Recent cataclysmic changes in the international economic order are shaping the global policy choices of the 1990s. In his final collection of essays, the late Bela Balasa, a foremost international economist, examines the implications of these recent changes for developed, developing and reforming socialist economies. Essays include development strategies, adjustment policies, the public sector, and financial liberalization, economic integration in Eastern Europe, and trade policy negotiations.
" Setting National Priorities continues the highly acclaimed and influential series of books that examine domestic and foreign policy choices confronting the United States. Members of the Brookings staff join outside experts to evaluate America's course through the next decade. In clear and nontechnical terms the contributors explain and evaluate options for the United States in the 1990s, consider whether the federal government's current pollicies are consistent with long-term objectives, and explain what action could best achieve those goals. Charles L. Schultze shows why it is important to solve the problem of the federal budget deficit and how it can be done: John D. Steinbruner addresses the revolution taking place in American foreign policy and explains how the United States can be more secure with lower defense spending; Lawrence J. Korb evaluates President Bush's defense budget and suggests possible improvements; Robert Z. Lawrence describes how the U.S. government and private industry should respond to the competitive challenge from foreign companies; William D. Nordhaus explains the risks form global warming and presents a policy to meet them; John E. Chubb and Eric A. Hanshek chart new directions of American elementary and secondary education; Henry J. Aaron identifies the major problems with the financing of healthcare and describes how they can be solved; and Thomas E. Mann considers how political institutions and public preferences constrain our ability to enact needed policy changes and what might be done to overcome those obstacles. "
The US in the 1990s faces a changed world, a world that calls for new perspectives on foreign policy. The authors examine many of the critical questions that American policymakers will face in coming years, including: how should the US react to Gorbachev's reforms of the Soviet Union?
Crisis in rural America is by now an all too familiar complaint, yet the problems presented by changing demographics, economic decline, and increasing poverty persist. They have not vanished with a new administration. However, with a new farm bill in the offing, now is the time for a fresh initiative to assess the difficulties facing nonurban America and to offer positive solutions. Rural Policies for the 1990s, written by some of the foremost experts on rural America, focuses on policy-relevant research. Within a carefully crafted framework, the contributors present stimulating discussions on resolving problems and improving the situation in rural areas. Looking at the crucial issues of employment, demographics, environment, technology, and the global impacts of national and international policies, they offer a broad analysis that is neither regionally based nor biased. The result is not an advocacy book, but one that effectively enhances our understanding of the problems facing rural America and presents concrete proposals for revitalizing it.
America's power has declined since 1945, yet America's democratic purposes are more widely emulated in the world today than ever before, and economic growth and employment in the United States in the 1980s reached levels that rivaled the boom years of postwar prosperity from 1947-1967. Challenging the pessimists who focus only on the decline of American power, this book argues that outcomes depend much more on how America defines its political identity or national purposes in the world community and what specific economic policies it chooses. In recent years, America has projected a more self-confindent political identity, anchoring an unprecedented trend even in the communist world towards freer political institutions; and future American economic policy choices, especially the need to reduce the budget deficit, still hold the key to preserving and enhancing what considerable power the United States retains. This pathbreaking book is intended for the general reader, but will be essential reading not only for economists, politicians, and policy makers, but also for scholars and students working in economics and international relations.
