Economic Problems of the 1990s: Europe, the Developing Countries and the United States.

• Author: Dugger, William M.

This book contains a selected set of essays from an international workshop organized by the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics and the College of Business Administration of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The subject of the workshop was "The Economic Problems of the 1990s" and out of the 30 or more papers from the workshop, 11 are published here. These 11 papers are grouped into three areas: (1) economic development and international finance, (2) Europe and Eastern Europe, and (3) the United States. Being a careful selection from a larger group, all of the papers are works of quality and some of them are of real significance. The volume belongs in any good university library and several of the papers would make excellent reading assignments for advanced undergrad or grad students.

The first part of the collection--development and finance--contains five essays. In them, A. P. Thirlwall provides an excellent survey of the terms of trade literature and a discussion and the problems involved in debt and development. William Darity, Jr. takes international banks to task in a short but provocative piece on "loan pushing" to what can only be called third-world kleptocracies. Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira and Yoshiaki Yakano describe the recent attempts at price level stabilization in Brazil. Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho works out a very promising post Keynesian theory of inflation and hyperinflation. And, Paul Davidson rounds out the first part of the collection with a proposal for a post Keynesian international payments system.

The...