Currencies and Crises

Paul Krugman's first collection of essays, Rethinking InternationalTrade, mounted a spirited assault on established trade theory and proposed analternative approach to account for increasing returns and imperfect competition.Less theoretical and more embedded in real-world experience, this new collectionrevolves around Krugman's work on international monetary economics from the late1970s to the present in an effort to make sense of a turbulent period that "involvedone surprise after another, most of them unpleasant."The eleven essays cover suchkey areas as the role of exchange rates in balance-of-payments adjustment policy, the role of speculation in the functioning of exchange rate regimes, Third Worlddebt, and the construction of an international monetary system. They are unified bythe same basic methodology and style the construction of a small theoretical modelin order to simplify or clarify a puzzling or difficult world monetary problem.PaulR. Krugman is Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyand a member of the Group of Thirty.