Books in the Central Issues in Contemporary Economic Theory and Policy series

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.

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 policymakers in terms of information efficiency and risk control.

This volume addresses different issues related to green innovation procurement as well as exploring the challenges involved in public procurement. It offers a broad array of perspectives, addressing both general, abstract problems of optimal public procurement and concrete cases of national or even local public procurement systems.

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.

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.

This volume studies the various aspects of the ICT revolution, with an analysis of firm-level determinants of productive efficiency and growth and the effects of internationalization and the completion of the European market.

This volume explores all aspects of contemporary public procurement theory, examining managing risk in procurement, collusion in procurement, efficiency in procurement, transparency in procurement, and auction design.

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.

Single market and monetary integration of EEC countries, Germany's reunification and Central and East Europe's move towards the marketplace are redesigning the european political and economic spheres and creating great opportunities and challenges for Europe and the rest of the world.

New Institutional Economics open a new methodological perspective in political economy by posing the question of why economic institutions are created. New developments in game theory are applied to many case topical studies including corruption, central bank independence, globalization and other issues in contemporary economic governance.

Antitrust, Regulation and Competition brings together a group of well-known European and American academics to examine antitrust policies and competitive behaviour on a wide variety of topical cases and critical markets.

The book collects ten papers which give a broad overview of the most recent economic studies in the fields of lobbying and special interest groups.