Abstract
The paper written by Michael Klein constitutes a survey of six books on the Israeli economy written over the past five decades. Two of them are compilations of articles [Ben- Porath (1986) and Ben-Bassat (2002)] while the others were written in their entirety by their respective authors [ Patinkin (1960), Halevi and Klinov-Melul (1968), Michaeli (1975) and Razin and Sadka (1993)].
In the first part of his paper the author identified five economic issues common to all six books: 1) The definition of the relevant comparison group; 2) Immigration, integration and inequality; 3) The roles of the government and markets in the economy; 4) The openness and dependence of the Israeli economy; 5) Inflation, crises and stabilization.
In the second part he briefly described the evolution of the Israeli economy during the period covered by the books surveyed, and in the subsequent part he presented the views of the corresponding authors on the aforementioned issues through the use of quotations.