The Picture—Small and Big: Iceland and the Crises

• Main Author: Giorgio Baruchello
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The University of Akureyri 2014
• Subjects: crisis; Oddsson; Galbraith; McMurtry; Iceland; IMF; scipo; hist
• Online Access: https://doaj.org/article/9ad6fb4c68a247eb8eeb7f62926deb6c

This paper was written for the 2014 Winter Symposium of the Nordic Summer University’s (NSU) research group number three, dealing with the concept of crisis. In it, I provide two pictures of Iceland’s notorious 2008 economic crisis and unexpected 2009-2013 recovery: one small, another big. The small one is a concise three-step account of what sort of policies preceded the economic crisis, what this crisis consisted primarily in, and what sort of policies followed it. The big one is a twofold reflection on how the Icelandic experience fits within larger global trends, which means considering the country’s experience from an economic-historical perspective and from an axiological one.