Focusing on trade and development, the book addresses key global issues such as rapid growth in the Third World, sustained expansion in industrial nations, and the elimination of extreme poverty and inequality. It is divided into four parts: the first three analyze the world economy and major trade issues, while the fourth offers a foundational understanding of the results through formal models. The descriptive analysis emphasizes market behavior and the interaction between domestic policies and international markets, highlighting the importance of market responses to policy decisions.
Told as a story of discovery and the evolution of his own thinking, Geoffrey
Heal's book makes difficult conceptual arguments transparent. He uses examples
to illustrate the key issues in environmental economics. In so doing, he
demonstrates why an understanding of the consequences of all production and
consumption processes for environmental resources must be an essential part of
any description of economic activities. - V. Kerry Smith, Arizona State
University, University Fellow, Resources for the Future
The origins of this volume can be traced back to a conference on „Ethics, Economic and Business“ organized by Columbia Busi ness School in March of 1993, and held in the splendid facilities of Columbia's Casa Italiana. Preliminary versions of several of the papers were presented at that meeting. In July 1994 the Fields Institute of Mathematical Sciences sponsored a workshop on „Geometry, Topology and Markets“: additional papers and more refined versions of the original papers were presented there. They were published in their present versions in Social Choice and Wel fare, volume 14, number 2, 1997. The common aim of these workshops and this volume is to crystallize research in an area which has emerged rapidly in the last fifteen years, the area of topological approaches to social choice and the theory of games. The area is attracting increasing interest from social choice theorists, game theorists, mathematical econ omists and mathematicians, yet there is no authoritative collection of papers in the area. Nor is there any surveyor book to give a perspective and act as a guide to the issues in and contributions to this new area. One of the two aims of this volume is in some measure to play this role: the other aim is of course to present interesting and surprising new results.
