Translation and Economic Ideas

What happens when economic ideas travel from one national epistemic jurisdiction to another? Political economy has recently shown considerable interest in the transnational spread of social and economic policies (Simmons 2001; Mukand and Rodrik 2002; Elkins and Simmons 2004; Levi-Faur and Jordana 2005; Mesenguer 2009; Helgadottir 2016), with most research departing from the observation that domestic political and economic processes are not isolated. Instead, they are extensively shaped by external factors. As Keohane recently put it, one of the priorities of political economists should be a better understanding of ‘how transnational networks, diffusion, and convergence shape economic policy’ (Keohane 2009: 38-39). Transnational diffusion, one may say, is de rigueur in political economy. Yet this burgeoning and sophisticated research agenda has not yet produced a framework to explain how economic policies as diverse as ‘current account liberalization’ or ‘central bank independence’ have been appropriated by policy elites all over the world.