In this bold, sweeping study of the development of Western economies, Douglass C. North sets forth a new view of societal change.

CD-ROM contains: World Bank data.

Pryor follows the theme of structural complexity through many different subdisciplines of economics to show how the US economy has evolved.

This book provides an innovative framework to analyze the process of industrial upgrading and diversification, a key feature of economic development. Based on this framework, it provides concrete advice to development practitioners and policy makers on how to unleash a country's growth potential.

The trade policies addressed in this book have far-reaching effects on the world's increasingly interdependent economies, but until now little research has been devoted to them. This volume represents the first systematic effort to analyze specific U.S. trade policies, particularly nontariff measures. It provides a better understanding of how trade policies operate, how effective they are, and what their costs and benefits are to trading nations. The contributors chart the history of U.S. trade policy since World War II, analyze industry-specific trade barriers, and discuss the effects of tariff preferences and export-promoting policies such as export credits and domestic international sales corporations (DISCs). The final section of essays examines the worldwide impact of import policies, pointing out subtleties in industry-specific policies and providing insight into the levels of protection in developing countries. The contributors blend state-of-the-art economics with language that is accessible to the business community, economists, and policymakers. Commentaries accompany each paper.

This book is the first systematic treatment of the philosophy of science underlying evolutionary economics. It does not advocate an evolutionary approach towards economics, but rather assesses the epistemic value of appealing to evolutionary biology in economics more generally. The author divides work in evolutionary economics into three distinct, albeit related, forms: a structural form, an evidential form, and a heuristic form. He then analyzes five examples of work in evolutionary economics falling under these three forms. For the structural form, he examines the parallelism between natural selection and economic decision making, and the parallelism between natural selection and market competition. For the evidential form, he looks at the relationship between animal and human economic decision making, and the evolutionary explanation of diversity in human economic decision making. Finally, for the heuristic form, he focuses on the plausibility of equilibrium modeling in evolutionary ecology and economics. In this way, he shows that linking evolutionary biology and economics can make for a powerful methodological tool that can enable progress in our understanding of various economics questions. Structure, Evidence, and Heuristic will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, evolutionary biology, and economics.

This volume on evolutionary approaches to economic development and growth is a member of a family of special volumes that Springer has published on Evolu tionary Economics recently. The present volume has excellent predecessors. There is a special volume on "Evolution in Markets and Institutions", edited by Ulrich Witt, and another on "Evolutionary and Neoclassical Perspectives on Market Structure and Economic Growth", edited by Yannis Katsoulacos. And there are more in the pipeline. The volumes already published reflect the broad ranging interests of evolu tionary economists, and within the scope delineated they are devoted to major research areas of the discipline. The editorial intention behind the venture of special volumes has been to bundle together some of the research areas in order to sharpen the problem focus and to generate research synergies within major research fields. We may, somewhat obviously, define a research field by its research topics. For the present purpose however, we may wish to conceive the research conducted by evolutionary economists as belonging to either a research area that is inspired in its problem perspective by neoclassical economics or to one that is not. The very success of the critique of the neoclassical paradigm relied on a preoccupation with its research scope and questions. Evolutionary econom ics has scored marvelously in challenging major neoclassical stands, and neoclassical economics may never be quite the same in the future.