Rethinking economic performance in Central and Eastern Europe, 1870–1989: old narratives and new evidence

Good, David F.; Leff, Carol Skalnik

doi:10.4337/9781781952832.00009

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In most of these cases, a dominant explanation of a particular issue is laid out, disputed, and finally appended by a marginalized narrative whose importance is perceived to be underappreciated. As a result of this method, the status of the dominant narrative is reduced to a mere perspective rather than a proven fact (Good, 2000;Gottfried & Hayashi-Kato, 1998;Hartmann, 2010;McMaster, 2002McMaster, , 2013. This narrative concept is also present in a rather political strand of the development economics literature (Béné et al, 2010;Bergius et al, 2020;Dercon, 2013;Ellis & Manda, 2012;Engström & Hajdu, 2019;Fairhead & Leach, 1995;Gautam, 2019).…”

Section: Political Economy Economic History and Development Economicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives in economics

Roos

Reccius

2023

Journal of Economic Surveys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is growing awareness within the economics profession of the important role narratives play in the economy. Even though empirical approaches that try to quantify economic narratives are getting increasingly popular, there is no theory or even a universally accepted definition of economic narratives underlying this research. First, we review and categorize the economic literature concerned with narratives and work out the different paradigms at play. Only a subset of the literature considers narratives to be active drivers of economic activity. To solidify the foundation of narrative economics, we propose a definition of collective economic narratives, isolating five important characteristics. We argue that, for a narrative to be economically relevant, it must be a sense‐making story that emerges in a social context and suggests action to a social group. We also systematize how a collective economic narrative differs from a topic and from other kinds of narratives that are likely to have less impact on the economy. With regard to the popular use of topic modeling, we suggest that the complementary use of other methods from the natural language processing (NLP) toolkit and the development of new methods is inevitable to go beyond identifying topics and move towards true empirical narrative economics.

show abstract