ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the non-neutrality of power in economics, which is a very serious distortion from empirical reality. Laureate Paul Krugman's contribution was mainly to explain intra-industry trade and to better understand dumping, and it has been very influential in international economics ever since. But it allows looking at the importance of the market power of certain world market actors for trade. When looking at the theory of asymmetric information, used widely also in international economics, one can easily see that there is a useful information surplus emerging from that. On a more international level, Higgott and Weber discuss the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), while Woods and Lombardi discuss the question of power differences of certain countries in decision-making within the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Many economists stop their efforts after having identified power as an "exogenous" variable, which it impossibly can be in international economics.
