We found that published textbooks did not adequately meet these challenges. Too often, international economics textbooks confront students with a bewildering array of special models and assumptions from which basic lessons are difficult to extract. Because many of these special models are outmoded, students are left puzzled about the real-world relevance of the analysis. As a result, many textbooks often leave a gap between the somewhat antiquated material to be covered in class and the exciting issues that dominate current research and policy debates. That gap has widened dramatically as the importance of international economic problems—and enrollments in international economics courses—have grown.
This book is our attempt to provide an up-to-date and understandable analytical framework for illuminating current events and bringing the excitement of international economics into the classroom. In analyzing both the real and monetary sides of the subject, our approach has been to build up, step by step, a simple, unified framework for communicating the grand traditional insights as well as the newest findings and approaches. To help the student grasp and retain the underlying logic of international economics, we motivate the theoretical development at each stage by pertinent data or policy questions.
About the Author
Paul Krugman earned his Ph.D. in economics from MIT, and has since taught at some of United States' most prestigious universities, including Yale, Stanford, MIT, and currently, Princeton University.
Krugman spent a year in the early 1980s working in the White House for the Council of Economic Advisors. He has written and edited several hundred articles and 18 internationally acclaimed books. Notably, he is recognized as a co-founder of the "new trade theory," which has been an important contribution to the fields of economics and finance.
In recognition of his achievements, Krugman was awarded the John Bates Clark medal in 1991.
Maurice Obstfeld specialized in mathematics in Cambridge University and went on to MIT, where he attained his Ph.D. in economics. He has since held faculty positions at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania and currently, is the class of 1958 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Obstfeld has authored numerous articles and highly influential books. In view of his prominence in the fields of economics and finance, he has served as consultant for the World Bank, as participant in the European Commission Study Group on the impact of the Euro on capital markets, and most recently as the honorary advisor for the Institute of Economic and Monetary Studies, Bank of Japan.