Global Collective Action

Description

This book examines how nations and other key participants in the global community address problems requiring collective action. The global community has achieved some successes, such as eradicating smallpox, but other efforts to coordinate nations' actions, such as the reduction of drug trafficking, have not been sufficient. This book identifies the factors that promote or inhibit successful collective action at the regional and global level for an ever-growing set of challenges stemming from augmented cross-border flows associated with globalization. Modern principles of collective action are identified and applied to a host of global challenges, including promoting global health, providing foreign assistance, controlling rogue nations, limiting transnational terrorism, and intervening in civil wars. Because many of these concerns involve strategic interactions where choices and consequences are dependent on one's own and others' actions, the book relies, in places, on elementary game theory that is fully introduced for the uninitiated reader.

Todd Sandler holds the Robert R. and Katheryn A. Dockson Professorship of International Relations and Economics at the University of Southern California. He has written or edited eighteen books, including Economic Concepts for the Social Sciences, The Political Economy of NATO (with Keith Hartley) and Global Challenges: An Approach to Economic, Political, and Environmental Problems (all published by Cambridge University Press) as well as numerous journal articles in economics and political science. In 2003 he was the co-recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War.

'Todd Sandler has a reputation in his field for being a thought-provoking and innovative thinker, and his latest book does not disappoint. ... this is a fascinating, innovative and thought-provoking tome, which explores some of the most serious problems facing the world today from a fresh and rigorous economic perspective. Global Collective Action is extremely well-written, readable, lively, and even at times entertaining. This book comes highly recommended, both for professional economists and the interested lay person. It would also be suitable for post-graduate or possibly advance undergraduate students.' Economic Issues