes clear that Keynes is starting to realize what he will need to do to get to the General Theory in 1936. And there are the beginnings of the ideas which would lead to the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 and to the rebuilding of the international monetary system after World War II. Understanding these connections helps us to visualize the arc of Keynes’s discovery, one which stretched all the way from 1919 until his death in 1946.

Just over a century old, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains a seminal document of the twentieth century. At the time, the book was a prescient analysis of political events to come. In the decades that followed, this still controversial text became an essential ingredient in the unfolding of history. In this essay, we review the arc of experience since 1919 from the perspective of Keynes’s influence and his changing understanding of economics, politics, and geopolitics. We identify how he, his ideas, and this text became key reference points during times of turbulence as actors sought to manage a range of shocks. Near the end of his life, Keynes would play a central role in planning the world economy’s reconstruction after World War II. We argue that the “global order” that evolved since then, marked by increasingly polarized societies, leaves the community of nations ill prepared to provide key global public goods or to counter critical collective threats.

War reparations have been a common feature in peace settlements for thousands of years. The chapter provides an overview of how historical reparations were paid, and then an overview of the literature on the transfer problem, one hundred years after Keynes started the debate. Whether direct transfers of money or indirect transfers of assets, transfers affect trade flows and future income in the short or the long run. Financing a transfer is a budgetary problem in the short run, and if a country can borrow the money, the constraint is a willingness to pay, not the capacity to pay. But a transfer can also have second-order effects on savings, investments, consumption, and output, because interest rates or the terms of trade might mitigate or exacerbate the economic costs of the transfer. I show that the terms of trade, for the most part, improved in the years following the announcement of reparations, and that sovereign debt markets allowed countries to finance reparations by borrowing.

The continued relevance of Keynes’s famous polemic, after more than a century, is itself remarkable. It has always been controversial: first as polemic, then as economic analysis, and finally as historiography. In which genre should we place it? The literary force of its vignettes of the key participants must be acknowledged. Likewise the concentration on reparations in linking the Armistice to a burden of post-war debt highlights the notion of guilt. And the distinction between historic ‘indemnities’ and the wholly new coinage of ‘reparations’ still needs to be better understood. Hence the inescapable centrality of Article 231 of the Treaty, the famous War Guilt Clause. Subsequent controversy has focused largely on assessments of the actual burden that reparations posed – or would have done if actually paid. Here the salience of Etienne Mantoux’s contribution in 1945 is still worthy of acknowledgment (though, ironically, not in castigating Keynes as ‘anti-French’). Instead, the ongoing significance of the analysis presented in the Economic Consequences points to the centrality of Keynes’s vision of the welfare of Europe as an integrated organic whole – rather than seeing the Treaty as a zero-sum game in which Germany had to punished, for moral as much as economic reasons.

This chapter reviews the ideas and reception of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It focuses on a single, as yet untold, aspect: how Economic Consequences fits into the context of debates about the construction of the memory of the Great War. It asks: ‘What role did Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace play in the formation of the “futility myth” which dominates British popular perception of the First World War to this day?’

This chapter analyses the major development achievements of the Bangladeshi economy until today and seeks to identify the major challenges it will have to address in the future. Whether these challenges can be overcome, and which reforms can be undertaken for this to happen, depends in turn on the institutional context of the country. Focusing exclusively on economic and social issues, this chapter first analyses the sources of growth and possible limitations of the present development regime. It then evaluates the financing constraints faced by the economy in general, and by the public sector in particular. It also focuses on sources of concern in social and environmental areas and economic crisis related to COVID-19.

The strategy of structural reforms in practice is the object of this final chapter. As an example, the history of the first centre-left government in Italy in the 1960s is considered, with reforms concerning the nationalization of the electricity sector, the reform of the secondary schools, universal wealth assistance, pension reform, the workers statute expanding workers rights, etc. A worldwide stage of retreat followed the fall of the Bretton Woods system and the affirmation of neoliberal governments in key countries (Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the USA). The negative consequences and the shaky theoretical foundations of neoliberalism are illustrated. A renewed strategy of structural reforms is proposed, both in an international dimension and with specific reference to the case of Italy.