Global Political Economy

Robert Gilpin is a Princeton University professor emeritus and author of The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), a landmark in the field of international political economy. The world has changed much in the 14 years since that work appeared. The cold war has ended; few vestiges of communism remain. Advances in technology have increased the interdependence of national economies, and regional economic cooperation has blossomed. Meanwhile, the information economy has risen. Originally Gilpin intended to issue a second edition of his classic treatise, but he found world changes too dramatic and his own ideas so different that a "wholly new book" on the subject was warranted, which he has prepared with the assistance of a coauthor. Two years ago, he wrote The Challenge of Global Capitalism: The World Economy in the 21st Century (2000) to describe the current state of the world economy. Global Political Economy complements that work and replaces Gilpin's earlier text by providing the scholarly, theoretical framework for examining how markets and the policies of nation-states determine the way the world economy functions.