ABSTRACT
The world economy is an exciting topic. The collapse of the centrally planned economies, the oil crisis, the Great Depression in the 1930s, the failure of Latin America in the lost decade of the 1980s and the success of the Asian ‘tigers’ in spite of the temporary financial disturbance in 1997/ 98-these are all fascinating issues (section 1.1). The world economy is becoming more global. The segmentation of markets is being reduced; new regions, which have until recently scarcely been involved in world trade, are pushing into the international division of labor (section 1.2). The reader will be familiarized with the most important variables of the world economy, notably world product and its composition from the production and the expenditure side as well as its regional structure (section 1.3). The world economy is in a process of continuous change. Thus, the newly industrializing countries have succeeded in becoming much more integrated into the international division of labor (section 1.4). Meanwhile some of them have reached remarkable places in the ranking of competitiveness (section 1.5). For these and other problems we have to take a global view, as if the world is being analyzed from outer space (section 1.6).
