My motivation for writing this book stems from my experiences teaching a Master's level macroeconomics course at the Center for Development Economics at Williams College, as well as from delivering lectures on various topics in macroeconomics to audiences of policymakers from emerging economies in a variety of settings. In both contexts the audiences have often been very bright, very knowledgeable about the problems of their countries, and not very interested in sophisticated mathematics. These experiences convinced me that there is a need for a book on macroeconomic policy in emerging economies that treats the most important issues facing these countries in a way that is conceptually sound but that does not place excessive technical demands on the reader, thus making it accessible to students and policymakers who are less mathematically inclined than the typical graduate student in economics. This book is my attempt to meet that need. It is intended to be accessible to upper-level undergraduates (i.e., undergraduates who have taken a course in intermediate macroeconomics), to students in policy-oriented master's degree programs in economics or in public policy, and to policymakers.

Why a book on macroeconomics in emerging economies instead of a more general macroeconomics text that could be applied to emerging economies? This is an important question, and I think that there are essentially two answers to it.