ABSTRACT
Recently there has been more attention to the importance of international economic relations. To study them, students need background in both micro and macro; but when the topic is put at the end of the book, instructors may fail to get that far in the course. There is a problem in any case if the books don't provide enough tie to the real international relations issues that are not just a matter of the theory of comparative advantage. One may get a discussion of protectionism as against free trade principles, but one may get little if any indication of the respects in which the cold war distorted international trade and investment, little if anything on the background of and nature of the third world demands for a New International Economic Order, little if anything on the conflict over the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Economic Community, little on the complex factors in the U.S. quarrel with Japan, and little on the complex sets of factors leading to the breakdown first of the gold standard and then of the Bretton Woods System. Having any real understanding of international economic relations is simply not reducible merely to understanding the principle of comparative advantage and the present nonsystem in international exchange rate determination.
