The multiple features of intellectual property rights and industrial competition are explored through the analytically rigorous lens of the frontier of the economics literature. The book covers a broad range of issues ranging from industrial espionage to collective property rights in cultural districts.

We are now living in a period of disillusion in the ability of economic policy to stabilise the economy. This is proven by the onset of severe world recession in the early 1980s and the inability to invert the negative phase of the business cycle under way in the industrialized countries in the early 1990s. The failure of old policies motivates the research into the causes of economic fluctuations and their measurement whose results are published in this volume

The world economy is at a cross road: it can either widen and deepen international integration, within and between different areas, or be tempted by neo-protectionism. Which road should the international economy take? Which way will it take? The need to reform the present international monetary system has been almost continuously discussed since the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in August 1971, and even earlier, and it has found renewed interest since the Mexican financial crisis in early 1995. Despite the successful completion of the Uruguay Round in December 1993, many international...

This collection of essays is concerned with three major and debated topics in international economics, namely interdependence between countries, real and financial integration, and the conflicting relations between industrialized (North) and developing countries (South). The first section deals with the international policy coordination problem and the economic growth of open economies. In the second section new foundations for commercial policy and the problems of economic integration, real and monetary, are discussed. The final section includes an analysis of North-South relations and of...

This volume analyzes in great detail the problem of information and risk management. Both topics are a central issue in current financial and monetary economic literature. Several recent theoretical and empirical contributions consider asymmetric information between investors and financiers as a major determinant of financial risk. In this framework, we may regard financial and banking innovation as, on one hand, policy and individual agents' response to the problem of asymmetric information and risk management and, on the other, as a self-generated innovation process posing new challenges to...

Building the 'New Europe' is at the core of the new international economic and political initiatives leading the world through the nineties and toward the twenty-first century. This challenge rests on dual processes: on the one hand, the European Community-wide single market and monetary integration; and, on the other, the East European transition to the market place and integration with Western economies. The volume is divided into two parts. The first section includes essays on the general and specific topics linked to the transitions to a market economy and to a pluralist political system....

Privatising firms and liberalizing their market environment generates in Eastern Europe a variety of problems, many of which are not common to the analogous attempts in industries countries. A first difference between the two experiences resides in establishing the value of the firm or of the assets that are being privatized. A second main difference concerns the lack of the record of market performance for the firm. The book explores these open questions through an overview of on-going and proposed processes in Section 1. In Section 2 theoretical foundations of privatization processes are...

We are now living in a period of disillusion in the ability of economic policy to stabilise the economy. This is proven by the onset of severe world recession in the early 1980s and the inability to invert the negative phase of the business cycle under way in the industrialized countries in the early 1990s. The failure of old policies motivates the research into the causes of economic fluctuations and their measurement whose results are published in this volume

The single market has been operating in Europe since 1 January 1993 but the twelve national fiscal systems remain independent. How will this be resolved? Harmonization and coordination or fiscal competition with distortions in the allocation of resources, in factor use, in localization of activities?

The subject of this book is the kind of economic interaction and interdependence that has arisen among nations in the contemporary world economy, the nature and significance of the pattern of trade balances that have resulted from them, and the question of what, if anything, should be done by national governments about that pattern. The need for international coordination of economic policies is also investigated.