A pro-administration account of contemporary US economic policy, and the public rationale for it, can be found annually in Economic Report of the President, and for trade policy since 1963 in the annual reports of the US Trade Representative. The former is mostly devoted to domestic economic policy but typically includes a chapter on foreign economic policy, which is of course conditioned by domestic economic conditions and pressures. The president's proposed budget for the coming year, reflecting his administration's spending priorities, can be found in the annual Budget of the United States, along with recent data on actual spending under the same headings. The monthly Federal Reserve Bulletin also contains useful contemporary information and analyses.
Developments in the world economy seen from a non-US perspective can be found in the annual reports of the Bank for International Settlements; global trade developments are covered in International Trade, published annually by the secretariat of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Comparable data on foreign aid can be found in Development Assistance Efforts and Policies, published annually (during the 1960s) by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Data on US arms trade and estimates for that of the Soviet Union can be found in World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, published by the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA).
Glimpses into the worldview and thought processes of key decisionmakers can often be found in their memoirs: See, for example, Dwight Eisenhower, Waging the Peace, volume II of his The White House Years (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), Lyndon Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963-1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), and Richard Nixon The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978). John F. Kennedy was unable to produce memoirs, but partial substitutes can be found in Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper Row, 1965), and in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); both Sorensen and Schlesinger were close to Kennedy and worked for him in the White House. An entertaining discussion of foreign policy, especially foreign economic policy, can be found in The Past Has Another Pattern (New York: Norton, 1982), by George W. Ball, under secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. See also Henry A. Kissinger's The White House Years (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1979) and Years of Upheaval (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1982); and H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1994) for the Nixon administration. Francis Bator, deputy national security assistant for economics and for Europe in the Johnson administration, has written a series of recollections and reflections on Johnson's approach to foreign economic policy, in Kermit Gordon (ed.), Agenda for the Nation: Papers on Domestic and Foreign Policy Issues (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1968), Foreign Affairs (1968), George L. Perry and James Tobin (eds.), Economic Events, Ideas, and Policies: The 1960s and After (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2000), and Aaron Lobel and Robert Richardson Bowie (eds.), Presidential Judgment: Foreign Policy Decision Making in the White House (Hollis, NH: Hollis Pub., 2001).
A British perspective is provided by Harold Macmillan in Pointing the Way, 1956-1961 (London: Macmillan, 1972) and At the End of the Day, 1961-1963 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), by Harold Wilson, A Personal Record: The Labour Government 1964-1970 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1971), and by Alec Cairncross, The Wilson Years: A Treasury Diary 1964-1969 (London: Historian's Press, 1997). A French perspective is given in Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971). Allowance must be made for the likelihood that all memoirs are written with a historical legacy in mind, especially the last.
An overview of world economic growth during the past half-century (and more) can be found in Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001). For a Federal Reserve insider's account of international monetary developments, see Robert Solomon, The International Monetary System, 1945-1981: An Insider’s View (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). For an analysis of the effectiveness of economic sanctions, see Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Kimberly Ann Elliot, and Jeffrey J. Schott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990). On the Kennedy Round of multilateral trade negotiations (concluded in 1967), see Ernest Preeg, Traders and Diplomats: An Analysis of the Kennedy Round of Negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1970); and on the interplay between trade policy and US domestic politics, Water’s Edge: Domestic Politics and the Making of American Foreign Economic Policy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), by Paula Stern. Thomas A. Schwartz has written authoritatively on Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
For the performance of the Soviet economy, see Paul R. Gregory and Robert C. Stuart, Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th ed. (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2001), and Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945 (New York: Longman, 2003). The classic study of the Soviet economy, which was parsimonious in providing data, is Abram Bergson, The Economics of Soviet Planning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), and Bergson's Productivity and the Social System: The USSR and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). See also Marshall I. Goldman, Detente and Dollars: Doing Business with the Soviets (New York: Basic Books, 1975), and the triennial compendia on the Soviet economy produced by the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. Anatolii F. Dobrynin provides an insider's view of US-Soviet relations in In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents, 1962-1986 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001). Krushchev's concerns about Soviet agriculture and excessive Soviet military spending, based on much Soviet archival material, are documented in Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Krushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: Norton, 2006).
See also entries under sections 6 and 7 in this bibliography, and relevant parts of the bibliographies in volumes I and III.
World History
