Long ago~ the welfare of a sooiety used to depend heavily on the skill and dedioation of its oraftsmen - the miller~ the blaok- smith~ the oobbler and the tailor. These oraftsmen aoquired their skill by a long and poorly paid apprentioeship to some master of their oraft. They learned by imitation and experienoe~ and by tri- al and error. They did not read books or study soienoe~ they knew nothing of the theory of their subjeot~ the geometry of their ru- dimentary drawings~ nor the mathematios underlying their primitive oaloulations. They oould not explain how or why they used their methods;...

In July 1992, over 300 astronomers attended the Third Tetons Summer School on the subject of The Environment and Evolution of Galaxies. This book presents 28 papers based on invited review talks and a panel discussion on The Nature of High Redshift Objects.

Mangrove ecosystems are typical formations found in coastal deposits of mud and silt throughout the tropics and some distance into the subtropical latitudes. The total wordwide mangrove area, which is estimated at about 170,000 km² with some sixty species of trees and shrubs exclusive to the habitat, dominates approximately 75% of the world's coastline between latitudes 25 N and 25 S. Such unique intertidal ecosystems support genetically diverse communities of terrestrial and aquatic organisms that are of direct or indirect socioeconomic values. Mangrove forests play important...

The use of silicon-based microsystems for chemical analysis is one of the most promising concepts in the recent developments in micro system technology (MST). It is expected that chemical sensors will be increasingly integrated in so-called miniaturized total analysis systems (uTAS), a concept first presented by Ciba-Geigy. In such systems, all steps in a chemical determination, from sampling to detection and data treatment, are integrated in one miniature instrument. uTAS offer a variety of advantages over conventional analysis systems such as improved analytical performance, reduced reagent...

It is beyond any doubt that East-Central European countries such as Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia has dramatically changed its shape through its radical transition from centrally planned to the market economies in last 7 years. Many economists divide the process of economic transformation into areas of Stabilization, Liberalization, and Privatization/Restructuring. The traditional view is that stabilization and liberalization can be achieved rather quickly-by balancing budgets, balance of payments, tightening money supply, freeing prices and liberalizing trade-but that the area...

Bringing the eastern European economies in transition (defined more precisely in the Introduction) under the economic, political, and secu- rity umbrella of the European Union (ED) has been an ambition of many of these countries from the very start of the so-called annus mirabilis in 1989. The road to gratification of this aspiration since then has been rather bumpy, however one wants to look at recent events. Indeed, since 1989 the relationship between the EU and the economies in transition has been ebbing and flowing with the evolution of two main strands of policy stances in the EU. One...

This book is designed as a modest contribution to the ongoing deliberations about how to ease the fairly tight constraints on the external payments of many countries of the eastern part of Europe. In the fIrst instance, this inquiry is addressed to those that have embarked on wide-ranging systemwide reforms. External constraints have been markedly hampering the introduction of market oriented economic mutations, thereby raising the cost of transition far above levels expected at the outset of the present wave of uniquely restructuring the countries involved. I explore here several angles of...

In the late 1980s, the field of comparative economics and NATO faced a similar problem: the threat of obsolescence. A predictable reaction of those who had made major investments in both comparative economics and NATO was to look for a new job. It was time to say: comparative economic systems are dead, long live comparative economic systems. The purpose of this book is to redirect study of what we called comparative economic systems toward analysis of the development of institutions and the effects of alternative institutional arrangements on economic performance. To that end, the book...

I. Until about a dozen years ago, the economic analysis of the relationship between political preferences and political demands was a rather straightforward, if dull, subject. The most common assumption was that the only political instrument available to citizens was the vote. Given this assumption, the analyst could express the outcome of the voting process in one of two ways. One possibility was to make the heroic assumptions necessary to obtain the median voter theorem, in which case, the political demands of the citizenry are simply the preferences of the median voter. The alternative was...

Stabilization and Privatization: An Economic Evaluation of the Shock Therapy Program is the first comprehensive account of Poland's economic transition since mid-1989. Monetary stabilization, trade liberalization (including convertibility) and privatization of state capital assets are discussed. Sources of economic recession which have accompanied the post-1989 transition are analyzed. The role of demand-side factors (i.e. monetary contraction) is weighed against that of supply-side factors (i.e. credit availability). The prevailing view is that the recession has been...