This collection of papers proposes to trace the professional and personal fortunes of Maffeo Pantaleoni (1857-1924), an eminent and controversial Italian economist from the liberalist culture which in the early twentieth century perceived the shortcomings and dangers of the nascent monopolist concentrations. He was one of the founders of what we can today call the Italian school of economics and finance. These contributions examine his life, thought and works and his reputation since his death. His vital influence on economic history.

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.

The US twin deficit, Western European economic integration, Eastern Europe's transition towards a market economy, the debt burden of the Less Developed Countries, the growing and deepening discrimination against the rest of the world by new homogeneous areas such as the North America free trade area, the new Europe, and Japan are the issues at the heart of global disequilibrium in the world economy. This book brings together leading economists to analyse these issues and further the debate on the need for sound economic policies to avoid a crash on a global scale.

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?

In the post-war period, spending on social security, health and education has grown continuously in the leading industrialized countries. The considerable size of this spending as a percentage of GDP together with the ageing population raise doubts on the sustainability of welfare spending. These doubts have been accompanied in recent years by an increasing awareness of the allocational inefficiencies and the distributive inequalities caused by the provision of some social services. The welfare state should therefore be reconstructed not only through readjustment of the social security system...