Disequilibria

Providing overviews of states and sectors, classes and companies in the new international division of labour, this series treats polity-economy dialectics at global, regional and national levels. This volume in the series looks at the complexities of structural adjustment in Africa.

Michael L. Arnold offers an exploration of the evolutionary process of natural hybridisation, and presents data from various sources that support the paradigm of natural hybridisation as an important evolutionary process.

What determines the focus of a researcher's interest, the sources of inspiration for a study, or the variables scrutinized? If we were to examine the antecedents of these decisions, they would surely emerge as accidents of circumstance--the personal experiences of the researcher, the inspiration of early mentors, the influence of contemporary colleagues--all tempered by the intellectual currents that nurture the researcher's hypotheses. Among the accidents that mold the careers of researchers is geographic location. The culture in which a research program emerges helps determine both its very subject and its method. The primary purpose of this book is to assist those interested in the scientific study of children's social competence in transcending the boundaries imposed both by geography and by selective exposure to the highly diverse schools of thought that have led to interest in this field. Most of these ideas were presented and exchanged at an Advanced Study Institute entitled "Social Competence in Developmental Perspective" held in Savoie, France, in July 1988. This Institute was attended by scholars from France, England, Northern Ireland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Canada, the United States and Brazil. Those who participated will recognize that the metamorphosis from lecture to chapter has necessitated many changes. In order to accommodate the reader who may be unfamiliar with the field, more attention has been paid here to identifying the theoretical contexts of the research described.

This updated edition is radically changed from the original and will be much appreciated by thinkers within economics. Boland is back.

There is no lack of good international economics textbooks ranging from the elementary to the advanced, so that an additional drop in this ocean calls for an explanation. In the present writer's opinion, there seems still to be room for a textbook which can be used in both undergraduate and graduate courses, and which contains a wide range of topics, including those usually omitted from other textbooks. These are the intentions behind the present book, which is an outcrop from undergraduate and graduate courses in international economics that the author has been holding at the University of Rome since 1974, and from his on going research work in this field. Accordingly the work is organized as two-books in-one by distributing the material between text and appendices. The treatment in the body of this book is directed to undergraduate students and is mainly confined to graphic analysis and to some elementary algebra, but it is assumed that the reader will have a good knowledge of basic microeconomics and macroeconomics (so that the usual review material on production functions, indifference curves, standard Keynesian model, etc. , etc. has been omitted) . Each chapter is followed by an appendix in which the treatment is mainly mathematical, and where (i) the topics explained in the text are treated at a level suitable for advanced undergraduate or first-year graduate students and (ii) generalizations and/or topics not treated in the text (including some of those at the frontiers of research) are formally examined.