US objectives during the Cold War were to prevent Soviet attacks on the United States and its allies and to prevent the spread of communism as a political and economic system to other countries, whether by force or by threat, subversion, persuasion, or bribery. The principal instrument to...

Development as a global policy objective dates from the 1940s. Relative to expectations then, the world economy performed outstandingly well during the second half of the 20th century. Worldwide growth in average per capita income exceeded two percent a year (historically unprecedented), many...

This paper addresses the influence of foreign trade and investment on inequality or, more generally, on the distribution of income, with a focus on developing countries. There has been some scholarly debate on the influence on economic growth of economic openness to the rest of the world. Since...

This article examines the impact of global developments on the practice of U.S. monetary policy, broadly defined to include regulatory and lender-of-last-resort functions as well as open market, discount, and intervention activity, over the past forty years. It is part of a paper presented at...

With the end of the Cold War, and until 9/11/01, many academic and journalistic pundits averred that military power was no longer of great importance, that the future lay with economic power. The claim was made that the United States was an "economic superpower," and therefore would continue to...