structural:reformatting
Policy discussions

Hayek's ideas on spontaneous order and the importance of prices in dealing with the knowledge problem inspired a debate on economic development and transition economies after the fall of the Berlin wall. For instance, economist Peter Boettke elaborated in detail on why reforming socialism failed and the Soviet Union broke down. Economist Ronald McKinnon uses Hayekian ideas to describe the challenges of transition from a centralized state and planned economy to a market economy. Former World Bank Chief Economist William Easterly emphasizes why foreign aid tends to have no effect at best in books such as The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Since the 2007–2008 financial crisis, there is a renewed interest in Hayek's core explanation of boom-and-bust cycles, which serves as an alternative explanation to that of the savings glut as launched by economist and former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. Economists at the Bank for International Settlements, e.g. William R. White, emphasize the importance of Hayekian insights and the impact of monetary policies and credit growth as root causes of financial cycles. Andreas Hoffmann and Gunther Schnabl provide an international perspective and explain recurring financial cycles in the world economy as consequence of gradual interest rate cuts led by the central banks in the large advanced economies since the 1980s. Nicolas Cachanosky outlines the impact of American monetary policy on the production structure in Latin America.

In line with Hayek, an increasing number of contemporary researchers sees expansionary monetary policies and too low interest rates as mal-incentives and main drivers of financial crises in general and the subprime market crisis in particular. To prevent problems caused by monetary policy, Hayekian and Austrian economists discuss alternatives to current policies and organizations. For instance, Lawrence H. White argued in favor of free banking in the spirit of Hayek's " Denationalization of Money ". Along with market monetarist economist Scott Sumner, White also noted that the monetary policy norm that Hayek prescribed, first in Prices and Production (1931) and as late as the 1970s, was the stabilization of nominal income.

Hayek's ideas find their way into the discussion of the post- Great Recession issues of secular stagnation. Monetary policy and mounting regulation are argued to have undermined the innovative forces of the market economies. Quantitative easing following the financial crises is argued to have not only conserved structural distortions in the economy, leading to a fall in trend-growth. It also created new distortions and contributes to distributional conflicts.